The Challenge to Democracy in Nepal
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The Challenge to Democracy in Nepal

T. Louise Brown

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The Challenge to Democracy in Nepal

T. Louise Brown

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About This Book

In 1990 Nepal's Peoples Movement reduced King Birendra from an absolute ruler to a constitutional monarch. This book is the first academic analysis of these events and places the 'revolution' of 1990 within the context of Nepali history.
Louise Brown examines the background to Nepal's recent upheavals as well as covering the country's ealy history and its continuing problems of national integration. The previous, unsuccessful, democratic experiment and the nature of monarchical rule are discussed within an analysis of Nepal's social and economic modernisation. The evolution of political parties, Nepal's foreign relations and development issues - and the way in which these have moulded the political system - are explored in depth.
Drawing on extensive interviews with leading politicians and influential figures the author provides a comprehensive survey of the Himalayan Kingdom's political development. This is an original contribution to the debate on democratization in the developing world.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2002
ISBN
9781134885329

1 Traditional Nepal

In 1990 Nepalā€™s Jana Andolan celebrated the humbling of an absolute monarch and the legalisation of multi-party democracy. But although the Jana Andolan has repeatedly been portrayed as a glorious revolution which gave birth to a ā€˜people-orientedā€™ democratic era, the new political system has failed to alter the lives of ordinary people. In the mid-1990s Nepal practises the formalities of representative parliamentary democracy, but the rights and freedoms which the political parties won after decades of struggle have yet to make Nepalis citizens in a democratised society.
The inability of the democratic system to address the basic injustices of Nepali society can only be understood in the context of Nepalā€™s long-term historical development. This is because, despite the end of authoritarian rule, politics in democratic Nepal remains marked by many of the same features that have characterised Nepali politics since the nation was unified in the second half of the eighteenth century. The political system continues to be hierarchical, centralised, riddled with conspiracies and dominated by a complex patron-client nexus. Most importantly, the structure and distribution of power and wealth have remained largely undisturbed by the adoption of a multi-party, democratic political system. Although the balance of power within the Nepali elite has shifted in the twentieth century, Nepal is ruled today, as it has always been, by high caste, Indo-Aryan men from the hills.
Nepalā€™s history has been under-researched and the nationā€™s past has been distorted by powerful and politically inspired myths. Amongst the most potent of these are the inevitability, and desirability, of national integration, the vision of a harmonious Hindu country with a monolithic political culture, and the exaggeration of Nepalā€™s isolation from the rest of the world.
Three interrelated processes have dominated Nepalā€™s history and political development. First is that of the in-migration and then territorial expansion of Indo-Aryan peoples. Second is a creeping hinduisation, and third is a process of consolidation into a single political entity ruled from Kathmandu.
Two distinct races settled in Nepal in successive waves. Tibeto- Burman peoples migrated from the north and east into the hills and mountains of Nepal at dates which have yet to be established. The first Indo-Aryan peoples, known as the Khas, migrated from the west and south, into what is now west Nepal, around two, thousand years ago (Bista 1991:15). Over many centuries high caste Hindu Khas rulers established tiny principalities in the Himalayas. The Khas elite, which was later to form the nucleus of the traditional Nepal elite, included three principal elements. First, there was the thakuri aristocracy. Second, was the priestly brahman caste whose members were known in Nepal as bahuns, and third, was the chhetri caste whose members held the ritual status of warriors (Bista 1967:4). Khas Kura, which was the language of this elite, and which is now commonly known as Nepali, was to become the official language of the Nepali state.
From their original power base in the west of modern-day Nepal, high caste Indo-Aryan peoples migrated eastward through the hills, establishing control over Tibeto-Burman communities (Pradhan 1991:162). Tribal peoples were subjugated partly as a result of conquest and partly as a result of a process of intermarriage between Hindu and tribal elites. Through coercion and through a desire to ingratiate themselves with the hegemonic political culture, Tibeto-Burman groups then adopted many of the values and practices of the high caste Indo- Aryans. They thereby became enmeshed in a social structure which legitimised the rule of the Indo-Aryan elites by placing them at the top of a religious hierarchy. This expansion of the political and economic power of high caste Hindus and the complementary permeation of subject cultures by the Hindu religion, forms one of the major dynamic processes in Nepali history and is sometimes referred to as hinduisation or ā€˜sanskritisationā€™.
