Tim Gill

There is a civil war taking place in Nepal that has killed an estimated 5,000 people since 1996 with up to half of this number killed in the past year-a dramatic escalation by any standards. According to the Nepalese government, this is a war between a legitimate democratic government and a terrorist organisation. The government has successfully sold this argument to Western governments and has secured "military aid" and support from the United States, Britain and Belgium in the worldwide war against "the terrorists."

This view though is an erroneous approach to the problem. The most superficial of analyses of the conflict in Nepal shows that two basic human rights concerns are at the root of the civil war:
poverty and discrimination. The democratic legitimacy of the monarchy and the Parliament is a valid political concern, but it is doubtful that anyone would be willing to go to war unless there
was such a large degree of class and caste discrimination in Nepal.

This discrimination has secured significant grassroots support for the Maoist insurgency. Thousands of men and women are committed to a revolution that promises to provide them with education, land, equality and freedom from untouchability. The insurgency is also blatantly nationalistic, appealing to a perceived neo-imperialist threat from India and Western aid donors while also attacking the troubled monarchy.

This rationale is far from a defence of the insurgency, however, for the insurgents are responsible for a multitude of serious violations of human rights, including the massacre of police officers, government officials and civilians they suspect of not being supportive of their cause. Moreover, they have destroyed essential infrastructure, making emergency food deliveries and the provision of heating impossible for many people who were barely surviving in the first place. The police and armed forces have also committed multiple abuses and have misused emergency laws to stifle freedom of expression. The crimes being committed by both sides indicate that neither will be able to successfully govern the Nepali people according to principles of human rights and the rule of law.

Despite the seriousness of this situation, few observers have stopped to consider the most important question: What is driving people to take up arms against their own government? People are hungry. People want a chance for their children to go to school. People want to escape from intergenerational serfdom. Ethnic minorities are sick of having their lives trampled on by centralists, and Dalits are tired of untouchability and of doing the most degrading jobs in society without pay.

A recent fact-finding mission by Amnesty International (AI) investigated the human rights cost of the current war in Nepal. The report outlines grave human rights abuses against the people of Nepal at the hands of both the government security forces and the Maoist insurgents. Significantly, the report also looks at the background to the current war:

"Most of the recent grave human rights abuses of concern to Amnesty International in Nepal have occurred against a background of six years of violent political conflict between the Maoists and the State. Very little analysis has been done about the origins of this conflict. However, it is clear that the Maoists have found considerable support among those dissatisfied with the pervasive climate of corruption and the lack of development under the parliamentary democracy established in 1990. Dissatisfaction is particularly strong among the unemployed, women, people belonging to traditional 'lower' castes, marginalised ethnic groups and poor people in the rural areas. "However, the initial euphoria of having overturned the panchayat [non-democratic local governance system] regime and the hopes that the new democracy would allow equal access to power were soon dashed. The political leaders of 1990, many of them from the urban elite belonging to the 'higher' castes, failed to tackle the traditional hierarchies in political, economic and social organisations. Many people continued to feel excluded on the basis of caste or their regional origin. For instance, not a single member of the 'lower' castes was elected to the House of Representatives in the parliamentary elections of 1994 and 1999. 'Lower' castes as well as ethnic minorities continued to be underrepresented in political parties, the judiciary, the legal profession and the civil service."

The government of Nepal has shown it is not serious in addressing the poverty and inequality that is driving this war, yet, rather than admitting this fact and redoubling its efforts to secure the basic social, economic and cultural rights of the people, it has decided to label these people as terrorists-a tag which signifies to the world that "these people are not human beings; they are enemies that must be destroyed at all costs." The United States has been at the forefront of this philosophy, and it is not surprising to see them encouraging Nepal with military aid.

Of course, there is class discrimination in almost every country-there are, for example, far greater distinctions between the rich and the poor in the United States than in Nepal-but in Nepal, the class system is combined with an entrenched, religiously condoned caste hierarchy that makes for inequity on such a sufficient scale as to ignite a war. Dalits-the lowest in the caste system-make up about 20 percent of Nepal's 22 million inhabitants. Nepal is one of the poorest nations on earth, but a glance at the difference in social indicators for Dalits and caste Hindus shows that there are, in fact, two nations here: one which is developing and the other which is downtrodden. Of the total population, 50 percent of the people are literate, but only 11 percent of Nepal's Dalits can read and write. Life expectancy in Nepal is only 58 years; but for Dalits in some parts of Nepal, it is an astounding 42 years. Per capita income in Nepal is a low US$ 210, but Dalits can expect to earn only about US$ 40 per year. While 40 percent of the population are below the absolute poverty line, an estimated 80 percent of Dalits are living in extreme poverty. Meanwhile, regarding the control of the "means of production," Dalits own a mere 1 percent of cultivable land despite the fact that most Dalits live in rural areas. Every imaginable social indicator belies the systemic socio-economic exclusion that means Dalits are effectively living in a different nation to higher caste Nepalis. Dalit women face even more extreme poverty, humiliation and deprivation than their male counterparts.

