Borderline Crimes

In Hebrew, Nepal is still referred to as a “poor country,” but in English development practitioners have long ago adopted the much nicer sounding term “impoverished.” Progress seems to have come to the very discourse of progress itself. But in my bilingual program Tevel Be’Tzedek (The Earth in Justice), the interchangeability of “poor” and “impoverished” raises a question about the substance of this switch. “Impoverishment” is a word that promises a lot in terms of political consciousness. Not only does “impoverished” disrupt any assumed relationship between a person or community’s moral character and their economic capabilities, it also implies an agent of impoverishment, a responsibility that goes beyond present circumstances and into history.

Slums on the Bagmati river

For example, when Nepal is introduced as a “poor” country,  what is being referred to is the present. On the one hand, they are talking about the government’s tiny budget, endlessly supplemented by program-specific grants from non-governmental organizations, foreign governments and different branches of the international government like the World Bank. More than 80% of the health, education and probably other budgets comes from these non-governmental governments, systems that are largely dysfunctional and unaccountable (while the Nepali Royal Army is an image of efficiency and uncommon job security). The idea is that the government is weak and poor, so the nongovernments have to help the government. The assumption is that if the government “worked,” then everything in Nepal would be fixed, that essentially the problem with Nepal is poor governance.

On the other hand, they are talking about the poverty of the people. Although the vast majority of people in Nepal live in rural villages, when foreigners talk about poverty they are mostly talking about what they see in Kathmandu, the extremes symbolic of the rule. People collecting garbage to recycle, fishing through trash to find fruits to sell. Child porters carrying 170kg at a time, many under 12 years old (10% of the GDP or more is from child labor). Slum dwellers living on the banks of the garbage-choked Bagmati river, where no one else wants to live because of the monsoon floods. And of course, the infamous street children, who live their lives in the streets getting high on glue. Yesterday, one of the kids pointed to a stray dog and said cheerfully in Nepali “Just like me.”

Probably like many third-world cities, Kathmandu assaults the average middle-class first worlder with both presence and absence. The presence of piles of burning garbage and throngs of people. The absence of recognizable signs of authority, from street signs and street lights to animal control, from paved roads to city planning. On the other hand, the absence of central authority only makes it all the more amazing at how good people can be at managing with each other. Although most of Kathmandu’s residents have no access to any discussion on governance, Kathmandu (miraculously) works, day after day, probably with less theft and violent crimes than most of America’s heavily-policed cities. Despite the poverty and inequality, Kathmandu’s residents offer each other admirable amounts of their already limited space. One of the TBT workers said that his greatest culture shock upon returning to Israel is all about buses. In Nepal 30 people or more cram into a microbus and still manage patient smiles, even when sitting on top of each other. On the other hand in Israel, despite the large, roomy, air-conditioned bus traveling on the fully paved road, the people are far more impatient to say the least.

The poverty in Kathmandu is undeniable, sometimes described as “crushing.” But when we say these people are ‘impoverished,’ that implies causes, agents, reasons. If they are impoverished, who or what is doing the impoverishing? And if they are crushed, who is doing the crushing? (And no, it can’t just be a ‘lack of awareness’). Unfortunately, the questions implied by the word ‘impoverishment’ remain largely inert in the absence of history.

My first exposure to history in Nepal is Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy by Manjushree Thapa, a problematic and conflicted book by one of Nepal’s elite liberal humanists trying to understand her country. What I understood from the book and from the smattering of historical content in the program is that Nepal’s “history” is actually two histories. First there is the widely known ‘political history’ of Nepal, frustrating as it is irrelevant. Beginning with the ‘unification’ of the country by a particular royal dynasty 250 years ago, this history is an endless series of soap-opera successions, betrayals, and power struggles with local and international powers backing opponents and making deals to top the intrigue. Most of Nepal’s people are not mentioned, the assumption being that they are somehow implied in the endless royal drama. In 1950 the royal dictatorship was briefly replaced by their elite challengers/inheritors, political parties, who rode on popular desire for some alternative. They behaved in much the same way as different lineages of royal inheritors had, except with more instability, with ten governments taking power in as many years. The second half of the 20^th century is a struggle for power between different segments of the royal family and the political parties, culminating in a second 1950’s style popular movement followed by the reinstitution of parliamentary democracy in 1990. Then, out of nowhere, the People’s War from 1996 to 2006, a ten year insurgency led by the Maoist communists of Nepal. Violence, refugees, natural disasters, broken treaties, a strange massacre in the royal family, and the negotiated settlement with the Maoists come in a rapid and incoherent succession, a feeling of watching a massive spectacle that one has no active part or understanding in. Thapa communicates this brilliantly in her book.

On the other hand, very much in the background and totally separate from this traditional telling of Nepali history, is the (depoliticized) economic history. Development projects exploding with the reinstitution of the royal dictatorship in 1960, and roughly since then a growing corpus of increasing statistics in a myriad of areas such as literacy, poverty, nutrition rates, number of schools, number of people. The arc of progress made of tiny numbers stretching out like  rainbow while the politicians bicker.

If accepted, this history would lead one to forsake politics for the sake of the pure, light-bringing progress of economic development. While the politicians quibble, the apolitical non-governments have been the only ones to do Nepal any good. Give us economics, save us from politics. Although this history is unintelligible and explains nothing, it is its very unintelligibility that achieves its political ends: to make people stay as far away from politics, to make it reasonable to think that economic development can be apolitical, to dismiss history as hornet’s nest of cynical power-politics that no person should even try to know or understand.