The Kathmandu Valley, which was the home of the Newars, a group who spoke a Tibeto-Burman language, formed an exception to this pattern of Indo-Aryan domination of the hills, because Newari society had become stratified on the basis of a Hindu caste hierarchy long before the less developed hill society. The valley was a vital entrepĆ“t along the trans- Himalayan trade route between East, Central and South Asia and a complex urban society developed in the flourishing commercial centre. Hinduism had already begun to spread into the valley as early as the fifth century, and it gradually merged with and, to a significant extent, displaced the Newari peopleā€™s previous devotion to Buddhism and shamanism.
The mid-eighteenth century marks the beginning both of Nepalā€™s political unification and of its modern history. Prithvi Narayan Shah was the architect of this unification. The Shah dynasty had ruled the tiny kingdom of Gorkha in central Nepal for three centuries, but because of its remote location, their poor and rather insignificant state derived few benefits from lucrative trans-Himalayan trade. Such limited horizons were unattractive to the ambitious Prithvi Narayan Shah, who therefore launched Gorkhaā€™s expansionism.
At the culmination of the Gorkha conquests in the early nineteenth century, Nepal had become a unified kingdom but not a unified society (Pradhan 1991:163). It was integrated only in the sense that it was ruled from the Kathmandu Valley. The process of hinduisation was accelerated, the Hindu rulers of Gorkha and their nobility were enriched, the military controlled large parts of the Himalayas and the peasantry were further exploited as the centralisation of the state increased the eliteā€™s capacity for surplus extraction (Seddon 1987:14).
The large and restless armyā€™s desire for yet more glorious military campaigns brought the Gorkhaā€”or now Nepaliā€”state into direct conflict with the equally expansionist East India Company, then in control of much of the sub-continent. Fearing that the aggressive hill stateā€™s strategic situation gave it the ability to cut Calcuttaā€™s lines of communication with northern India, the British launched a war against Nepal in 1814 (Rose 1971:83). The East India Company found it difficult to break the experienced Gorkha army and when Nepal was finally defeated the British exacted a heavy price. The Treaty of Sugauli (1816) therefore stripped Nepal of large chunks of territory, including parts of the Terai.
The East India Company did not wish to absorb Nepal into the formal British Empire. It simply wanted to make Nepal smaller and weaker (Rana 1970:78). An independent Nepal could serve as a buffer between Chinese and British interests, whereas a colonised Nepal would have proved far too difficult to administer. Its rugged terrain would have turned pacification of the country into a nightmare and the British would have had to contend with the Gorkha army (Ramakant 1982:36ā€“37). Indeed, the British were so impressed by the prowess of Gorkha soldiers that during the Anglo-Nepal War Gorkha prisoners and deserters were drafted into the British Indian Army. Over a period of many years this practice became institutionalised and Gurkha (a corruption of the original Gorkha) regiments became an important part of Britainā€™s military forces.
The Treaty of Sugauli gave the East India Company the right to place a resident in Kathmandu. An exaggerated significance has frequently been ascribed to the role of this resident during the first half of the nineteenth century. Such beliefs derive from traditional Nepali fears of foreign intervention in their country. Nepal has an important geo-political location astride the Central Himalayas and the country marks the geographic and cultural divide between East, Central and South Asia. Precisely because of this, the area that was to become Nepal has never been isolated. On the contrary, it was the conduit for trans-Himalayan tradeā€”the exchange of Tibetan wool and salt for Nepali grain and Indian goods. It was linked to the rest of Asia by the in-migrations of two major racial groups. It also played a crucial role in the spread of Buddhism from South Asia to lands north of the Himalayas and subsequently was at the interface between Buddhism and Hinduism. Far from being a backwater, the Central Himalayas were at the juncture between two dynamic regions. But this also made unified Nepal vulnerable, and successive regimes in Kathmandu developed a keen sense both of Nepalā€™s strategic significance and of its strategic weakness, squeezed as it was between the major powers of Asia. As the astute Prithvi Narayan Shah pointed out in his Dipya Upadeshā€”his Divine Counselā€”which gave advice to his successors, Nepal was like ā€˜a yam between two stonesā€™. And he insisted that it was necessary to balance one giant neighbour against the other in order to preserve the nationā€™s independence. This was sage advice, but it was only practical when China and India were evenly matched. When one power became preponderant it was impossible for Nepal to use the other as a counterweight. This is what happened in the nineteenth century, when a weak and declining China could no longer play an active role in Himalayan politics. Nepal therefore became exposed to the influence of the British in India and was absorbed as a satellite state into the informal British Empire.

