| Username |
Post |
| Paschim |
Posted
on 29-May-02 06:55 AM
Birthday time. Still a long way before I turn (that coveted age) of 30, but I'm getting there! Anyway, a friend sent a gift - an article that I myself wrote on my birthday exactly TWO years ago. I'd long forgotten about it, but he had saved it these 2 years, and voila, it was in my inbox today. I have written on this board about the Nepali future. I have discussed here the Nepali present. I haven't talked about the past the way I have below, attempting to look at 3 factors (economic, political, geographical) that I suggest have contributed to landing us in the current morass.
Please treat this as a recyclable birthday gift from me to all my loyal readers and friends on Sajha. Hope you find it useful irrespective of whether you agree or disagree with what I have to say. I'd noted then that the Maoist problem is a "transient difficulty" in the broad sweep of history. The jury is still out, but I think I was wrong in that particular assessment. As for the rest, I don't expect this to trigger a heated debate, it's just for passive consumption. But if there are important points that people raise, I'll respond later next week. Thanks in advance for reading.
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SURVEYING CONTEXTS OF NEPALI MALADY
1. The history of History
Nepal presents an unambiguous case of an impoverished nation-state whose efforts to prosper through the ages have been constantly frustrated by an unusually adverse combination of physical, socio-cultural, and politico-economic factors. A centralized autocracy of hereditary kings and prime ministers having ruled a stratified society of largely Hindu, Buddhist and Animist peasants engaged in subsistence agriculture through much of its modern history (1750 AD – 1950 AD), the current predicaments of Nepal’s failed experiment with economic development is hardly a tale of great surprises. At a deeper level though, the explanation could be less simple. This same country, with a smaller population and a much simpler pace of life, hosted a culturally sophisticated base in the Kathmandu Valley which thrived as a trans-Himalayan trading hub between Tibet and North India right until the late 18th century.
During the process of territorial consolidation after 1764, it also emerged as a powerful mountain empire strong enough to withstand British threat, as bigger neighbors - India and China - succumbed to imperial advances. Values such as hard work, risk-taking, and discipline have long been observed to have been hallmarks of many ethnic groups. The ruling elite in the modern era have been Hindus. However, the nature of influence of Hinduism in Nepal, while is claimed to have obstructed progress by restricting mobility, perverting work ethic, and undervaluing labor, differs from a much stronger version practiced in the Gangetic Plains.
Certainly, modern economic growth as a global phenomenon itself is of recent origin – annual world growth rates between 1100 BC and 1750 AD have consistently been zero (in one decimal place). But even in the race that began so belatedly, Nepal was probably one of the last starters and the least equipped to take on the enterprise of modern development. Fascinating in this context is an account by B.P. Koirala, the de-facto leader of an armed struggle that toppled a century-old oligarchy in 1951, who recalls beginning his term as Home Minister of a new, democratic Nepal with a telephone that did not work, assisted by one imported secretary from the Uttar Pradesh Civil Service on the ground floor of a run-down house in Tripureshwor. We then had, as a recent development summary put it, “virtually no infrastructure, modern social services, cash economy or significant economic linkages to the rest of the world”.
Depending on what yardstick of measurement is used, we seem to have done much in the past fifty years, but not enough, for we still have the dubious distinction of being the poorest country in the continent of Asia in per capita income terms. In the ensuing discussion, the broad issues that have been considered necessarily have ramifications across the multi-stratified strands down to the women, men and children in each household. However, I do not go into these specifics in this brief essay. Instead, what I attempt is to present broader processes in history and make three simple claims: i) if we understand the way the structure of the polity evolved in Nepal over the last few centuries, we will also be able to rationalize, but not condone, many current problems, ii) aggravating the situation that (i) would have created regardless, we started with a flawed economic model when we finally got our acts together just fifty years ago - a very late beginning by world standards, and iii) all this drama has taken place in the context of a natural adversity that landlocked-ness presents.
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| Paschim |
Posted
on 29-May-02 07:02 AM
2. The Socio-political Construct
“Long ago we made a tryst with destiny…and now the time comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed finds utterance”. If August 14, 1947 AD was a watershed date for Jawarharlal Nehru’s newly independent India, its fortuitous neighbor, Nepal’s parallel year of reckoning would perhaps be 1950, when an armed struggle led by Nepalis schooled in India paved the way for unprecedented citizen participation in political life. While the project of creating a modern nation state out of trifling mountain fiefdoms began in earnest in the mid-eighteenth century, ingredients that had to be injected into the territorial skeleton to give it life were ad-hoc, subsequent developments that largely reflected the background of the rulers. As descendents of 12th century migrants from the arid lands of Rajasthan, it was quite natural for the Shah Kings, their Rana Prime Ministers, and their Brahmin advisors, to facilitate ascendancy of Hinduism-inspired legal codes, institutionalization of monarchy for legitimacy purposes, and promote Nepali, a language from the Indo-European family, whose variant version they and the Brahmins brought as they sought refuge in the mountains in the middle ages. History is almost always written by the victors, and the class of people that held sway in the middle Himalayas were a brave lot who won in style and amassed glory in plenty.
