A flailing nation

TKP 22/12/2009

The republication of Nepal’s Failed Development offers a chance to recapture some of the energy and vision that drove the 2006 Jana Andolan

Devendra Raj Panday has been involved in almost all possible capacities in Nepal’s struggle for development and political modernization over the past half a century. He joined the civil service in 1960 and resigned in twenty years. In the 1980s he took on the roles of development scholar and consultant and became a prominent advocate of the importance of democracy and human rights in the development effort. Towards the end of that decade he explicitly took on the role of a human rights activist, forming, with the late Rishikesh Shah as chairperson, the human rights organization HURON. Having played a role in the 1990 movement that dislodged the Panchayat regime and ushered in the era of multi-party democracy, he was appointed Finance Minister in the interim government led by Krishna Prasad Bhattarai. His efforts in that decade also led him to form a short-lived political party: the Prajatantra Lok Dal.

These days, Panday is best known for his role as a prominent civil society leaders of the 2006 Jana Andolan. First a facilitator in the talks between the Nepali Congress and the Maoists, he later came into the public eye as a leader of the Citizen’s Movement for Democracy and Peace (CMDP). That was a period of great and wide frustration with King Gyanendra’s rule, but the people were suspicious of the political parties who claimed to lead them against the monarch. The ineptness and venality of the party leaders during the decade when they were in charge was, after all, well remembered. And it was only due to civil society leaders like Panday, who encouraged political leaders to criticize themselves in public for past mistakes and urged the public to again repose their trust in their political leaders, that hundreds of thousands flocked out onto the streets against Gyanendra’s regime.

The 2006 Jana Andolan was for Panday a period of great hope and energy. It was not only a revolt against an authoritarian king; it was a mass movement on the back of which, he hoped, the sicknesses of Nepal’s public culture could be swept away and an order based on the values of democracy and social justice institutionalized. It was an opportunity to translate into action the values and remedies Panday had articulated during a period of soul searching he had undergone some years before.

In the late 1990s, frustrated with his efforts at politics and deeply disillusioned with the political system that had replaced the Panchayat, Panday entered into a time of reflection and writing. The result of his efforts was published in 1999, in a book titled Nepal’s Failed Development: Reflections on the Mission and the Maladies. The book has now been republished: exactly a decade after its first appearance. Now edited for the sake of clarity and readability, and with an epilogue that takes into account recent events, the volume offers insights into Panday’s motivations during the 2006 movement and, with its trenchant analysis of Nepal’s politics, economy and society, invites the reader to share his vision of a free and just Nepal.

If the book appears unwieldy, it is because Panday has sought to include in it almost everything that he has observed and experienced in his professional life. There are analyses of the growth of Nepal’s economy, its political culture (first during the Panchayat and later during the decade of multi-party democracy), its geopolitical position as a poor and underdeveloped nation under the shadow of India, and the role played by the international aid system. As if this were not enough, there is also a long account of the evolution of the idea of development and a call for a moral and spiritual transformation into a truly democratic society where energies are invested in the pursuit of the public good rather than narrow and parochial interests.

The idea of development pursued in the book is one of sustained and equitable progress where efforts in one direction have positive effects on another, and where the growth of one individual or community does not occur at the expense of another. And where, as a result of these efforts, the feelings of solidarity and participation predominate.

Panday’s argument is not that Nepal’s development has failed because of an inability to match a utopian ideal; it is that in no area has Nepal even made an attempt to work towards these values. For instance, the links between the agricultural and the other modern sectors of the economy -- manufacturing and services -- are tenuous to the point of non-existence. The growth of the services sector, concentrated as it is in Kathmandu, is propelled more by opportunities produced by foreign aid than any demand generated by domestic production. It thus, “contributes not to establishing linkages with commodity production and capital accumulation but to leakages in the form of increased imports for consumption on the one hand and speculative or unproductive activities outside the real sector on the other.”

The causes of this unequal growth, meanwhile, can be traced directly to the inability of the political class to institute a coherent and equitable policy regime. Caught up in factional intrigues to undermine rivals, all energies that should have gone towards the consolidation of democracy XXX the foundations of equitable growth went towards pandering to the old established interests of Kathmandu. No political party was able to compete on the basis of their political stance or policy positions as everything was subordinated to the drive to power -- leading to the formation of unnatural coalitions such as the one between the supposedly communist CPN-UML and the royalist Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP). In other words, the political culture that emerged was hardly different from that of the Panchayat and was still dominated by the “feudal culture, increasingly rapacious middle classes, and continuing court intrigues.”

Meanwhile, the educated class “quietly assimilated itself into the prevailing culture of corruption.” Repeated political interventions into the bureaucracy, which had as their objective short term gain for one politician or another, destroyed the morale and dignity of the civil service. Those in the professions and civil society too, seeing their interests best served through attachment to particular leaders, willingly offered up their services to narrow interests and pursuits. Those who did not, academics, for example, spent their energies not in professional pursuits that would enrich the intellectual life of the nation, but in the collection of rents gained by producing pointless reports commissioned by various sections of the international aid industry.

After the erosion of traditional value systems then, Nepal’s intelligentsia -- ostensibly responsible for leading the nation into a prosperous modernity -- settled into a narrow and materialistic individualism. Among the broader public, there was a severe loss of self-esteem and honour. “Deep within,” as Panday writes, “we [began] to believe that it is alright for a poor country to do shameful things, because we expect to be forgiven -- just as we believe, our international debt will be forgiven some day.”

If Panday had hoped that the 2006 alliance between civil society, the Maoists and the traditional political parties would lead towards a social transformation, his hopes were soon to be belied. The mass movement of that year, it is true, momentarily offered not just hope but public repentance for past mistakes by political leaders and the reclaiming of some dignity and honour. But all this was forgotten during the bitter power feuds that followed the Jana Andolan: the fall into old habits and styles of functioning was swift. Panday himself, the esteemed civil society leader of 2006, was soon marginalized from the political mainstream and vilified as a Maoist by the old political class and the old interests. The energy he and the civil society movement brought to bear against Gyanendra’s rule was largely forgotten. Now, however, the publication of the tenth anniversary edition of Nepal’s Failed Development -- with sentences of aphoristic elegance interspersed through all its bulk and repetition -- offers the reader another chance to capture Panday’s disillusionment and vision.

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