THE EARLY RANA PERIOD

Jung Bahadur Kunwar, who later became known as Jung Bahadur Rana, is one of the most controversial figures in Nepali history. From amongst the myths some facts are unquestioned: Jung Bahadur came from a fairly undistinguished chhetri family in Gorkha and rose to power by murdering his opponents. In the bloody Kot Massacre of 1846, scions of the leading families were slaughtered in the Kathmandu durbar, or court, by Jung Bahadur and his men. He then set about creating a new nobility. Potential opponents who survived Jung Bahadurā€™s gory accession to power were either killed or exiled (Whelpton 1991:197; Jain 1972:95ā€“96) and the military was kept quiescent by a judicious juggling of army posts (Whelpton 1991:205, 208).
Jung Bahadur became a dictator. He assumed the title of Prime Minister and, in effect, usurped all of the sovereign rights of the monarchy. He arranged for himself to become Maharaja of Kaski and Lamjung in an attempt to raise his family from the chhetri caste to that of the royal family. And, through the Lal Panja edict of 1856, the monarchy handed over their prerogatives not only to Jung Bahadur but to the Rana family in perpetuity (Shaha 1990a: 246ā€“247). The only thing that Jung Bahadur lacked was the title of king.
Jung Bahadurā€™s success and the subsequent concentration of power within the hands of the Rana oligarchy for over a century, owed much to the weak personalities of the Shah monarchs. To complete the neutering of the monarchy as a political force, Jung Bahadur and his successors then implemented a cunning strategy. First, the king and his family were physically supervised by the Ranas. Future kings, it was claimed, were introduced to lives of debauchery at an early and impressionable age (Kumar 1967:57). Satiated by vice they would, presumably, be uninterested in, and incapable of, interfering in politics. Second, the political role of the monarchy was downplayed and the king was instead projected as Nepalā€™s spiritual head and the incarnation of the god, Vishnu. Third, and most importantly, Jung Bahadur established a tradition of intermarriage between the Shah dynasty and his own family (Kumar 1967:58). The policy gave formal recognition to the elevated caste status of the Ranas, made the Shahs easier to manipulate, and also entwined the fates of the two families. This customary marriage alliance is maintained even today. King Birendra, Nepalā€™s present Shah monarch, who shares the blood line of the Rana family, is also married to a Rana.
The mechanisms through which Jung Bahadur ruled Nepal and the political and administrative culture which he established had a profound and enduring effect upon the country. Among the most notable features of Rana rule was the concentration of authority in the person of the maharaja (Gupta 1964:15). Decision-making was the prerogative of the maharaja, and his subordinates enjoyed few delegated powers.
An adroit use of patronage was fundamental to Jung Bahadurā€™s success. This was dispensed through two principal mechanisms; first, through the Roll of Succession and, second, through the institution of pajani (Kumar 1967:81ā€“82). Because Jung Bahadur had many ambitious brothers and nephews, all of whom wished to become maharaja, the family officially adhered to the principle of agnatic succession. Under this system the eldest male member of the family became maharaja. The names of Rana men were placed on the Roll of Succession according to seniority, and titles and posts in the army and the administration were allotted according to ranking on the Roll. The most prestigious offices and the most lucrative sinecures were given to those at the top of the list. The Roll, however, was not determined solely on the basis of age. There was a degree of flexibility and inclusion and position on the Roll could be adjusted according to political and personal circumstances. It thus proved a powerful instrument of control and a useful insurance against dissent.
A second means of dispensing patronage was through the pajani. Although this institution did not originate with Jung Bahadur, he made good use of it because it allowed him to vary the composition of the non- Rana sections of government. All official appointments were granted for a period of only one year. Providing that the employee had exhibited an appropriate degree of sycophancy to the Prime Minister, appointments were renewed at the annual pajani ceremony. Uncertainty over the renewal of contracts was therefore a marvellous incentive to loyal behaviour.
In the nineteenth century, Nepalā€™s elite was dominated by branches of the Rana family who were elevated to high status and great wealth along with Jung Bahadur. The oligarchy organised trading monopolies and state enterprises and they treated the country as their private property (Regmi 1984:175). No distinction was made between the state treasury and the coffers of the Rana family (Kumar 1967:87). State revenues were spent on unproductive purposesā€”on building ostentatious palaces and importing luxuries from abroad. Alternatively, they were invested in Indian industries (Seddon et al. 1980:38).
Ranas were the principal recipients of vast land grants and Jung Bahadur, and those after him, used the existing exploitative landholding system to amass fortunes and to give themselves unassailable political control over the country. Estimates suggest that by the end of the nineteenth century the Ranas directly controlled no less than 25 per cent of all income-yielding lands in Nepal (Regmi 1988:38). Some pre-Rana elites managed to retain wealth and social status during the Rana period, and a small bureaucratic elite prospered, but, in general, Ranas monopolised public life and the nationā€™s economic wealth.
