Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. US$115.00, cloth. ISBN 9780198872894.
Between 2006, when the People’s War waged by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) ended, and 2015, when the country promulgated a new constitution, Nepal underwent a fundamental political transformation that saw it transition from a Hindu kingdom to a democratic, federal republic. What did not change was the dominance of the approximately one-third of the population that belonged to the highest castes (the Khas Aryas), which had controlled the state since its founding in 1768. The goal of the constitution-making process that consumed the political energy of that near-decade was the creation of a federal state that would allow for the full participation of the country’s politically, socially, and economically marginalized ethnic groups in the country’s governance. That, however, was not to be.
The story of the failed attempt to give Nepal a constitution that would recognize its ethnic heterogeneity is told in granular detail in this important contribution to the study of Nepal’s politics by one of its leading political scientists. Constitution making veered from a proposal for identity-based federalism (different in significant respects from a federalism based on ethnic identity) to a territorial federalism that reinscribed the dominant position of the high castes. The reader gets an insider’s view of how the process unfolded, as the author was also a member of the State Restructuring Commission which drafted the initial proposals for the Constitution. The book provides a synoptic examination of the politics of Nepal’s lowland tarai region, whose people (the Madeshis) were the catalyst, through their uprising in 2007, for the re-introduction of the federal idea to constitution making; of the machinations of high caste (Khas Arya) organizations to undermine the federal project, and when that did not succeed, to co-opt it; and of the weakness of the fractured janajati (Indigenous peoples) movement in advocating for the kind of federal state its activists sought.
The key question that the author poses is how to manage ethnic diversity: by trying to create a homogeneous nation state, the favoured method of the authoritarian regime that ruled Nepal from 1960 to 1990, which sought to create a national unity predicated on the culture, language, and religion of the dominant Khas Aryas, or by recognizing the ethnic heterogeneity of the nation via a federal state based on territories defined by identity. Ethnic federalism was a plank in the Maoist insurgency, but had no traction with the major political parties, especially the Nepali Congress and the Communist Party-UML. It became an issue after the popular uprising (jana andolan) of 2006. The failure of the interim constitution (2007) to take up the idea of federalism led to the first Madeshi uprising in that year. In response, the Interim Constitution was amended to declare Nepal a federal state. What that federal state would look like consumed much of Nepal’s constitution-making energies for the next eight years.
Proponents of ethnic federalism argued that Indigenous groups should have the first claim on natural resources like water and land, along with the right to self-determination and preferential rights in the provincial administration, and they deferred the question of the economic viability of ethnically defined federated provinces to the future. In a country as ethnically heterogeneous as Nepal, where the cut-off to make a claim to an ethnic province was to have just one percent of the population, these claims proved not to be viable. The approach that gained traction was identity-based federalism, which eschewed the special provisions for ethnic groups referred to above, but proposed that provinces be demarcated according to the geographical distribution of ethnic groups, whose identity would be recognized in the province’s name. Even this was vigorously opposed by the Khas Aryas, whose caste interest cut across differences of political ideology. They stressed provincial economic viability as being paramount, and held that these units should cut across the hill, mountain, and tarai zones as a way to encompass diverse natural resources. They argued also that federalism would promote conflict over natural resources among the different federal units; therefore, the fewer federal units, the more likely that they could be made self-reliant. Although the first Maoist-dominated Constituent Assembly had favoured identity-based federalism, it was unable to bring it to fruition for lack of a two-thirds majority. Elections for the second Constituent Assembly shifted power decisively to the Nepali Congress and the Communist Party-UML, neither of which were receptive to the idea. In the wake of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, they manoeuvred successfully to promulgate a constitution that preserved the hegemony of the Khas Aryas.
My critiques of the book are few, and do not concern the author’s knowledge of the events he analyzes, which is impeccable. The book is unevenly edited, a failing attributable to the publisher. The bibliography is divided into six parts—documentary sources, then two parts each for books and articles in English and Nepali, all separately listed, concluding with unpublished sources. This fragmentation makes the bibliography inconvenient to navigate. On the other hand, for a student of Nepali politics, and especially the politics of the Tarai, there is a wealth of sources here. The author argues that the civil code of 1854 “translated diversity into inequality” (53). Inequality and hierarchy, however, were fundamental features of social organization throughout the subcontinent, including Nepal, and the civil code (muluki ain) simply imposed a statewide system of hierarchy in place of the regional variation that pre-existed the Gorkha conquest. There is no need to romanticize the past to highlight the inequities of the present.
This is not a book for the novice, who is likely to be overwhelmed by the amount of detail and references to organizations, people, and events that only someone relatively familiar with Nepal is likely to know. But it is of value for students of comparative constitutionalism and its politics generally, and essential for students of contemporary Nepal. It will pay dividends for their understanding of the political forces that shaped the modern Nepali state.
Arjun Guneratne
Macalester College, Saint Paul