The national question

TKP 13/4/2009

The Maoists are facing the consequences of underestimating the depth of ethnic sentiment

A newspaper editor, accustomed to hearing Maoist leaders advocate ethnically determined autonomous provinces, was surprised by a recent statement by Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai that purely ethnically determined federal provinces were dangerous. That other factors -- such as resource base and geography -- had to be taken into consideration in the formation of the federal structure. The editor asked Bhattarai whether he had changed his mind after years of speaking and writing about the need for autonomous ethnic (jatiya) states.

Bhattarai explained that the word he actually used in his writings was “nationality”, which although often taken to refer to ethnicity, had a substantially different meaning. According to the historical materialist perspective, Bhattarai explained, nationalities are formed when a group of individuals live in a particular area, have similar living conditions, face the same kind of marginalization and oppression and develop a common language.

Nationality is a product of shared history. That word is therefore preferable to the word ethnicity (jat), which seems to imply eternal and immutable characteristics of particular groups. In Nepali Maoist doctrine, nationality is transitory. The oppressed nationalities are to be given autonomous areas and liberated for a period of time until their living standards and status catch up with those of the privileged groups. Then there will be no nationalities, only the Nepali nation.

In broader historical terms, as Bhattarai wrote over a decade ago, nationalities -- oppressed minorities with a shared culture -- exist only in the period of feudalism. With the transition from feudalism to capitalism occurs a simultaneous transition from nationalities to nation. The myriad nationalities come together as a homogenous nation-state.

This was more or less what Nepali communists had been saying for decades. The one crucial difference between the old communists and the Maoists was that while the former were in favour of immediately moving towards a homogenous nation state, the latter felt that, considering their history of oppression, the marginalized nationalities had to be given a period of near-total liberation before they were assimilated. It was this ideological modification, undertaken with a heavy reliance on Lenin's writings, which enabled the Maoists to attract the support of various ethnic movements -- both armed and unarmed.

The first task for the Maoists and their partners in the various ethnic movements was to demolish the real and symbolic links between the Hindu state and the nationalities. Maoist activists barged into villages during the period of the people's war, forced villagers to breach the ritually guarded space between castes (for example, by forcing upper castes to eat food cooked by Dalits) and intimidated the guardians of the old Hindu order (by forcing them to stop teaching Sanskrit in schools, for example).

The oppressed nationalities, to varying degrees, had over the previous centuries emulated the rituals and lifestyles of the upper castes in an attempt to raise their status (a process known to anthropologists as “Hinduisation” or “Sanskritisation.") Encouraged by the openness after 1990, and quickened by the Maoist revolt, the indigenous nationalities, particularly in the hills, began shedding the religion, customs and rituals they had adopted over the previous centuries. The intellectuals of these groups sought to fill the void by pouring over historical sources and legends, trying to uncover the authentic identity of their ethnic groups, as existed in some primordial golden age. The anthropologist Marie Lecomte-Tilouine labels this process “desanksritisation”.

However, as Lecomte-Tilouine writes, the process lays “claims to the same weapons” as the process of Sanskritisation, and can thus also be termed “para-Sanskritisation.” In the context of the Magars, for example, replacing the symbols of the Hindu state are “an incomprehensible language and alphabet (the Akkha lipi, which replaces Sanskrit), specific handbooks of rituals written in Magar, collections of sacred texts, great men of the nation, etc.”

So while the Maoists were happy that the various ethnic groups supported them in the destruction of the symbols of the old Hindu state, they were dismayed by the new forms of identity that were being created in its place. The emphasis on culture and identity was a distraction from the true problems of the marginalized groups, which are, in the Maoist view, chiefly economic. And the search for an eternal culture dating from the dawn of time seems not only fraudulent and “unscientific”, but also dangerous, as it characterises ethnic groups as immutable and the barriers between them as insurmountable. This, the Maoists feel, impedes the development of a national culture and can only lead to prolonged conflict.

The view that all nationalities would converge into a single nation as Nepal transitions from feudalism to capitalism was excessively simple. The Maoists made the same mistake as all other Marxists of the third world: they placed an inordinately high value on class, and as a result underestimated the emotive power of ethnic nationalism. Theirs was not an isolated error, however; it very closely approximates the error made by their opponents, the bourgeois liberal democrats, in the middle of the twentieth century.

Like the Maoists, the old liberal democrats of the third world felt that as their countries managed to grow economically, educate its people and ensure them adequate standards of living, they would gradually come to resemble the modern West. There would be secularism in public life, individualism would replace group identity, and class would replace retrograde forms of identity like caste and ethnicity.

So when the Indian state introduced reservations for marginalized castes in the 1950s, its leaders strongly felt that reservations would last only until a time when the oppressed groups attained a certain living standard. The society would gradually become casteless and the need for reservations would no longer exist. But as the decades rolled on, the reservation system further expanded and became entrenched. The hierarchies between castes shifted, but the distinctions between them were still fiercely maintained.

Sixty years after independence, no Indian leader or politician speaks of the time when society will become casteless and there will be no need for reservations. On this issue, Nepal's Maoists are likely to take an approach similar to one they have taken on the issue of socialism: they have for the time being given up on their dream of establishing a socialist state and tell themselves that this can happen only after a long and prolonged period of national capitalism. Likewise, they will have to accept that the transition from nationality to nation will take much longer than they had thought, and will have to push their vision of a homogenous nation state far into an imagined future.