Nepal is passing through one of those interesting times when the abnormal appears the most normal. Due to their personal distaste for the-then incumbent premier, leaders of political parties unanimously handed over the reins of government to a team of bureaucrats led by the Chief Justice. [break]
There are many ways of committing political hara-kiri; Nepali politicos found the most effective one to spite each other and created a Catch-22 situation: The current government can’t be ousted without its own recommendation to the head of state for necessary changes in whatever remains of the interim constitution. Expectations remain that the winners of the lottery currently in government are serious about an election that would strip them of power and authority. Hope indeed springs eternal.
The media is not only good at gauging the direction but also adjusting its sails to suit the wind. The budget of the bureaucratic government has been allowed to escape largely unexamined. Increase in the allocations for security forces has hardly been debated. Behavior of bureaucrats running the government has attracted even less attention.
There was a first-person report that the head of interim election council practiced untouchability at home and treated Dalits differently in the office. No mediaperson took up the issue and at least ask for a public explanation from the chief giver, implementer, and protector of laws. Everybody is busy in bashing politicos that have begun to appear increasingly inconsequential in the extra-constitutional and ultra-democratic ‘new order’.
Headlines over last few days have been frustratingly under-whelming. The former king, his family and hangers-on went on an excursion to the far-west of the country and reportedly spent over Rs 10 million for travel and lodging to distribute relief materials valued variously between three to five million.
A Maoist ideologue and a Hindutva campaigner sparred about what they had proposed to each other on the future of the king in the dying days of monarchy. In the grand old tradition of every ambitious politico going on a pilgrimage to New Delhi to obtain blessings of presiding deities in the Indian capital in order to secure their future in Nepal’s politics, Madhav Kumar Nepal too went to pay his obeisance. In this barrage of trivia, the media had little time to examine shameful displays of barbarism in Belbari.
Hypocritical mainstream
Dictionary meaning of casteism and casteist are based upon notions of prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of birth. The definition, however, fails to capture the full force of the weight that Dalits—the non-caste ‘untouchables’ of the Hindu social order—have been made to bear for millennia. It does not help that most Dalits look, talk and live exactly like their caste-Hindu neighbors. Similarities infuriate dominant castes and communities even further.
It is no longer the question of purity and pollution; it is the loss of traditional privileges—monopoly over state, social, and cultural power—that has begun to incite ‘upper-castes’ into fear-driven frustrations, fury, and violence.
It is easy to dismiss the public humiliation of Maya Sarki and Manoj Bishwakarma as aberrations. The bien-pensant of Kathmandu claim without pretensions that if a Trayvon Martin could be gunned down and his killers acquitted by the jury of the most powerful country and the oldest democracy of the world, there is not much that can be done about similar incidents in barely modernized societies.
The White Shirts, however, are insistent that education and awareness will change the situation.
The gendering of the event also appears attractive. The moment a victim is depicted as a woman, her Dalit identity becomes secondary and perpetrators can then be charged as practitioners of a form of gender violence. That is an area where a large number of ‘upper-caste’ Hindu women too are victims. Sisterhood would then help the community of oppressors appropriate the oppressed as one of their own.
Dismissing the devilishly planned and brutally executed dishonoring of Dalits and degradation of their Janajati sympathizers as mob madness is yet another way of absolving caste-Hindu executors of the hate-crime.
Acts committed under the pressure of the moment do not cause as much revulsion. However, it’s the depiction of the tragic occurrence as a law and order problem—failure of the police, weakening of the rule of law, and the unresponsiveness of the administrative machinery—that succeeds in hiding the ugliness of an unequal society where ascribed identity decides one’s fate in every aspect of life.
The liberal elite of the United States tried to wrap George Zimmerman, the killer of a boy that President Barack Obama would later describe as “it could have been my son” or “could have been me 35 years ago”, as an accidental beneficiary of lax gun laws and slipshod interpretation of the “stand your ground” acts.
It took a while for the reality to dawn that the race issue is not just another street-crime in trigger-happy US. President Obama finally gathered courage to reflect over the state of African Americans even after nearly 150 years of their legal emancipation. It has hardly been six decades since the abhorrent Hindu practice of untouchability was officially abolished in Nepal. The habits of the mind would perhaps take many more decades to diminish.
Emancipated bondage
In Marxist theory, false consciousness is understood as a belief or view that prevents people from seeing exploitation, oppression and social relations for what they are and consider them as one’s own creation. Most Marxists, however, put economic relations above everything else. “…the ideal,” claims Karl Marx, “is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”
Perhaps the Marxist depiction correctly reflects the true condition of a certain time and space: The nineteenth century Europe. For the rest of the world, Pierre Bourdieu offers a better explanation: “…Social order is progressively inscribed in people’s minds’ through ‘cultural products’ including systems of education, language, judgements, values, methods of classification and activities of everyday life.” Such a consciousness is first faked and then forged as societal consensus.
The justice system of the US—hanging chads, politicized judges, acculturated jury and all— is a reflection of existing power relations. The Khap Panchayats in the northern Indian states rule according to existing norms of society when they declare that girls should not wear jeans or carry cellphones. The upper-caste perpetrators of barbarism in Belbari are convinced that they acted at the urging of what they term ‘samaaj’—the society. Now, when an entire ‘society’ is guilty, laws alone are unlikely to work.
Changes in Hindu society, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar discovered to his chagrin in India, is excruciatingly slow as educational or economic attainments seldom translate into social or cultural status commensurate with one’s endeavors and achievements. Maya, had she been born a Brahmin, would have commanded respect. Manoj would have been considered a conscientious professional aware of his civic duties. They are Dalits, and would have to “educate; agitate; organize” and fight their own fight to challenge the forged consciousness of “first of all we are all Nepalis” formulations of a deeply casteist and rabidly communal society.