Identity, dignity and development as trajectory: Bihar as a model for democratic progress in Nepal? Part II. Nepal’s promise

ABSTRACT

Part I of this article traced the experience of India’s Bihar state as it shifted in the last decade of the twentieth century from a region dominated by landowning upper castes and plagued by entrenched poverty to one led by newly emergent middle castes. In a two-step process, these groups first attained a significant dignity and self-respect and then it became possible in the 2000s to turn to economic growth and improvement in living standards. Part II makes a case that Nepal, long suffering under conditions similar to those hobbling Bihar until recently, might follow a similar two-stage path of dignity and then development.

KEYWORDS:

• Bihar
• Nepal
• caste
• elections
• legislatures
• economic development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Postscript

National elections held in December 2017 returned a newly formed UML-Maoist alliance with 174 seats in the national legislature, a clear majority in the 275-member house. In addition, this left alliance won majorities in six of the seven new provinces. Assuming that these two parties will consummate an announced merger plan, the emerging legislature will a have a clear mandate to govern unobstructed by any need to build coalitions. And further assuming that constitutional requirements are met to use PR seats to meet identity quotas, legislatures at both levels will be reasonably representative. What remains to be answered is whether hill elites leading the governing party will actually share power with Nepal’s heretofore excluded minorities, and whether the party will be able to use its stable majority to embark on the kind of development trajectory undertaken by Nitish Kumar in Bihar.

Notes

1. Unlike the Indian census (at least until 2011), the decennial Nepal census has regularly registered the caste, ethnicity and religion of all citizens down to the village level, so these data are widely available.

2. See Höfer (2004) for an account of the Muluki Ain. It was not superseded until 1963.

3. Whelpton (2005, p. 183 and ff) provides a short synopsis of this history; see also Jha (2014, p. 171 and ff), and Folmer (2013, pp. 89, 93).

4. For a thorough analysis of these trends, see ICG (2011, esp. 1–5; 2012a).

5. Data in this paragraph are drawn from GON and UNDP (2014). The HDI combines measures of life expectancy, education and income. For the 2014 report on Nepal, HDI calculations were recalibrated across all categories, as discussed in GON and UNDP (2014, Annex 2).

6. Among the many accounts of the conflict and its end, Jha (2014) offers an excellent one.

7. These developments are covered at length in the ICG reports as well as Jha (2014).

8. The Maoist party has undergone many name changes over its relatively short life. As of late 2017 its official name was the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre).

9. The Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NEFIN), organised in 1991, had been trying to promote Janajati unity for more than two decades but with little success (Ismail & Shah, 2015).

10. On the evolution of this distinction in Marxist analysis, see Andrew (1983).

11. Once the new constitution went into effect, the CA/parliament became simply the parliament.

12. These Tarai figures are from Sharma (2008, p. 13). Other district-level data in this and the previous paragraph are from GON (2013).

13. In a ‘closed list’ PR system, the ballot shows only political parties, not individual candidates; after all votes are tallied across the constituency (in this case the nation), parties are allotted a number of MP seats according to their percentage of the total votes cast, which they can fill as they wish.

14. The term ‘Khas Arya’ is defined in the same article as follows: ‘For the purposes of this clause, “Khas Arya” means Kshetri, Brahmin, Thakuri, Sanyasi (Dashnami) community’. Thakurs and Sanyasis are both very small groups. Thus, the term essentially refers to Brahmans and Chhetris (here denoted as Kshetri).

15. The 2008 constitution included a similar provision [Article 63(4) in Cottrell, Surya, Basant, Kedar, and Pant (2009)], but it was somewhat looser than the new version.

16. Such a balancing of course will not be possible for parties electing only a small number of MPs on the PR ballot.

17. There are other examples to draw upon as well. Closest to home, women MPs in the Indian Rajya Sabha worked together across party lines to advocate successfully in 2010 for a Women’s Bill that would replicate at national and state levels the one-third female requirement created in the 73^rd Amendment for local governments. The bill passed in the Rajya Sabha but so far has stalled in the Lok Sabha (Rai, 2012, esp. 207-209; also Singer, 2016, and Tengbjer Jobarteh, 2016).

18. Jha (2017, pp. 83–90) traces this disintegration in some detail.

19. Thus far Limbus have been the most successful Janajati group in electoral terms. See Lawoti (2013, esp. pp. 200–204; Lawoti & Susan, 2013).

20. The ‘Others’ included with the ‘Lower OBCs’ in Table 1 comprised 257 castes according to the Mandal Commission Report of 1980, almost all of them with miniscule numbers. See Backward Classes Commission (1980).

21. In the 2015 election, Paswan’s party added almost 5 percent to the BJP’s 24 percent of total votes, though it won only two seats in the legislature (in 2005 it had won 11 percent of the vote and 10 seats).

22. The severe 2015 earthquake forced a serious drop that year, but the growth rate rebounded the following year.

23. Nepal’s classification of state expenditure as ‘recurrent’ or ‘capital’ is not exactly the same as Bihar’s division into ‘developmental’ and ‘non-developmental’. For example, defense is included under the ‘capital’ heading in Nepal, but Bihar relies on the national budget for this sector. Thus comparisons between the two entities can only be approximate. But the contrasts between Figures 2 and 5 appear sufficiently striking to make the case here that serious difference do in fact exist.

24. This was certainly my conclusion at the end of the 1980s in an essay comparing rural development in Bihar, Bangladesh and Maharashtra (Blair, 2008).