Despite concerted efforts to elevate themselves to thakuri status through concocted genealogies and intermarriage with the royal family, the Ranas retained their links with the chhetri caste. Chhetris provided the oligarchy with a bedrock of support and the caste was rewarded with the Ranaā€™s patronage (Whelpton 1992:235). At the same time brahmans also supported the Ranas because they promoted Hinduism, and because they were seen to pay suitable respect to the priestly caste. To rule in remote areas at low cost, the oligarchy aligned itself with high caste local elites (Prindle 1978:73) and, consequently, privileges were granted to those taghadari (or high caste, Indo-Aryans) who became agents both of Hinduism and of the Rana family.
Jung Bahadurā€™s Nepal was culturally, socially and politically heterogeneous. He therefore attempted to legislate national integration through the Muluki Ain (Legal Code) of 1854. The Muluki Ain was a civil and religious code which ordered relations between Nepali subjects. Its main purposes were to emphasise Nepalā€™s political identity, to strengthen Hinduism, to establish a national legal system and to unify the country by integrating previously independent social systems (Hofer 1979:40, 46, 195). The Indo-Aryans of the hills, the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley, the peoples of the plains and the many Tibeto- Burman ethnic groups, were all granted an official place in Jung Bahadurā€™s Nepal.
Despite the often profound internal divisions within communities, each ethnic group was assigned a casteā€”or jatā€”and was drawn within the Hindu ritual hierarchy as a single, indivisible, entity. The Indo- Aryan peoples of the hills, known as the parbatiya, and the Newar community, however, were exceptions to this rule because they were officially recognised as having an elaborate degree of internal stratification. Each jat was then allotted a specific ranking within the Hindu hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy were the high caste parbatiya, in the middle were the jats of the Tibeto-Burman tribes, and at the bottom were the Indo-Aryan untouchables. As a result of the imposition of this framework, ethnic groups previously defined by the territory in which they resided were, henceforth, defined according to their caste (Burghart 1984:116ā€“117).
Although the Muluki Ain was flexible and even exhibited some sensitivity to local custom it, nevertheless, legally enforced the Hindu religion throughout the kingdom. The hinduisation of the Nepali population was therefore encouraged in two interrelated ways. First, the Muluki Ain gave it official legitimacy and a body of law. Second, groups sought, of their own volition, to adopt the culture of the dominant parbatiya castes. Hinduism was not, necessarily, forcibly imposed upon non-parbatiya peoples. The Newars of the Kathmandu Valley had, after all, been stratified by caste for centuries before the Muluki Ain. Instead, hinduisation was the product of the interaction between differing social systems. This interaction, however, was heavily weighted in favour of the high caste parbatiya because they held a monopoly of power.
The hinduisation promoted by Jung Bahadurā€™s legal code was synonymous with the integration of Nepal. The simple fact that the Muluki Ain applied to all Nepali territory was of major significance (Whelpton 1992:219ā€“220), and made it a crucial milestone in the process of national integration. It is therefore possible to equate the process of hinduisation with one of ā€˜Nepalisationā€™. Nepalisation, in its turn, enshrined in law the cultural, political and religious dominance of the bahuns, thakuris and chhetris of the hill country. From this position of power they were able to determine the nature of all that was authentically Nepali (Burghart 1984:121). It was they who led the process of Nepalisation and it was they who defined its form by creating the myth that their own political culture was representative of that of all peoples living within Nepali territory. Crucially, as this process ā€˜was nothing but the subjugation of tribes to the dominant, ruling class of high castes in Nepalā€™ (Pradhan 1991:164), it represented a conscious method of controlling non-parbatiya peoples.
Nepalisation, however, was not a uniform success. Some ethnic groups proved reluctant to absorb the religious and social customs of the Nepali elite. This was particularly true of the Limbu peoples of eastern Nepal. The sustained attack which the state and its representatives made upon traditional Limbu society provides an illuminating example of the erosive capacity of the social and political culture of the parbatiya. It is also a well-documented and analysed case of Nepalisation (Caplan 1970).
Eastern Nepal was conquered at a relatively late date and it remained difficult to incorporate within the unified state. The very basis of its landholding system was fundamentally different from that found in the parbatiya heartland. Limbu communities owned land collectively under what was known as the kipat system. But as land in Nepal was held, at least in theory, to be the property of the king, efforts were made to encourage the conversion of kipat land to the standard form of tenure found elsewhere in the country. This would make it easier to tax and would reinforce Kathmanduā€™s authority over the Limbus. Therefore, in order for the state to establish a presence in Limbu territory, the Nepali government encouraged the migration of high caste Hindus into eastern Nepal (Caplan 1970:59).
Although at the beginning of the nineteenth century these bahun migrants were a minority dependent on the goodwill of the Limbu people, by the middle of the twentieth century they had become a powerful majority, controlling local communities both politically and economically. This transfer of power was the outcome of a struggle over land and it was a struggle in which the bahuns had decisive advantages. They possessed more wealth, had the support of the government, and were able, through their literacy in Nepali, to manipulate the legal system for their own benefit (Caplan 1970).
A wide gulf existed in Rana Nepal betwe...

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