The construct of the Nepali state has been a disfigured one right from the outset. The exclusionary polity that disenfranchised almost all the residents in the territorial domain over which it claimed jurisdiction, was really a troupe of elite gangsters. Sure, some were more benign than others, but they all belonged to the same herd with neither enlightened nor novel ideas on governance. The political establishment made no attempt to involve common citizens in the affairs of the state, and there existed neither a legitimate domain nor channel to either participate or air claims in the public sphere. Nepal the land was nothing but an unproductive real estate of the Ranas with tenants who, as subsistence farmers, didn’t care too much about any thing else except, perhaps, the timing of the monsoons. So silent a people in so remote a land - no wonder we always managed to avoid foreign domination. The dense malaria infested Sal forests of the Terai and the zealous self-interest of Rana rulers who kept us in forced isolation might have also helped us remain independent as a state. Yet, we neither seem to have been able to make much economic use of our political independence nor, at least, give that impression to outsiders, for when Ballavbhai Patel, the Indian Home Minister, wanted to annex Nepal after the patronage of the British was gone in 1947, he didn’t think it was a very bold proposition.
With passage of time, we have succeeded in creating a stronger sense of political independence of our country, but we have done so through the flawed instruments of Panchayat nationalism. The illusion of national distinctiveness and heritage of cultural, religious and linguistic uniformity are charades that stunt a healthy growth of a country with richly diverse constituents. With a multi-party democratic architecture in place, we now have an opportunity to be more honest with ourselves and more realistic with our options of working towards finer collective outcomes. We finally have a domain to legitimately claim and contest our differing interests. The state of Nepal can thus only be stronger in the new century as a secular, pluralistic democracy that honors diversity and guards all freedom in law, and practice. Transient difficulties (in the context of a broad sweep of history) such as the disturbing Maoist insurgency of recent times as well as the debasement of public service and political life are indications of the fact that we have not yet grasped this truism in its entirety.
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| Paschim |
Posted
on 29-May-02 07:06 AM
3. The Misplaced Economic Paradigm
A strong democratic foundation is however only a necessary condition for future well-being, not a sufficient one. Witness Project USA, and it will be clear that it is prosperity that is the greatest bind of interests. We in Nepal need to grow very rich, very soon. Be it the Gerschenkronian way by taking “advantage of backwardness” or simply believing a Marxian claim that “capitalism creates a world after its own image”, we need to be optimistic about making giant leaps. As far as creation of wealth is concerned, capitalism, discovered in the 19th century has become a useful tip. It would surprise many that it was Karl Marx, of all people, who realized this when he saw the uniqueness of the capitalism system in its powers to unleash productivity as never seen in history before. He wrote “the bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization…..it compels all nations, on pain of extinction to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels what it calls civilization into the midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves”. Beautiful prose, which also happened to be one of his very few assessments eventually proven right. But untamed capitalism often wreaks havoc through economic instability and unmitigated inequities. As economist Dani Rodrik observes in a recent paper, it took the world three centuries of wild experimentation to realize that the market and the state are complements, and thus the most valuable heritage of the 20th century is the idea of a mixed economy that combines a rational law-bound state with tamed capitalism by creating ingenious institutional ingredients such as central banking, stabilizing fiscal policy, antitrust and regulation, social insurance and political democracy, thereby facilitating material prosperity in countries that chose to walk this path.
In Nepal and the rest of South Asia, we followed a model that was politically prudent but economically flawed. By following the paradigm of Nehruvian state-led-industrialization, we essentially ruled out spectacular material advance. A patriarchal state pervasively interfering in all aspects of public life sapped incentives for wealth creation and institutionalized illegitimate rent-seeking. Growth in India, between 1950 and 1990, hovered around a dismal 3 per cent as fatalistic commentators groped – in good humor - the ancient scriptures for possible consolatory prediction of a “Hindu rate of growth” while others lamented the perverse web of the “license Raj”, as the country gradually slid into bankruptcy. Nepal was merely a miniature version of the Indian tragedy, only more pathetic. Population since 1940 has quadrupled to around 23 million, over half of whom presently live in absolute poverty. It is now clear, as it has actually always been, that we need a national mission that can be executed with passion and wisdom. We need to draw lessons from the Japans and the Koreas of the world that have transformed themselves from primitive rural societies to rich industrialized states within a generation or so.
