Uddhab Pyakurel Since socio-cultural diversity is one of the dominant features of South Asia in general and Nepal in particular, people are still being marginalized and the practice of inequality remains deeply and firmly lodged. However, some positive attempts have been made in the recent times to correct the past mistakes i.e. the denial of equal access to education, jobs and other policy-making bodies. The policy of affirmative action is one such attempt introduced with the hope of making an inclusive society by overcoming the hierarchical and narrow-minded society of the past. In this context, this essay tries to analyze not only the need of such a policy in the society where hierarchy based on caste, gender and creed are still a naked reality, but also the impact of such…

Sara Shneiderman In post-conflict Nepal, one anchor for mobilization has been the demand for ethnic federalism—explicit territorial recognition of ethnic difference at the constitutional level. Another has been the demand for affirmative action—a set of policies to address socio-economic inequality through what has often been called “special rights”. But these two demands are commonly conflated, with arguments for affirmative action embedded in those for ethnic federalism, as if special rights are inherently linked to territorial recognition through the model of self-determination. This presents a seemingly intractable political and analytical problem where many members of erstwhile dominant groups argue almost instinctively against ethnic federalism, because the possibility of separating territorial and non-territorial forms of recognition is not well understood. It is now imperative to disentangle discussions of ‘ethnic federalism’ from those…

Susan Hangen Affirmative action policies are usually conceptualized as ways of promoting social equality by increasing marginalized groups’ access to the state and resources. The diversification of state representatives through affirmative action policies can also democratize the state, as these officials will hopefully be more responsive to communities. I argue that there is another potential benefit of affirmative action that has been overlooked – it may promote decentralization, a stated yet elusive goal for the Nepali state for decades. In the highly centralized Nepali state, central authorities appoint local state officials who then move from the capital or district headquarters to run the state at the district or village levels. These individuals are thus more accountable to central authorities than to local people, and often do not serve these communities…

Neera Chandhoke We can draw a significant lesson from the manner in which affirmative action policies in India have been conceptualized and implemented. The notion of compensation on grounds of ‘harm done’ or brute luck, is simply inadequate, if it is left to stand on its own. Though the general feeling at the time of forging the Constitution was and continues to be that those who have benefited from history should be willing to pay the costs, over time this consensus has been watered down. the idea that ‘we’ owe something to ‘them’, in abstraction from a consensus on why people are owed restitution for historical wrongs, divides society along the axis of ‘we-ism’ and ‘they-ism’, and dissolves solidarity. Over time younger generations have begun to raise the following questions:…

Mara Malagodi The paper uses the constitutional Right to Equality as a prism to investigate Nepal’s post-conflict process of state-restructuring aimed at securing social justice and inclusion for the many marginalised groups in the country. The core argument is that the embattled – and yet unfulfilled – shift from the predominantly negative notion of equality under the 1990 Constitution to a positive one after 2006 requires to address the demands for both recognition and redistribution raised by the People’s War. First, the paper examines and compares the formulation of the Right to Equality with regard to group entitlements in the Indian Constitution, Nepal’s 1990 Constitution and 2007 Interim Constitution, and the CA Committee Report draft. Second, focusing on post-1990 Indian constitutional adjudication pertaining to the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category,…

Mahendra Lawoti Affirmative action policies, though adopted in many countries around the world, have been controversial. This paper will test some of the claims made by supporters and critics of the policy, such as whether the policy is needed to increase representation or whether education and mobilization would lead to the inclusion of the previously excluded groups, by comparing representation in the Parliament in three multi-ethnic South Asian countries: India and Nepal where affirmative action in the political sector was adopted around six decades and this decade respectively and Sri Lanka where the policy has not been adopted in the political sector. Nepal provides an opportunity to examine the effect of policy by comparing conditions of target groups before and after 2008. Findings based on comparison of target group’s performance…

Meena Acharya The paper argues that multi-dimensional inequality in results is a function of multi-dimensional inequalities and inequities in the socio-political and economic structures. But each of these factors impact differently in different social groups. In Nepal, while inter-ethnic/geographic/religious group inequality may be a result of political design, geographic remoteness and intra-group cultural /religious/social practices, gender and caste inequality is more a matter of social and in the case of women even the legal rights. Therefore, even with equal political and legal rights and proportional representation in political institutions, women, Dalits and the marginalized ethnicities will need other kinds of affirmative action, which must address the additional factors that lead to unequal access to state and other social resources. But these must be designed in a way not to infringe…

Kåre Vollan A complicated system for electoral quotas was introduced during the 2008 Constituent Assembly elections in Nepal.  Both excluded groups and the elite were given quotas in the proportional part of a mixed electoral system. The system did produce a more inclusive assembly than any parliament before but a targeted system for affirmative actions designed to include otherwise excluded only may show more efficient in the future. In addition, other elements of the electoral system can be used to secure diverse representation.  Whenever designing the system of representation one should establish the purpose that the various elements should serve.  Are the measures taken to achieve real (and not just formal) equality over time, are they designed to create a state where rather fixed groups are balancing each other as…