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David Gellner/Inclusion, hybridity, social order:
Preconditions of democracy
David Gellner’s paper dealt with the politics
of inclusion from an ethnographic perspective.
Delving into the question of how to develop a
legitimate, liberal, democratic state in Nepal,
he said that it was essential to enhance its inclusiveness
of dalits and janjatis. This, while being a well-recognised
fact, is seen as threatening for elite (Bahun-Chhetri)
interests. Gellner suggested that one way to get
around this may be by changing the official outlook
on who is a dalit, who is a janjati and who is
Hindu and who is not, thus countervailing the
exclusionary tendency of the state.
Discussing notions of democracy, Gellner said
democracy in Nepal is variously known as prajatantra,
janatantra and janabad, which in themselves are
not clear definitions. Criticising the popular
definition, he said that the ‘government
of the people’ meant those who governed
in the name of the people were more equal than
the others, while ‘the people’ in
the formulation ‘of the people, for the
people, by the people’ remained undefined.
Did the term refer to men, or to adults, or to
men who are earning, or to all? Did democracy
refer to participation or representation, as in
the Rousseauvian model?
Gellner described various models and approaches
to democracy, including the Marxist and the liberal
models, and those posited by Schumpeter and Macpherson,
whose view predominates in American political
science. He said that there was a danger in the
increased acceptance globally of the value of
democracy without adequate analysis of the concept.
Its acceptance as an indicator of development,
such that ‘greater democracy’ of the
likes of grassroots empowerment has come to be
seen as a measure of greater development, is problematic.
Gellner proposed three conditions as necessary
for enabling democracy in Nepal, making a distinction
in the ones that were prescriptive in nature and
the one that is rooted in the factual circumstances
of the state today.
The most pressing need of the Nepali state today
is social order, without which there is a danger
of the ‘Biharisation’ of Nepal. The
restoration of social order means the restoration
of peace and the neutralising of armed groups.
The second need is of greater inclusion, measures
for which should be mandated by a revised constitution.
Third, he suggested a revision of the constitutional
enshrinement of Hinduism as the religion of official
patronage since the country is witnessing increased
ethnic politicisation, and is, in fact, to a large
degree, secular in practice. To implement this,
he suggested the inclusion of a comma in the constitution,
which would restrict the mandate of religion to
the king and not apply to the state.
Gellner suggested the restructuring of the federal
units of the country to make the districts larger
and so, fewer, and to effect greater decentralisation.
This would result in citizenship cards no longer
bearing the ethnic identity of the individual.
Suggesting the reconfiguration of constituencies
as multilingual and multicultural units, he proposed
reservations along the Indian model.
Addressing the issue of hybridity, Gellner stressed
the need to acknowledge hybridity in demographic
data-gathering and analyses. He suggested that
the modern state’s obsession with ethnic
and caste purity be abandoned in favour of encouraging
multi-ethnicity and celebrating a multiethnic
heritage. As a beginning, Gellner proposed that
people should be allowed to tick more than one
box in the religion and ethnicity categories in
the census form. In support of this, he cited
the case of the Newars, many of whom practise
a syncretic religion that tends towards Buddhism
but for reasons of state patronage tick Hinduism
in the census form, contributing to a skewed representation
of demographic data in official records. According
to Gellner, such an exercise will not only provide
a truer and more nuanced picture of Nepal’s
population, it will also force the state elites
to acknowledge their own hybridity and multi-ethnic
lineage. This might change the bahun-chhetri proclivity
for exclusivism, and thus, change the nature of
the Nepali state as well.
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