To optimize our traditional strengths in tourism, water, Terai lands, and of course the people, we need substantial amounts of new financial injection from national and international sources. The nonsense of stale ideological debates often triggered by our under-read politicians and mediocre bureaucrats must be crushed with intelligent voices. The government will need to come out even more strongly in areas where it has hitherto only shown half-hearted commitment. It needs to reshuffle its own structure by being more inclusive of women, the Aryan under-class and the under-represented ethnic groups, and be more responsive to the poor as it withdraws from its traditional grazing ground. Are you still reading? Thanks. In addition to a credible contract-enforcing role that it would need to assume, it will have to step up quality investment in public education, health, infrastructure, institutions and socio-economic safety nets. With a progressively liberalizing economic strategy, based on strong democratic foundations, Nepal is only now seeing the right infrastructure for the kind of wealth creation that can be the best hope for the very poor in a poor country.
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| Paschim |
Posted
on 29-May-02 07:12 AM
4. The Geographical Trap
As the emerging literature on economic geography is showing, it is not so easy to be rich if one is an isolated, landlocked territory far from the coasts or navigable rivers, disadvantaged to trade internationally. A paper by John Luke Gallup et. al. has come up with a disconcerting econometric finding of a long-discussed hypothesis that location and climate strongly influence macroeconomic performance. Reasons are simple: a landlocked country faces higher transport costs in engaging in international trade and tropical countries face heavy disease burdens and low agricultural productivity. Of the top-thirty richest countries in the world only two are tropical - Singapore and Hong Kong, exceptional island territories whose stories are quite unique. All landlocked countries are poor except the 6 in Central and Western Europe, which are well-integrated into the European market and enjoy low cost trade. Gallup et al. point out that even the mountainous Switzerland has bulk of its population living north of the Alps in low-elevation cantons with access to navigable rivers. So, of the 29 non-European landlocked countries, the richest is Botswana which ranks 38th in the world largely because of its huge diamond mines, followed by Belarus which ranks 68th. The rest are way below. While geography is not destiny, we certainly are at a disadvantage which calls for increased innovation in tackling a difficult bottleneck. The tourist industry, which relies in part on our stunning topography, compensates a bit for the trade handicap, but its contributions, at 4% of GDP, is hardly spectacular.
5. Conclusion
My concern in this essay has not been to delve into the underpinning “micro” picture – anyone who knows her numbers and is familiar with the development literature can come up with an impressive plan. What was intended here is to trigger a thought process on broad themes related to a viable sustenance of a state with numerous nations. Because the bulk of the present crop of Nepalis running the bureaucracy and politics, businesses and civil society organizations are unimaginative, it is up to the emerging generations of active citizens and passive well-wishers to start afresh. This requires in part a painful process of unlearning and discarding of most of our received wisdom. We increasingly ought to stand ready to account for our failures, take responsibilities, and stop shifting the blame to an external agency (which to a fatalistic rural villager could be an elusive “bhagya”, to a fine neta-ji from a communist party will be “India” and to everyone else, the amorphous “system”).
We don’t seem to realize how lucky we are to have a decent-sized geographical territory that we can call home, a sovereign, independent land. The project of creating a functioning nation-state of it has always been a good idea. Nothing should excite us more than the mere thought that the goodness of the idea remains robust.
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| whatever |
Posted
on 29-May-02 08:00 AM
I am more than a little intrigued. 'Paschim' is obviously your pseudonym, and if you insist on using it, why drop in all the personal details ? I don't think it matters to readers of this forum how old you are, where your advice is being sought, which schools in the world you have graced with your presence. It might have been palatable if you had used your real name.
Just a thought, and no not one of your fans.
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| Sadhu |
Posted
on 29-May-02 08:49 AM
Whatever, your curiosity is justified. Paschim is Swarnim Wagley. Board Second in SLC and from Gorkha--traces of Dr. Baburam Bhattarai here. But unlike Dr. Bhattarai, Paschim has chosen to be an intellectual mercenary available for any agency that is willing to support his lifestyle. Any more questions?
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| tiramisu |
Posted
on 29-May-02 11:44 AM
would you like to comment on the thread ' who will bell the cat'?
by the way, treat us as observers, not fans just because we comment on your threads, albeit not always in the negative.
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| dasein |
Posted
on 29-May-02 12:59 PM
>Paschim has chosen to be an intellectual
>mercenary available for any agency that is
>willing to support his lifestyle. Any more
>questions?
Slime green with envy, aren't you? Join the club.
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| manashalu |
Posted
on 29-May-02 01:11 PM
Paschim has posted long stuffs containing 15 paragraphs. His writngs are insightful and worthy to think, but some persons are only commenting about his first paragraph and rest of the paragraphs were ignored. WHY ? Can anyone explain me ?
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| whatever |
Posted
on 29-May-02 01:44 PM
>Paschim has posted long stuffs containing 15
>paragraphs. His writngs are insightful and
>worthy to think, but some persons are only
>commenting about his first paragraph and
>rest of the paragraphs were ignored. WHY ?
