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After the Rukum massacre, which resulted in the lynching of six Dalit youths, caste-related questions are again getting space in our public forums. Literates, illiterates, scholars, youths, old-age people, everyone is debating them. This is good as it will help more people know about the society’s bitter reality.

Following the killings of Navaraj BK and his friends in Rukum, I conducted a small survey of around 150 college-going youths to find out their views on caste. All seven provinces were represented. They responded via email, Facebook messenger, and Viber. I asked each: ‘What is caste?’, and ‘Are you going to have an inter-caste marriage’ (as BK wanted to do)? To the first question, the majority said caste was an artificial construct and that all men and women are equal. The second question, however, seemed to confuse them. They didn't answer spontaneously.

After a few minutes they said they would not go against their parents’ wishes. In addition, they would by themselves opt for intra-caste marriages over inter-caste ones. Now we can see the real face of our youth. They say all humans are equal and yet they are reluctant to marry out of their caste. They would rather happily stick to their old castes, creeds, and traditions.

Dalits and non-Dalits may be boyfriends and girlfriends, but when it comes to marriage, it’s still a no-no. This is the thought process of our revolutionary youths. It indicates a big gulf between their words and action; it is easy to lecture but difficult to practice what you preach. Rather hypocritically, our youths are simply not interested in fighting a noble cause they supposedly believe in.

Generally, the introductions in our society start with first name, and end with caste and clan. People love this process, as others are quickly categorized as mama, dai, bandhu, or whatever their caste conventions dictate. In Hindu, society caste is your primary identity.

It doesn’t matter whether you are educated or not. Most people continue to deeply identify with their castes. Even our prime minister is obsessed with his caste. That’s why he appends two high-caste surnames to his name. Apparently, the communists have no religion, but clearly not here in Nepal. They give speeches on casteism as a debased system and yet they continue to practice it. The prime culprit of the Rukum massacre is also a communist.

Renowned scholars have written many poems, stories, novels and books on social equality and cultural emancipation. In the western world, James Baldwin has done a lot to champion the cause of Black folks. Similarly, in Nepal the great poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota wrote about caste in his play “Muna Madan”, where he says people become great through their deeds and not through their castes. But who listens to wise men like him?

Everybody in Nepal read this play during their school college and university days. They even wrote long essays on it, denouncing the caste system, in their exams. But, again, very few of them would have practiced what they wrote.

Sadly, our people, society and our lifestyle in Nepal continues to be dominated by a caste-based thinking to a large extent, hollowing out the concept of common humanity we all like to espouse. The Hindu Varna system divides people. As a result, even though all of us are made of the same flesh and blood, we continue to be arbitrarily labelled and discriminated against. Nor, as we see, is this kind of outdated casteist thinking limited to old folks. Today’s youths are as infected by it.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the architect of India’s ‘neighborhood first’ policy, doesn’t have many friends in the region. Moreover, enamored with big powers like the US and China, the Indian media give small states in the subcontinent scant attention. Even the little attention it gets is invariably negative. Take the latest coverage of Sri Lanka’s parliamentary elections. With an overwhelming majority for the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), the party of the Rajapakshas, a foregone conclusion, the fear was that the island country would slide further into China’s orbit. That is not the least of India’s worries. 

India-Bangladesh ties took a nosedive when Modi brought the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019. The legislation bars the path to citizenship for new Muslim migrants in India. As most of these migrants originate in Bangladesh, the CAA’s goal was clear enough. As if to rub it in, the BJP also accused Bangladesh of systematically torturing its Hindu minority. Bangla Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, otherwise a staunch Indian ally, subsequently came under immense domestic pressure to distance herself from New Delhi and to inch closer to Beijing. 

There is also a growing unease in Bhutan over its tight embrace by India and New Delhi’s attempts to keep it from directly dealing with China. This was partly the reason behind the 2017 Doklam crisis, and behind China’s latest claim to a new territory in Bhutan. China wants to settle its borders with Bhutan through land swaps, which India vehemently opposes. Bhutan’s outreach to China isn’t hard to understand either: If India is gaining immense economic advantages of trading with China, why can’t Bhutan?

India’s relations with Pakistan have never been worse. With the Maldives, things are a little better after the election of India-friendly Ibrahim Mohamed Solih as president in 2018. Yet it’s wistful thinking to believe the Maldives, with Mandarin-speaking tourists as its economic lifeline, will suddenly agree to distance itself from China. 

Nor would it be an exaggeration to say Nepal-India relations have hit rock-bottom. All official talks between the two have been put off, indefinitely. The influence of the Chinese in Kathmandu has increased alarmingly. So where did Modi go wrong in the neighborhood?

During his six years in office Modi seems to have cared about little else other than consolidating his Hindu vote bank. This was the calculation behind the repeated military strikes against Pakistan, the promulgation of a new map of Jammu and Kashmir—which included the Nepali territory of Kalapani—the amendment of the citizenship act, and his latest inauguration of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. As Arundhati Roy pointed out in her recent piece for The Wire, Modi timed his Ayodhya visit with the first anniversary of India stripping of J&K of its statehood. 

Besides using South Asian forums to isolate Pakistan, the neighborhood has never been Modi’s priority. China is being hounded by the world for bungling its initial Covid-19 response. And yet it continues to tighten its grip on South Asia. It is curious that smaller democracies in the region seem to trust authoritarian China more than they trust democratic India. Attributing this to China’s ‘checkbook diplomacy’, or to the old mistrust of India, the traditional hegemon, would be a cop-out. Nor will it do much to resurrect India’s flagging image. 

The Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FNCCI) will soon elect its new senior vice-president (who is president elect by default) through its 54^th general assembly. The private sector’s apex body has been struggling to establish itself as a professional corporate entity due to a perpetual shortage of capable leadership. The leaders the FNCCI has gotten over the past two decades have been more oriented towards pleasing their political masters than in establishing high standards of corporate governance.

Rather than speaking the industry’s voice, the FNCCI is consumed with fulfilling the interests of its leadership. For instance, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), India’s private sector’s umbrella agency, has ‘Industry’s voice for policy change’ as its motto. The FNCCI lacks any such guiding principle. 

The federation has seen little growth in the past three decades since the opening up of the economy and reforms in 1990. Since its establishment in 1966, up until 1990, was the time for the organization’s institutional development. Yet, even after 1990, the FNCCI has had little to show for it. Its past presidents like Mahesh Lal Pradhan, Padma Jyoti, and Binod Chaudhari gave the institution some shape. But recent leaders such as Kush Kumar Joshi, Pashupati Murarka, Suraj Vaidya, and Bhawani Rana have done next to nothing to strengthen the capacity of the private sector and empower domestic investors. 

The FNCCI leadership has instead used the organization to curry favors from those in power. Suraj Vaidya became the coordinator of the Visit Nepal 2020 campaign, no sooner than he had completed his tenure as the FNCCI president. Likewise, Kush Kumar Joshi was able to get the ‘Kathmandu-Hetauda Tunnel Highway’ project immediately after the end of his term. In both cases, there was simply no match between the person’s expertise and the projects they later received.  

The FNCCI could have, over the years, pushed political leaders to adopt the right set of policies that favor industrial development in order to achieve higher growth and to create jobs. Yet the focus of the FNCCI, which has a nationwide network through its district-level units, has been on lobbying for higher margins in foreign trading business of its leadership, thereby eroding the private sector’s credibility. “The FNCCI has failed the country by limiting itself to being a lobby group, while the expectation was that it would contribute to industrial development and economic growth,” shares Pushpa Raj Acharya, former president of the Society of Economic Journalist-Nepal. “The golden opportunity for creative transformation of the private sector has been wasted in the past three decades,” he adds.

The 54^th general assembly was scheduled for March 2020, but was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic-induced lockdown. It has now been postponed again, due to internal disagreements within the FNCCI. Whenever the general assembly happens, all those contending for new FNCCI leadership positions have already shown enough evidence of groupism and vested interests. In other words, we cannot expect much from whoever leads it next.   

Raghuram Rajan, an economist and former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, points to three pillars of national development: state, market, and community. He argues that if the market colludes with the state then the community fails, causing people to suffer. This is exactly what is happening in Nepal.

Looks like the private sector will have to wait a long time before it gets capable and visionary leaders. 

As the federal government mulls yet another nationwide lockdown, let us take a moment to reflect on those who have suffered the most from the previous complete or partial lockdowns: not the big business owners, not their employees, or most people who enjoyed their chats and walk during the lockdown.

Those most affected are citizens who were suffering from the vicious consequences of pervasive and structural inequalities even before the lockdown: daily wagers who are the backbone of the national economy, even if their contributions are not officially counted.

Amid repetitive warnings from the World Health Organizations that the fight against this virus is far from over, including strong admonitions that a second waves of infections are probably just few months away, it is worth noting that Nepal has not even reached the peak of the outbreak. The worst is yet to come.

In this increasingly complex scenario, the decision makers have a tough choice: should they keep the economy open, give more respite to ailing workers and enterprises or should they considering enforcing a strict lockdown again? The stakes could not be higher: either let people risk their lives with a disease that is hard to tackle or allow many others to suffer from the lockdown’s economic impact. Perhaps it could be helpful to reformulate this dilemma from a vulnerability perspective.

Should policymakers allow the most vulnerable segments of the population to die from the pandemic? Or should their lives be jeopardized by getting them back to work in order to revive the beleaguered economy?

The way we answer these two questions is important. How many people working in the formal economy will literally lose their jobs if the work and movement restrictions are re-imposed? How many businesses could sacrifice some of their income and yet survive with a different business model that leverages on line, smart work? What can the State do to soften the hard impact on these corporations? How much fiscal space is there for the government in this emergency? Can resources otherwise allocated be diverted to corona-control? What can big donors do in such a situation?

A country like Sweden that took a very liberal approach to the lockdown paid a high price. Singapore, after enforcing a so called “circuit breaker” lockdown, a necessity after haphazardly easing up restrictions, is now back on business despite suffering a high daily per capita infections. The secret to this approach is to impose very strong regulations, expecting the citizens to strictly follow them out of a sense of civic responsibility.

Qatar, quite impacted in terms of number of persons infected in relation to its overall population, imposed draconian rules.

In addition all these countries have the resources and the knowhow of an efficient health system that is capable of dealing with severe outbreaks. Yet the leaders there are aware that even their best hospitals may not cope well in case of severe community outbreaks.  

Can Nepal follow suit and enforce a strong compliance system? Can the government mobilize private hospitals in case infections rise further? Are the private hospitals ready for that?

Many are going to lose something or the other in these circumstances. A progressive and far-sighted government should decide who is going to lose the most: those who are vulnerable and marginalized or the better off, including the roaring middle class?

While the latter deserve special consideration in terms of economic relief in the form of stimulus packages, the former are those at most risk no matter what the government decides.

Galimberti is the Co-Founder of ENGAGE, an NGO partnering with youths to promote social inclusion in Nepal. He can be reached at [email protected]