Politics of everyday life

After reading a story in a news-daily, a friend recently remarked, “Any analysis of politics that manages to include a line about taking a shit in the morning in the first paragraph is worth reading.” The story in question is Bijay Kumar Pandey’s eloquent analysis of the Nepali way of ‘doing politics’. One must refer to the original piece in Nepali to absorb his eloquence in its entirety. For now, let me quote a paragraph from the article that the friend helped translate. The quote more or less summarizes a politician’s everyday life, and by extension, the state, for one way of understanding or not understanding the state is through the observation of politicians and their puzzling political pirouettes:

“You wake up, grunt on the phone as you strain on the toilet while simultaneously being interviewed by a local radio station; you make false and real promises to the visitors who queue up to see you, make a few phone calls and spread rumors around the city, go to an inauguration and cut a red ribbon, devour chili chicken at a seminar as you pretend to gravely address citizens’ concerns; then you participate in more never-ending negotiations to find a ‘compromise’, arrive at a TV station to give an ‘exclusive’ interview, and finally, in the evening, you visit some ambassador or businessman’s house and, with a sheepish smile, insist that everything you said and did all day was only for ‘public consumption’. The next morning, you prepare for another day filled with the same type of ‘activity’.”

The Maoists once declared Nepal a semi-feudal neocolonial state. After the ‘People’s War’, muddling through the messy politics of state-making, they realized that it was instead a capitalist state. This inconvenient passing phase would however inevitably pave the way to socialism, which would then ultimately lead to a utopia—communism, a class-less society. At this point, the revolution as a ‘permanent process’ would cease to exist. Ideological commitment (or rhetorical shenanigans) aside, a more helpful assessment of the Nepali state may lie in not putting it into one box or another, but rather as an uncomfortable articulation of seemingly incommensurable things: A neoliberal capitalist system, run quite anachronistically by a self-proclaimed vanguard party of the proletariats, the Maobadi, until recently; the sustenance of the core of the state apparatus in modernity’s hotbed, Kathmandu, in turn would rely on maintaining neocolonial and semi-feudal relations of power with the peripheries—the hills and Tarai. Such relations are mediated historically, largely through the politics of land—ownership, reform, speculation, and surplus extraction; and contemporaneously,through the politics of identity, which may be described as being embedded to the land.

There are tenets of socialism in the 2007 interim constitution of Nepal; the imprint is that of a welfare state. But somewhere in the transition when the text is implemented, the socialist sentiment gives way to the overlapping politics of acquiescing to donor conditionalities; submitting to shortsighted politics of coalition; and conforming to bureaucratic protocol—to describe but a few obstacles. In the process, when the ideal state morphs into the ‘everyday’, those with whom we come into contact with regularly, such as plans, policies, people, and programs, of ministries and municipalities, it takes on the form of a neocolonial-neoliberal state.

Imagine a scenario where a farmer-entrepreneur is concerned that a ‘development project’—for the sake of conceptualized imagery, perhaps a Monsanto project—that is jointly proposed by a donor agency and a ministry may ruin her farmland’s ecological health in the name of ‘modernizing’ the agriculture sector. The farmer-entrepreneur may wish to publicly declare that the project’s benefits are questionable but can only do so in private through phone calls and personal meetings with those who are openly resisting the project. The farmer-entrepreneur is unable to make her concern public because doing so would jeopardize her ‘career’ as some of her own ‘projects’ are generously funded by the donor agency in question. She hopes that the proposed development project gets cancelled, while praying for the funding of her own projects to continue. There is an unequal relationship of dependency at work here; this might be called ‘neocolonialism’ in action.

In a neighborhood, the roads are black-topped and taps gush water so long as the resident is ready to up her share of the ‘public-private partnership’ (PPP)—a much coveted mantra for attaining the democratic fruits of local decentralization at the household level (in other words, ‘you are on your own’); the resident is ‘private’ here, the state is public. The chances of getting matching public funds from the municipal state for expediting the projects are enhanced if the resident is able to contribute 50 percent of the PPP fund instead of, say, 25 percent. That the resident is not treated as a right-bearing citizen but as a paying client of the state smacks of a neoliberal way of governing; ‘governance’ becomes something that can be bought or sold depending on how much one can fork out from their pocket.

The intention of the constitution is benevolent, but texts in and of themselves do not breath life. They have to be enacted and implemented by injecting good politics. Good politics come from good politicians. Quite sadly, the majority of our politicians are sucked into such a morass of ‘doing politics’ that we, as followers of the leadership, have been compelled to set a really low benchmark for ourselves to determine a good leader— that he (never she) is not ghusyaha, or corrupt. A non-corrupt politician is a good start, but what we need more importantly is someone with a desire for a good life—radical, visionary, and fearless. We do not find them, because they no longer exist, or are in hiding.

A conception of the state as real human beings instead of an amorphous entity may help one believe it can be touched and felt.

There were a few good men (only men), but once at the center of the ‘system’, it didn’t take them long to come to the realization that they were either confused, or already converted. Hence, what we are left with are the kinds of politicians that Bijay Kumar Pandey lucidly narrates in his trademark style—a crude yet honest humor that calls a spade, a spade.

A while ago I asked Man Prasad Limbu, a prominent figure of the sukumbasi movement in Nepal, what his aspirations for the ‘New Nepal’ were. After pausing for a second, he wisely responded, “I have to be able to touch and feel the state when I want to.” In our everyday conversation, there is a tendency among us to speak of the state in the most abstract way possible: “Isn’t the state supposed to provide us…(whatever)?” as if the state is a thing—something that provides, like ‘God’. At other times, we refer to the state as though it were a powerful patriarchal figure: “He should be fine, he has a really good relationship with the state.”

For me, what Bijay Kumar Pandey achieves is to cut through such abstraction and reveal what social scientists have rigorously theorized—that the state is in fact a constellation of confounding activities and relations that interweave to produce an ‘effect’ that makes it appear as if it is ‘above’ society, ‘out there’ and therefore beyond reach. When I intimated this idea of the state as being people, relations, and activities, to an acquaintance recently, she asked, “But what is the benefit of conceiving of the state as such—relations, etc.?” Rather optimistically, one would hope that such a conception of the state—as walking, talking human beings instead of an amorphous entity—may help one believe that the state can indeed be touched and felt.