This is the article from Kantipur.
- It is the New Year’s Day as the news of the Maoists poised for a landslide win in the CA elections is pouring in. Let me first utilize the opportunity to wish the compatriots a happy new year and then applaud the Maoists for their spectacular success.
But those who deserve the utmost congratulations are the common people who have shown exceptional political maturity in dispensing to the nation a verdict in favor of a paradigm change in the status quo (of the last 238 years) for which both the UML and the NC do not stand if not in principle, definitely in practice. The people have rightly assigned the onerous task of constitution-making and nation-building to the Maoist party which, among the mainstream parties, is the only one with a clear cut vision about the direction in which new Nepal must move.
However, the verdict has come as a rude shock to the many including the NC, the UML, the media, and the civil society. While the unfolding results have jolted the NC and the UML out of their embeddedness in the elite hill hegemony by the Aryan khas bahuns and chettries, it has exposed the ideology of the Nepali media and the civil society too: the so-called objectivity of the two pillars of Nepali democracy masks their subscription to the practice of racial democracy by the two mainstream parties since 1990.
The media’s (and also the civil society’s) traducing of the Maoists as the spoilers of the CA elections and their writing off the revolutionary party in the pre-election rhetoric as a push-over turns out to be a classic example of these important pillars of democracy becoming the victims of what Karl Marx calls “false consciousness,†which has made them lose a grasp of the momentum of history in the last thirteen years, especially the last two.
The stunning victory of the Maoists across the country powered mainly by the massive votes by the hill and Madhes Janjatis as well as some youths from the superior race and/or caste in the wake of the condemnation of the revolutionary political force in the discourse of the media, the civil society, the UML and the NC exposes how ideology functions: it disguises the interest of one race/caste/class as a “national†moral interest. The civil society’s rhetoric of khabardari gets exposed as a mere alertness to ensuring that minimum changes occur in the status quo of the last two hundred thirty-eight years—perhaps not beyond the demise of the institution of monarchy, which is a mere manifestation of the stubborn disease of the hegemony by the Aryan khas bahuns and chettries that it has left behind.
Merely removing the manifestation will only allow the disease to implicitly gain further ground. Fortunately, the people have been wise enough to realize that a necessary therapy must be undertaken to take care of both the disease and its manifestation. And they have given the Maoists the mandate to administrate the therapy through the drafting of a constitution that, while subverting the hitherto dominant ideology, widens the definition of Nepali nationalism so that every Nepali of different regions, races, ethnicities, castes and classes find a room in it. In this connection the people’s distrust of the UML is most revealing: the party’s flattening at the hands of the Maoists is primarily due to the pseudo-communists’ ideology of ruthlessly defending the interests of the Aryan khas bahuns at a time of critical transition—a fact most ostensibly confirmed by the party’s decision to allot 160 seats in the elections to only the bahuns.
The UML’s overt and the NC’s covert championing of the cause of the hill-centric bahun-chettri ethnonationalism suggests that Benedict Anderson’s point that minorities are the imagined communities may also be extended to the majorities who too are imagined and invented—a constructedness by means of which members of the dominant group in Nepal identify themselves against both an internal enemy (Madhesee) and external enemy (India). The ethnonationalism, which has been responsible for some of Nepal’s greatest exclusions in the last two hundred thirty-eight years, has always received nurturance from the stereotyping of the Madhesees (by which they are perceived as illicit settlers from India) on the one hand and India-baiting and China-coddling on the other hand.
The virus of the negative nationalism has taken such a strong hold over the so-called “Nepali†public pulse that a land dispute due to the swerving of the course of the river at Susta throws much of the nation into a hysterical frenzy while China’s building of a tarred road up to the summit of Mount Everest attracts only a deafening silence. As the Maoists’ manifesto and the thrust of their decade-long People’s War suggest, they will give top priority to replacing the negative ethnonationalism with one that recognizes both the glory and shame as well as the multi-ethnic plurality of the nation. It is also believed that they will follow a pragmatic, administrative, and development-driven foreign policy.
It is in coming up with a workable, all-inclusive nationalism that the Maoists are likely to face a very stiff challenge at the hands of the sticklers for the status quo—the NC, the UML, the monarchists, the ultra ethnonationalist People’s Front, and the ethnonationalist media as well as the civil society. That the Maoists are determined to tame the bulls by their horns has been underlined in their chairman Prachanda’s victory statement in Kathmandu on April 12 that people have given his party a mandate to institutionalize the agenda of the republic and the federal structure of governance based on the recognition of geographical-ethnic and developmental imperatives.
A crucial requirement of a workable, all-inclusive nationalism is the promotion of multi-ethnic education and historic truth—an enlightened nationalism which allows for the heterogeneous nature of Nepali culture and which respects the political rights of the minorities. The need for neutralizing the virus of hill-centric, elite ethnonationalism infecting Nepali education, history and literary criticism opens up a new topic which will be taken up another time.
(The writer, who teaches at the Central Department of English, TU, specializes in Cultural Studies in which he has a Graduate Certificate from the State University of New York-Stony where he was from 1997 to 2004 on Fulbright scholarship.)
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