POKHARA, January 31: If the first day of the fifth Nepal Literature Festival was interesting—what with the lively debate on Naya Shakti featuring Baburam Bhattarai, followed by a delectable discussion between Narayan Wagle and Buddhi Sagar—the second day, too, offered some heavy intellectual stimuli and preppy conversations amid a big Saturday crowd.
To kick things off, economist and development planner Swarnim Wagle entertained young CPN-UML lawmaker Rabindra Adhikari and senior journalist Rabindra Mishra.
"The mindset of our rulers continues to be occupied by how to get to power and hold onto it at all cost,"Adhikari remarked in a session titled "How to make Nepal."
The opposition in Nepal, the young UML parliamentarian from Pokhara added, is similarly incapable of looking beyond how to unseat the government through protests. "Unless this power-centric mentality of our political leaders changes, we can forget about developing Nepal."
He emphasized on the need to put people at the center and suggested that the political class should try to bridge the wide gulf between (big) words and (zero) action. In Nepal there is no difference between the ruling party and the government, Adhikari said, and until our political parties learn to make a clear demarcation between the two it's useless to talk of effective government.
His namesake, Rabindra Mishra, who has over the years been at the forefront of the national fight against corruption, was having none of it. "The entire political establishment is corrupt. So it's useless to expect our political leaders to provide solutions to our problems."
Mishra believes the work of cleaning up the society and building a Nepal that we can all be proud of has to start with individual families. Children of rich parents, said the head of BBC Nepali Service, need to question their parents where all the extra money is coming from, "for only by building honest families can we build an honest society."
The whole debate was centered on the classic chicken-and-egg problem: Do strong institutions ensure clean and effective governance or is it the people who make institutions strong?
The other interesting debate on Saturday—themed "Constitution and Identity"—was between noted scholar Pitambar Sharma, constitutionalist Bipin Adhikari and social researcher and analyst of Madheshi politics Surendra Labh.
"The new constitution is a paradigm shift in the history of Nepal," said Adhikari. Why? "Because it provisions for a religion-neutral state; for proportional representation of marginalized communities; it creates liberal space for politics; and it establishes a strong basis of identity."
Adhikari believes the new constitution is a milestone and oriented at finding solutions to the country's problems. Sharma differs. According to him "the new constitution does not establish any basis of identity."
"There are four major population clusters in Nepal: Bahun/Chhetries, Dalits, Janajatis and Madheshis. The constitution does not address the concerns of all these communities."
Asked if the politics of identity was being used to divide the country, Sharma replied: "It is the political leaders who are trying to divide people in the name of identity. They misrepresent the issue. Honoring people's identity is a way of coping with the extremely diverse Nepali society. There is nothing divisive about it."
Labh for one is troubled by the fact people these days only talk in the extremes, by how it has become impossible to hold a sane discussion on important issues like state restructuring and historical wrongs, for instance about how Madhesh has been traditionally ignored by Kathmandu. "Why are the Human Development indices of most Madheshi communities lower than the HDIs of people of even Humla and Jumla? Isn't it the state's responsibility to take care of all its citizens without any bias?"
In another session, poet and Dalit rights activist, Ahuti, discussed the subtle ways in which the Dalit community has been discriminated in the new constitution even though he acknowledges that it as a landmark document. It is the first constitution in South Asia to explicitly talk about Dalit rights, he says.
"But what the new constitution gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. For instance, it says that the landless Dalits will be given land but in the next breath it says that such lands will be provided only as per the laws." This, he said, was a roundabout way of saying that, ultimately, whatever the ruling community decides goes.
Talking with the session moderator Sanjeev Pokharel, Ahuti said that if the new constitution is implemented without any further amendments, "it would take the Dalit community another 50 years to come to parity with other communities."
Like the first day, the second day of Nepal Literature Festival was also dominated by politics, the debates there mirroring the ones now taking place in nearly every household in Nepal as the country struggles to emerge from the prolonged political transition. Even the sessions whose themes were clearly non-political were interspersed with unsolicited observations about the current government, state restructuring, the blockade and Madhesh.
Perhaps more such wide-ranging debates between experts from different fields (and from different communities) are just what the country need to find a way out of the current crisis. Kudos to the organizers for providing a wonderful platform.