Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series, 58. London; New York: Routledge, 2012. xvii, 265 pp. (Figures, tables, maps.) US$145.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-78097-1.
In May 2012 Nepal’s Constituent Assembly (CA) was dissolved without writing the new constitution for which it had been elected four years earlier. The CA had granted itself one one-year extension, two three-month extensions, and a six-month extension in succession; now the Supreme Court stipulated that further extensions were inadmissible. The CA had not been inactive in the four years of its existence. In addition to acting as the national parliament, it had abolished the monarchy and declared Nepal a republic, chosen a president and vice-president, and declared Nepal both secular (i.e., removing the special position that Hinduism had enjoyed previously) and federal. All these momentous, indeed revolutionary, changes were supposed to be embedded in the new constitution.
In the final six months, a specially appointed parliamentary committee worked hard to bring the different sides together and to broker compromises. But in the end the major political parties could not accept a federal Nepal where the basis of the federal units was ethnicity, and where the names of the units would in most cases refer to a particular ethnic group. In other words, the key issue, on which the whole future stability of the country foundered, was that of ethnicity and national identity. In this momentous context the present volume is especially welcome and is likely to become a key reference in the field.
The book is shaped by the approaches of its two editors, Mahendra Lawoti and Susan Hangen. Lawoti is a political scientist, who has published prolifically on ethnic politics in Nepal since 1990 and has advocated for ethnic federalism. Hangen, an anthropologist, has conducted groundbreaking ethnographic research in the far east of the country on the Mongol National Organization (MNO) and the movement for Janajati (ethnic minority) rights more generally. The editors decided, justifiably in my opinion, to include in the book two highly relevant but previously published papers: Krishna Bhattachan’s prescient article “Ethnopolitics and Ethnodevelopment: An Emerging Paradigm in Nepal” (originally published in 1995) and Hangen’s “Boycotting Dasain: History, Memory and Ethnic Politics in Nepal” (originally published 2005), which describes a key movement in the identity politics of post-1990 Nepal. In his new postscript Bhattachan quite rightly points out that Nepal’s adhesion to ILO 169 and to the UN Declaration of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights has created a new situation, with legal rights in principle claimable by those categorized as indigenous (there are currently 59 such groups within Nepal). He also rightly points out that most of the political elite of Nepal have completely failed to understand the implications of these new international instruments, a failure of political imagination that has had tragic consequences for the country.
The new contributions to the book cover the role of ethnicity in business (Mallika Shakya); Hill Dalits (Steven Folmar); Muslims (Megan Adamson Sijapati, Mollica Dastider); and the Madhesi movement (Bandita Sijapati). In addition there is a substantial introduction by Hangen and Lawoti, and two comparative concluding chapters by Lawoti: the first comparing the Dalit, Janajati, and Madhesi movements, and the final one usefully surveying the history of violence in ethnic movements in the country (and concluding, as most ethnic activists do, that it is only lack of accommodation to ethnic demands that leads to violence and separatism).
Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Nepal provides much valuable new material, not accessible in English before, on Dalits, Muslims and Madhesis, all significant populations who have suffered scholarly neglect in Nepali studies. Dalits and Muslims are the two most economically and socially disadvantaged groups in the country and have the weakest political representation. They are also two of the groups which cannot claim to be indigenous. Adamson Sijapati provides a careful and very valuable analysis of the speeches and discourses of the National Muslim Forum in the period 2005–06, as it sought to develop an identity for all Muslim Nepalis that was patriotic, non-ethnic, and non-threatening to the Hindu majority. Folmar brings out how vulnerable Dalits are—spread out throughout the country, with no territory to call their own, and defined by their place at the bottom of the caste system—to a new politics that prioritizes indigeneity and geographical belonging (a point also made forcibly by Lawoti).
The Madhesis, in contrast to Muslims and Dalits, do indeed have a place to call their own, but it is not always clear who is and who is not a Madhesi (as Sijapati describes). The Madhesi territory is the strategically crucial strip of Gangetic plain, or Tarai, mostly no more than twenty miles wide, that runs from east to west across the country and shares a long, hard-to-police border with India. This border is “open” for citizens of the two countries but supposed to be controlled so far as goods are concerned. “Madhesi,” the name for Nepalis of Indian ethnicity, is the newest “macro category” recognized in the country, newer even than “Dalit” and “Janajati.” Whether Tharus are to be included in the macro category is a highly controversial question, answered very differently in the west of the country from the way it is answered in the east. Thus, Madhesis are an ethnic category still very much in the making.
The penultimate chapter by Lawoti stands out in that it attempts a systematic analysis of four different movements: Madhesi, Limbu, Janajati as a whole, and Dalit. He shows that a high ability to hold bandhs (general strikes), the presence of armed groups supporting the aims of the movement, the ability to mobilize votes, representation in government institutions, high levels of education, cultural cohesiveness and distinctiveness, territorial integrity, and the ability to extract concessions from government are all features that tend to be correlated with each other. His analysis goes a considerable way to explaining the relative weakness of the Dalit movement, which scores low on all these counts.
Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Nepal cannot be said to provide a full and rounded picture of nationalism and ethnicity in the country today. For that, there would need to have been more consideration of the ethnography of everyday life, of the continuing relevance of Nepali nationalism, of the range of Janajati movements, and of the appeal of the new Bahun and Chhetri ethnic movements that, as Lawoti notes, have arisen in response to the situation the book describes. None the less, the book will be an important reference for anyone concerned with understanding Nepal’s present and future.
David N. Gellner
University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
pp. 174-176