>Can anyone explain me ?
Lincoln gave thousands of speech in his life. Can you tell me why his 'of the people, by the people, for the people' speech is the one that is most remembered ?
I don't much care if people use pseudonyms in the forums (I am doing that myself)but if you do, you should at least have the honesty to not drop hints as to how a great chap you are. Use your real name.
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| Fan of Paschim & Baburam |
Posted
on 29-May-02 06:06 PM
Paschim is a good intellectual with a soft corner for the king. Baburam is a bad intellectual with a soft corner for Mao. Interchange good and bad, if you like.
A fan of both Paschim and Baburam
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| Paschim |
Posted
on 29-May-02 07:26 PM
Phew...what a great site. Thanks everyone for your inputs.
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| Paschim fan |
Posted
on 29-May-02 08:01 PM
And I suspect Paschim works in Vietnam!
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| HahooGuru |
Posted
on 29-May-02 08:36 PM
manashalu wrote: Paschim has posted long stuffs containing 15 paragraphs. His writngs are insightful and worthy to think, but some persons are only commenting about his first paragraph and rest of the paragraphs were ignored. WHY ? Can anyone explain me ?
---
Because there are so many postings to read. So, peoples do not
have time to read long postings. I agree. they read only first
paragraph out of 15. But, there are some people who read
all the paragraphs, and then, the story changes. What happens
then?
Then, those who read only first paragraphs, go back and read
all the 15 paragraphs. I bet, my prediction is right. Thats what
I do. I don't all postings, all articles in TKP or Kantipur or any
weekly. I only read them, when someone says that was good
article indeed, or the article makes another news. In Sajha.com,
"another news" is when it has many follow ups. I don't read
articles with 1 or two follows or no follow ups, if its not from
well known writers like Paschim, NK, and Nepe. But, when
I find some follow ups, I do read their first few para. and
the complete reading continues when others refer to its
contents .... thats called REVIEW. When we buy books
also we do the same thing, when someone refers or
writes review in the well known sections of patrika . .. . .
Some one has to sort it out, and peoples will read those
sorted out articles and ... It happens in Sajha.com too.
HG
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| NK |
Posted
on 29-May-02 08:52 PM
And I am of the mind that it is ok to read and ponder. We don't have to write on writings all the time to show off our Bidwata. I read various articles in various magazine. Do I run to my computer everytime I see good articles? Of course, I don't! I read and I go 'hmmmm....' and read more on that posting and go another 'hmmm....' Maybe after all I not that Bidwan. Actually I am pretty sure, I am not a Bidwan at all.
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| Voltaire |
Posted
on 30-May-02 01:20 AM
NK,
I am glad you atleast know that you are not a biddwan.
As for Paschim's article,
A great job Paschim.However, I am kind of sad that you needed a birthday to post your writing here. I am confident you will not be disheartened by some of the comments above; you still own a horde of fans here who will read every word you post here no matter it could be some mundane padhere-guff. One suggestion to you:from my memory, the quotes about capitalism and the state are from the communist manifesto.Quoting immediately after the quote would make your writing more exuberant (especially to a person, like me, interested in politics,reading stuff with quotations from great books is a real fun).
Take Care,
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| KG |
Posted
on 30-May-02 10:13 AM
Paschim Bro:
Don't worry about the haters, for you can't make everyone happy. The article is very well written and very balanced. I do like the way you have depicted the ethnic groups in the article. I have also read Baburam's articles and interviews and was encouraged by his views regarding the ethnic groups, namely the magars at the time. This was prior to the Palace killings and the attack on the army. However, I am under the impression that Baburam has turned most of those poor, uneducated, desperate farmers into martyrs, and for what? I wonder if Baburam realizes that from his safe hiding place, whereever it is, in India or London. I have been heartbroken and even angry at what really happened in the US with the natives here, after watching "How the West was lost", a native perspective made after the White Americans rejoiced with the "How the west was won". I am glad Paschim has the gutts to give us a true account of what probably happened. He might have to watch out for Nepali right wing, red necks, who still want to believe in the ridiculous "chaar jaata chhattis barna, eutai phool baari", an idea they brainwashed in my head in childhood when I went to school in Nepal. If I were to compare that to US history, that is not very far from the boarding schools native kidss here were forced to go so they could be more civilized (christianized)!
The question that I have often pondered is how can we rid the nation of these useless statesmen and bureaucrats, who do more harm than good for the common people? By election? I doubt that at least not now with all the corruption that is rampant in Nepal now. By a popular people's uprising? We are seeing that now and doesn't seem to work.
How do you think the new generation of more liberal, more realistic, and more innovative youth penetrate and change the course of Nepali history? After all, Girija, Bhattarai et all have decided not to retire even at their ridiculous old age and despite the public disapproval.
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