The film uses power of suggestion—“show, don’t tell”—to convey everything it wants to say. The entire film is premised on the message that the pride of being a Gurkha emanates primarily from a process of recruitment that is rigorous as well as “free, fair and transparent.” That’s neither falsehood nor truth but a statement of position explained through the documentary.[break]
The line that a lie told often enough becomes the truth has been attributed variously to Joseph Goebbels and Vladimir Lenin, two of the most persuasive propagandists of the twentieth century. Any ‘truth’ however needs the paraphernalia of power to prevail over competing realities. Lies of Goebbels’ were exposed with the fall of the Nazis. After the breach of the Berlin Wall, certainties of Lenin are no more as authoritative as they once were.
With time and the inevitable shift in global balance of power, selective truths and fanciful fabrications of George W. Bush II and Tony Blair too will stand exposed.
Vilification of Saddam Hussain, a favorite despot of the US regime in the 1980s, is just not sufficient justification for devastations wrought upon Iraq. After ten years since the multi-pronged assault began, conservative estimates suggest that the US$1.7 trillion blitzkrieg killed at least 137,000 Iraqi civilians, deposited 400 tons of depleted uranium on Iraqi soil, and created almost 1.5 million refugees without discovering a milligram of WMDs, which was the fundamental basis of the war of aggression.
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
In case manufacturers of consent succeed in framing Anglo-American adventures in West Asia as “democratizing missions” (In the Age of Empire, such campaigns of subjugation were claimed to be “civilising missions”), it is possible that historians of the future will dismiss the obliteration of the Bath regime as one of the failed experiments of well-meaning Western powers. After all, excesses of the Berkeley Mafia and Chicago Boys have already been forgotten and few remember that the “moral equivalents of founding fathers” in Afghanistan were created, nurtured and then ultimately decimated, all in the name of US interests.
Rhetoric is an important component of establishing and maintaining hegemony. It transforms mercenaries who die fighting for foreign forces into martyrs. The tag of proletarian vanguard is assumed to justify a regime of usurpers. Warmongers disguise themselves as angels of peace. Manipulation of thought through skillful use of language has always been an important component of all efforts of establishing hegemony everywhere.
A new battlefront seems to have emerged in the form of NGOs in the developing world. Contemporaneous with the gaseous liberalization, privatization and globalization (LPG) agenda of the market, NGOs have begun to popularize what can perhaps be termed as “bottoms-up, rights-based and non-governmental” (BORING) approach. The LPG created crony-capitalism and established the inescapability of crime-capitalist cabal.
The BORING approach has resulted in the expansion of the class of lumpenbourgeoisie (“a militant, openly anti-democratic enclave within a functioning, however half-hearted and thus helpless democracy” in the succinct words of the Czech philosopher Karel Kosík) and formation of neo-literate gang that parrots “Root Cause” slogans with the conviction of neo-converts.
The Third Sector
Unlike indigenous voluntary organizations, NGOs did not emerge from the grassroots initiatives. In the 1960s, the United States asked members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to enlist social organizations to work as propagandists of the aid and development sector (AIDS) in recipient countries. As the AIDS industry began to expand, the role of NGOs was enlarged. However, NGOs established themselves as the Third Sector, along with the State and the Market, of political economy only after the 1980s when satellite regimes of the Soviet Union began to first shake and then fall one after another.
In less than 25 years of expansion, the NGO sector has established itself as an inalienable part of the socio-political landscape in much of the developing world. Its influence is pervasive in countries like Nepal: From helping frame laws to making lawmakers accountable, NGOs are involved in every activity of governance. Perhaps it is a little early to gauge their overall impact upon the society and the polity; however, it does not take a social scientist to figure out that NGO-activism has been influential in the de-politicization of social, economic and cultural spheres.
NGOism (Gaisasagiri in Nepali) has spread so fast because it serves a socio-economic need. Entrepreneurs of the sector estimate that NGOs, together with INGOs and their projects, employ at least 250,000 people. That sounds quite plausible if one assumes that 50,000 organizations employ at least five persons each. The figure is then equivalent to that of all government employees put together and nearly half of all the jobs organized businesses claim to have created. In addition, most NGOs pay better than public or profit sector bodies. Gaisasagiri has thus emerged as the second most lucrative job opportunity after the option of going abroad in search of work.
Some of the works that NGOs do to keep their funding sources functioning end up helping society in many ways. A few critics, Marxist scholar Tariq Ali for example, characterize NGOs as WGOs: The Western Government Organizations. In the assumption of liberals, NGOs should function like the Fifth Estate to support state authorities. The profit sector anticipates them to be the champions of the free market. Balancing these expectations, while pretending to work for the people and keeping funding agencies happy at the same time, is not an easy task. No wonder, the Third Sector of the political economy has begun to attract the best and brightest of the land. The scene is unlikely to change in the near term. Gaisasagiri is here to stay; hence the society has to learn to put up with its idiosyncratic ways.
One of the most damaging impacts of Gaisasagiri is going to be the intense de-politicization of the disadvantaged population. They are being won over with crumbs, and made to parrot meaningless lines in the name of awareness, empowerment and capacity building.
Boring Rhetoric
The town of Gularia falls under the shadow of Nepalgunj. Gaisasagiri in Bardia is limited to functioning as local contact persons or motivators of organizations based in the bigger town nearby. It doesn’t stop them from repeating lies that they have been told is the only truth. “Let us talk about social harmony, not minority rights,” urged a poster Tharu boy at a recent public hearing in Gularia. In communist China, when dissent has been ruthlessly suppressed, the regime habitually claims that the “issue has been harmonized.” Unfortunately, the NGO industry, like the public and profit sectors, has been almost fully appropriated by the PEON communities of Nepal’s population. They patronize distinctive members of oppressed groups that play their tune on the harmonium.
Inaruwa in Sunsari is a long way from Gularia, but fundamental beliefs of Gaisasagiri permeates public meeting in this eastern town, too. Flanked by self-assured Biratnagar and assertive Itahari, vocal Madheshis of Inaruwa accept that they have less of a chance in making to the positions of power but have been conditioned to think in terms of the Root Cause Theory: Remove poverty and everything else will go away. A Dalit woman who had attended Training of Trainer (ToT) programs does not seem to realize that reduction of poverty requires that related issues of political economy be addressed first. Politics for prosperity is a laudable idea—it is a rephrased version of King Birendra’s Panchayat-era slogan ‘Politics for Development’—but it fails to address the aspirations for identity, dignity and opportunity. The NGO-tsars, however, sneer at the ideas of federalism and inclusion. Their minions have been trained to eschew such terms in public meetings.
Change requires a certain amount of passion, which only politics can generate. Despite the good works that NGOs are doing, they are merely agents of pacification. Nothing wrong with the ‘bottom-up, rights-based and non-governmental’ (BORING) approach, but the rot of Nepali polity and society begins from the head. That kind of disease can only be cured with shocks of politics. A country that considers costs of Constitution making wasteful forfeits its right to be even nominally independent. Freeing the imagination from terms of pacification is a necessary condition of effective empowerment.
Lal contributes to the week with his biweekly column Reflections. He is one of the widely read poliitical analysts in Nepal.
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