Nepal is heavily reliant on tourism and development aid for survival, but even this income does not reach the Dalits. Few international aid agencies have developed a caste analysis for their programmes that would ensure that development dollars reach the Dalits. Even the government's own funds for Dalit development have not actually reached the Dalit community-3 million rupees (US$ 50,310) of Dalit development aid evaporated before it was seen by any Dalits in a 1999 government project.

A basic knowledge of these facts is enough to explain why so many Dalits support the Maoists. International development aid is seen by some Dalits as further cementing the superiority of dominant castes over the Dalits. Consequently, the Maoist perspective on this issue resonates with Dalits. Likewise, the Maoists promise them equality, education, land redistribution and the eradication of untouchability. Dalits do not have a history of violence, but they are beginning to see that the promises of the government have done nothing to bring them closer to equality with the rest of the population.

Dalits have been trying peaceful means to assert their equality and reject caste-based oppression, but these attempts have been met with strong opposition from the dominant castes. A striking example of upper-caste resistance to ending caste-based discrimination is the case of the Chamar community in Sihara and Saptari districts whose traditionally assigned unpaid work is to remove the carcasses of dead animals from the houses of the higher-caste families. The Chamars organised themselves and began to refuse to do this work and, as a result, were subjected to a complete social boycott organised by the dominant caste members, meaning they could not purchase necessities, gain employment, trade or participate in the local life of the community in any way.

Moreover, untouchability practices are still rampant in Nepal against Dalits. They cannot enter igher-caste Hindu temples, must use separate water supplies, are refused entry to the shops used by caste Hindus and are forced to live in separate communities.

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) witnessed this exclusion in a fact-finding visit to a small village outside Kathmandu. In this village, the distinction between living areas was clear-the more solid houses were reserved for the higher castes, which had their own grocery stores, school, tea shops and temple. In the Dalit community, illiteracy was rife with only one young woman able to attend a higher school, thanks to help from the Feminist Dalit Organisation of Nepal. The rest of the Dalit girls were married while still in junior high school to Dalit males whose occupations are restricted to making shoes -an occupation considered unclean as it involves working with the hide of cows. For their work, the Dalits were not paid in money but rather in insubstantial portions of grain.

Social and economic exclusion like this is the norm for the Dalits of Nepal. Other young women are even less fortunate. One Dalit community called Badi is now known as a "prostitution caste" because so many girls from this community are trafficked to work in the Indian sex industry. Thus, even trafficking has a caste bias.

Meanwhile, the hope for the future is not encouraging. As of 2000, Dalits, comprising one in every five Nepali people, did not have a single representative in the bureaucracy, the constitutional bodies, the judiciary, the recognised political parties nor the lower house of Parliament (there were four Dalits in the upper house). This amounts to a complete deprivation of Dalits' political rights, making their impoverishment and untouchability unlikely to change in the near future despite the promises of the government.

The responsibilities for change rest with the Nepalese government and with the international agencies and donors on which the government relies. If the government and donors continue to see the current situation as simply an act of terrorism (or more cynically, as in the case of Belgium, an opportunity to build up a new market for military goods), there can be no hope for ending the war. It is clear that the terrible violence of the many Maoist "sympathisers" is a direct reaction to the terrible violence they themselves have faced over centuries of neglect and repression at the bottom of Nepal's rigid caste system. Their violence is unjust and illegal and must be addressed through legal means, not through government-sponsored massacres. Likewise, the blatant discrimination of Dalits by the police, politicians and community leaders must be subject to criminal prosecution-an avenue that would also contribute to building Dalit confidence in the application of the rule of law for the defence of their human rights.

Similarly, aid agencies and donor governments that continue to operate in Nepal and ignore the caste system run the risk of increasing the prospects of war and violence as the current inequities are only entrenched by such nearsighted efforts. A caste analysis of Nepal's society, conducted with Dalits themselves, is essential for any agency investing resources in Nepal to ensure that aid responds to inherent inequity as well as national poverty indicators. Only through addressing the failure to provide the most basic means of livelihood or the most distant prospect of equality for Dalits can there be hope for lasting peace in Nepal.

 

Blind Dreams A Dalit poet Even when you sleep when your eyes are closed, You see things clearly what you had seen noted And enjoyed in the day during your other works. What you had then desired while awake in day, What you had coveted or what you had dreamt While awake in the day are seen as the dreams of night! The blind do not see even the world around them During the day itself as they go about Dreaming about what would really be the world! How then can they see the world in their dreams-Things they had neither known nor had seen ever? Pleasures in life for Dalits, whether awake, asleep, Are blank, like those dreams of the blind in the night!