Roads of change: political transition and state formation in Nepal’s agrarian districts

Abstract

This paper explores the political field that has opened up in the wake of the recent civil war in Nepal. We focus on cultural-political developments in agrarian districts, where some of the most intriguing openings, and indeed the most pernicious closures, can be witnessed (as opposed to the national-state restructuring that commands more media and popular attention). Our research asks what spaces open up in the emerging political field at the district scale to entrench or transform dominant cultural codes and sedimented histories of socio-economic inequality. Preliminary research identifies specific sectors of local governance that have emerged as significant sites of struggle over the shape and meaning of ‘democracy’, namely forest management and infrastructure development. The primary contribution of the paper lies in specifying an analytical approach to the study of ‘post-conflict’ governance at the local scale via three conceptual terrains of inquiry – governance and planning, political subjectivity, and cultural politics. The ultimate objective is to develop a framework for assessing the conditions of possibility for a democratic restructuring of economy and society to accompany the official political institutions of liberal democracy.

Keywords:

• ‘post-conflict’
• political field
• democracy
• Nepal
• cultural politics
• political subjectivity
• governance

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks go to Anil Bhattarai, Ben Campbell, Sabin Ninglekhu, Kathryn White and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this paper, which were presented at the Annual Conference on South Asia (2013), University of Madison-Wisconsin Department of Geography (2013), Brock University Department of Geography (2013), Dartmouth University Department of Geography (2014), Nepal Administrative Staff College (2015), Martin Chautari (2015) and Tribhuvan University Department of Anthropology (2015).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Political groupings subscribing to Maoist ideology in Nepal, like in neighboring India, have assumed multiple and shifting party formations. At the time of the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA), Maoist factions had joined as the Unified Communist Party of Nepal–Maoist (UCPN-M), but have since split multiple times. In this paper, ‘the Maoists’ refers to the post-peace accord unified Maoist party.

2 Italicized phrases are in the Nepali language and have been transliterated according to the conventions of Turner (1931).

3 The quotation marks around the term ‘post-conflict’ indicate that we reject prevailing interpretations that imagine a cessation of struggle and gloss over continuities in multiple dimensions of conflict. The term ‘post-revolution’ is engaged without quotation marks to signal simply the time period following the CPA peace accord (2006).

4 The pilot study was funded by a Royal Geographical Society Small Grant and International Opportunities Fund grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (grant no. 861-2008-1010).

5 Districts were selected based on prior professional engagements of the research team as well as assessments of their significance for representing and influencing subnational regional trends. Two visits were made to each of the three district centers, a total of 102 interviews were conducted with stakeholders involved in local governance, and gray literature on ‘post-conflict’ transition in Nepal was reviewed. The pilot study also collected data on the forest sector, which has been elaborated in Nightingale et al. forthcoming. The research team was comprised of the authors of this paper, with important inputs offered by three other researchers: Hemant Ojha, Sabin Ninglekhu and Fraser Sugden.

6 By 1996, the communist parties in Nepal had been through five decades of factionalism and ideological and tactical dispute. The permutation of CPN-M that consolidated then reflected a consensus around the objectives of ending the Hindu monarchy, forming a democratic republic and initiating armed struggle to achieve these ends (Thapa 2003).

7 Unlike in India (Patnaik 2006; Sundar 2006), the corporatization of agriculture has not been a major target of Maoist critique and organizing due to its virtual absence in the middle hills and the relatively weak capacity of the Maoists in the Southern Terai belt where larger-scale, but still semi-feudal, commercial agriculture is concentrated (Sugden 2009).

8 See Akhil Gupta’s Red tape (2012) for a compelling illustration of how seeing corruption from the standpoint of poor peasants in India furnishes crucial insights on how bureaucracies operating at the local scale enable structural violence to be perpetrated against the poor, even in the midst of universal political freedoms and extensive poverty-alleviation programs.

9 We use the term ‘agrarian’ simply to denote the prevalence of agrarian-based livelihoods throughout Nepal and to signal a different scalar focus for understanding political transition than can usually be found in media and popular analyses, which tend to concentrate on national-scale restructuring. Madhesi refers to people of Indian origin who inhabit mostly the eastern Terai of Nepal, as well as to their political mobilization in the form of a social movement and numerous political parties vying to end discrimination and have their rights recognized.

10 As of this writing, reports from rural areas all over Nepal indicate that the situation we describe in Mugu is becoming the norm for many places. The entire Karnali zone where Mugu is located is considered particularly egregious, but the dynamics here are nevertheless recognizable across the country. We do not have up-to-date information on Khotang to know whether the situation there has also regressed into these kinds of elite-dominated, patronage politics.

Additional information

Funding

Research was funded by an International Opportunities Fund grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [grant number 861-2008-1010] and a Small Grant from the Royal Geographical Society.

Notes on contributors

Katharine N. Rankin

Katharine N. Rankin is a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Cultural politics of markets: economic liberalization and social change in Nepal (Pluto Press and University of Toronto Press, 2004); further academic publishing focuses on research interests in the areas of the politics of planning and development, comparative market regulation, feminist and critical theory, neoliberal governance and social polarization. Current research projects investigate community economic development in Toronto, and infrastructure development, state restructuring and political subjectivity in Nepal.

Andrea J. Nightingale

Professor Andrea J. Nightingale is a geographer by training and presently chair of rural development in the Global South at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden. Her current research interests include: climate change adaptation and transformation debates; public authority, collective action and state formation; and feminist work on emotion and subjectivity in relation to theories of development, collective action and cooperation. She previously worked at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and the University of Edinburgh, Geography, School of GeoSciences, Scotland.

Pushpa Hamal

Pushpa Hamal is a development practitioner-scholar with extensive community development and community-based research experience in Nepal, and a research interest in examining the relationship among political subjectivity, state restructuring and community building in Nepal, with a focus on rural roads as a key site of political action and learning. He completed his MA in geography at Brock University. Currently he is pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Toronto/Ontario Institute for Studies in Higher Education.

Tulasi S. Sigdel

Tulasi Sharan Sigdel received his MA in rural development from Tribhuvan University and is currently pursuing a PhD at Kathmandu University. He also serves as director of studies (senior faculty) at Nepal Administrative Staff College, Jawalakhel, where he trains bureaucrats in governance issues. His areas of specialization and academic publishing are local governance, democracy and state-building, policy management and research methods. He has more than six years of experience teaching in the areas of development and governance to university graduates and government bureaucrats. He can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].