But under scrutiny, this history raises questions. For example, the People’s War turns out not to have been launched by the Maoists. It began with government attacks on villages where the movement later to be known as the Maoists was operating. Apparently, they were trying to organize people separately from the political system, something that threatened the sovereignty of the government was considered a threat existential enough to warrant massacring some unarmed civilians (this pattern would be repeated). The resulting insurgency fought the government to a standstill and even today controls large swaths of Nepal’s countryside.

Now, I’m not saying that the Maoists were perfect or selfless or even good, but rather that no insurgency can survive for one year, much less ten, much less fight the government to a standstill without massive popular support whose origins cannot be dismissed. Apparently they redistributed land in some places, forced banks to return confiscated land deeds, made landlords forgive massive debts, etc. On the other hand, Manjushree Thapa, the author of “Forget Kathmandu,” probably echoes widespread assumptions among Kathmandu’s urban intelligentsia about the Maoists: that the Maoist insurgency is a mindless pastime of impressionable villagers trying to vent their frustration at their own backwardness, or that most of their rural supporters are being coerced or threatened. These liberal elites explain that the insurgency is just an extreme symptom of a lack of development and/or “true” democracy. The march of development must be restored. The cynical, political past must be left behind in favor of it.

But there are more troubling facts. Leaders from a new ‘Janjati’ (ethnic/indigenous) party came to visit TBT, and they talked about all kinds of crazy things like the imposition of the caste system through a ‘Hindu state,’ how this imposition was used to dispossess people of their lands, how as recently as sixty years ago many people lost their land because elites had registered it in their own names. And of course, the sharecropper system that is one of the universal constants in Nepali rural life: most villagers must work the lands of rich, upper-caste, absentee landlords and pay half of their harvest as rent. Many if not most have lived on land that is not legally theirs for hundreds of years. Although the leaders who told us this were themselves elites with long histories in politics, quite possibly instrumentalizing their ethnic background for political support (but why is that only a problem when members of indigenous or marginalized ethnic groups do it?), this history was something different than the banal power contests that passed for history until then.

Yes, it turns out that not all is quiet and pastoral in the average Nepali village. In the two villages that I visited as part of the orientation, TBT workers explained that most farmers did not own enough land to feed themselves, with the best land usually owned by a minority of wealthy (sometimes absentee) landlords. The unequal land situation forces poor/impoverished farmers to relentlessly plow both their lands and the lands they sharecrop, leading to soil degradation and decreasing yields. The choice between rural hunger and backbreaking labor on the one hand, and urban poverty on the other is steadily sharpening. Like so many third world cities, Kathmandu actually a refugee camp for the rural poor, whose minimal services are mostly funded and partially administered by nongovernmental organizations and foreign grants to prevent the situation from becoming too bad to be suffered quietly. Through first-hand experience, Tevel Be’Tzedek workers have learned that virtually all of Kathmandu’s poverty is village poverty transported, that the urban poor are largely first generation rural refugees exchanging rural debt slavery for urban wage slavery.

Virtually everyone with a grassroots experience of social problems in Nepal knows that the problem is in the villages, that the problem disproportionately affects lower-caste/ethnic groups, and that the problem is land. Much fewer people have an idea of how this situation came about, how 80% of rural people came to own only 20% of the arable land.

But precisely at this point, the conversation ends. This is the end of the road for NGOs, because the history of land ownership is Nepal is a political history, and the question of land distribution is a political question. The separation of Nepal’s political history and its economic future must remain sacred and respected. After all, politics/history is impossible to understand and frustrating, it is best avoided. For all intents and purposes, then, the question of the historical origins of the very crushing poverty that NGOs seek to address is avoided.

This is a testament to how coincidental history is to the work of most development NGOs, a testament also to the limits of what “impoverishment” can mean in these circles. Obviously, the answer to the question of “how things came to be this way” would force nongovernmental organizations to deal with what is politically wrong in Nepal, to trace economics and politics back to the point where they become inseparable, then to trace it back to the present and stitch economics and politics back up again. It would force NGOs to grapple not only with the “impoverished,” but also with the political, economic and social actors, processes and systems that have and continue to impoverish them.

Perhaps the negative practical consequences of such a move are so great that they make it impossible to think it about openly. Wealthy land owners are after all actively running both Nepal’s government and many of its non-governments. But there is also a sense that TBT as a foreign organization has no legitimacy to look at the issue historically and politically. In Tevel B’Tzedek a series of largely informal understandings have arisen out of the direct experience of two years of trial and error. One is the sense that the mission is to learn about and empower the people we work with to think about the problems themselves, because they have legitimacy we do not to resist their enslavement. Although TBT volunteer activities have been formally confined to educational work related to health, nutrition, and agricultural improvement, there is a sense that there is a broader direction to the work that will somehow lead to greater autonomy and independent action, mainly exemplified by women’s groups and theater groups that aim to develop autonomous thought and expression in groups.

Needless to say, I believe that TBT needs to have a broader vision for their work that is firmly grounded in an explicit historical analysis. I believe this vision should include the creation of eventual creation of autonomous community organizations and networks with independent agendas that TBT can support and be a part of rather than proscribe. But I also believe that TBT’s unique model of direct and open-ended engagement of volunteer groups with village and urban Nepali communities and the willingness to follow and build on the conclusions of each group allowed TBT to reach deeper understandings of the issues than many (large, hierarchical) NGOs who have been in Nepal for years or even decades. Although I call for more historical analysis and reflection on the origins of present problems, I think that TBT is some proof of how loose, nonhierarchical structures and grassroots engagement more naturally lead to political directions. If nongovernments adopt more decentralized, democratic structures, it might only be a matter of time before they can no longer see themselves only as unpaid government assistants and start seeing themselves as allies of Nepali activists working for their liberation.