Shrochis Karki Education can be a poisoned chalice, particularly for indigenous and marginalized communities, because it can raise their hopes and expectations without providing them necessary skills or knowledge to achieve those outcomes. This finding of an unstable expectation-outcome nexus is based on fieldwork research carried out in a rural village in Chitwan, and in Kathmandu, Nepal. The Chepangs, a highly marginalized indigenous community, have harboured great hopes of escaping their poverty through education. Given the relative success of the few “educated” people in their village, Chepang parents perceive education to be extremely important and enthusiastically send their children to school; enrolment in the village has rocketed to almost 100% in the last decade. However, the state of Chepang education is found to be dismal, with students facing severe structural…

Mahendra Lawoti The paper investigates the role of the political elite in exclusion in Nepal through an analysis of their attitudes (structured survey) and behaviour (public policies/institutions). A survey of 101 Nepali parliamentarians in 2000 demonstrates a complex scenario. While the elite were highly tolerant, which indicate that they did not possess exclusionary attitudes, some level of racism existed among them. The apparent contradiction between the tolerant but racist attitudes can be reconciled if we distinguish between the lack of exclusionary attitudes from that of having inclusive attitudes. The elite may not have been exclusionary but they were not inclusive either. The attitudinal findings are supported by an analysis of policies that affected inclusion/exclusion during the 1990-2002 and post 2006 years when regime change led to a political transformation. While…

Katsuo Nawa This paper is an attempt to analyse the changing ways people of Nepali Byans articulate themselves in formal oratorical occasions from a linguistic anthropological perspective. Byans VDC lies in the northernmost part of Darchula District, Far Western Nepal, and main inhabitants there are people who call themselves ‘Rang’ in their language, most frequently called ‘Byansi’ in Nepali, and now officially listed as one of the indigenous nationalities in Nepal. Nowadays most of them live in the town of Darchula either seasonally or semi-permanently, where main audio-visual data for this paper were collected in 2010. There are some traditional occasions, notably in marriage ceremonies, in which several Rangs should give a short speech. This role is usually fulfilled by some elder males who are regarded as phaa tarta, i.e.…

Kyle Knight The human rights of people who do not identify within a male-female gender binary have been alternatively ignored or intensely policed by governments around the world. After a 2007 Supreme Court decision declared full legal recognition and rights for people who identify as not male, not female, but third gender, Nepal has emerged as a leader in the international LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights movement. But how has Nepal as a leader affected politics at home and internationally? Falling in line with the 2006 Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, Nepal’s laws are the most progressive in the world: in order to receive full legal recognition and claim rights, citizens need only to self-identify as third…

James Sharrock A small part of why the transitional period in the peace process has been relatively calm can be explained by the apparent stability in local level politics in Nepal since the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Unsurprisingly district-level bodies like the All-Party Mechanism, Local Peace Committees and the Indigenous Nationalities Coordination Committee, although widely perceived as entrenching corruption, assisted local level disputes from spiraling out of control by ensuring that an expanded ‘distributional coalition’ gained from patronage and government spending. However, on the ground after the CPA, politics in Eastern Nepal appeared far from calm, especially in terms of accommodating identity-based political actors. I will argue that local politics in Nepal during the transitional period has often seen political parties and other actors demonstrating their power and support -…

Jacob Rinck This article examines Nepal’s political economy from a rentier state perspective to explore the political implications of its remittance dependency. Remittances have contributed significantly to the reduction of poverty over the last two decades, but this article argues that they – together with foreign aid – also function as external rents which help to keep Nepal’s patronage democracy viable and militate against its transformation. The state derives a quarter of its budget income from external loans and grants, and more than one third from import and consumption taxes, largely driven by remittances. Therefore it is relatively autonomous from taxes on domestic production, and has little need to encourage domestic economic growth. At the same time, remittance based growth sustains the widespread rent-seeking by politicians and bureaucrats that has…

Dinesh Kafle As the Maoist insurgency ravaged the social, economic and political landscape of Nepal over a span of ten years (1996-2006), writers, journalists and the insurgents themselves took recourse to literature to express their attitudes about and experiences of the insurgency. While the act of writing itself served a therapeutic purpose to those directly involved in, or affected by, the insurgency, to readers, the literary representation became a window to peek into the insurgency and its impact on the lives of Nepalese people. These writings also added a new chapter in the Nepalese literary history, which we may call as the Nepalese insurgency literature. The Nepalese insurgency literature can be studied by dividing it into three categories—the civilian camp, the military camp and the Maoist camp—the representative texts of…