Thinking about charity
How do you respond to the child on the street in New Road who is begging for money? What do you do when he clings to your legs, drags himself, and embarrasses you until you offer money? This is a situation familiar to us. We know many children on the street use cigarette, alcohol or sniff dendrite. If we give them money, they might use it on these harmful substances. So by giving money, we might be doing more harm than good to these children.
But we are charitable and want to help. Also, it is embarrassing when a child clings to your feet and so many people are making faces at you. When I find myself in such a situation, I ask the child what they need the money for and almost unfailingly, they respond ‘for food’. And I offer to buy them food instead of giving money. Some appreciate the gesture and accept food, while some curse me and leave. I accept the curses believing that I did the right thing by preventing my charity from doing harm to this child.
“Charity is a tricky thing. I don’t always know when to offer it and when not,” my wife says. Many others have shared similar confusion. In this opinion piece, I discuss the tricky issue of charity with my current view, and while doing so I also present my earlier views.
Growing up, I had learnt from my parents to be kind and charitable to the poor and needy. Although I don’t recall the reasons they gave me, I believe they were based on the idea of daan leading to punya. And I used to give money to people on the streets who appeared needy and were seeking help. But this changed when I joined Social Work education. I now came across a view where charity wasn’t encouraged.
This view laid out that giving money to the poor encourages begging and makes them depend on others for a living. So I stopped giving money to those on the streets, although I found it difficult to say no to their requests. My training in social work taught me that giving skills, instead of money, was the right thing to do to help the poor. This was in accordance with the perspective that focuses on empowering the marginalized and the vulnerable by providing skills so that they can take care of themselves. The most commonly used example in professional social work is that if you give fish to a hungry person, they will survive for a day but if you teach them how to fish, they will survive every day of their lives. This was what I believed in then.
Relevant in the discussion about ‘to give or not to give charity to the poor’ is the individual vs structural view of poverty. The individual view contends that people are poor because of their laziness or unwillingness to work, whereas the second view highlights that people are poor because of structural issues, for example the socio-economic arrangements. The individual view blames the person for their poverty and thus discourages charity whereas the structural view holds the larger system accountable for the poverty of an individual. After being exposed to this individual vs structural view on poverty, I resumed giving to people in need but with a newer understanding of poverty and charity.
My understanding of charity expanded from giving money to the poor to providing support to the needy and poor including materials, skills, and networks. This understanding corresponds to the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s definition of charity as “generosity and helpfulness especially toward the needy or suffering”. My understanding of the poor as helpless and needy expanded to view them as victims of the larger socio-economic system, which needs to be changed in order to address the root causes of poverty. I learnt that each of us can intervene or contribute to bring about change in the system to lift people up from poverty. What we can do depends on where we are and what we are capable of.
There can be various levels and natures of interventions to address poverty, namely, micro, meso, and macro. At a micro level, an individual can help poor people by providing them with basic necessities of life or with skill development. At meso level, too, groups of individuals and organizations can extend similar help. And at the macro level, governments (local, states and central) can provide welfare to the poor through cash transfers, unemployment allowances, subsidized housing, skills development opportunities, employment generation, affirmative action, to name a few.
No matter where we are in the level of intervention, providing charity should be a thoughtful act of helping the poor or needy and not merely an expression of compassion or a daan. Charity should not be limited to acts carried out to feel good but aimed at empowering the poor and needy so that they are not dependent on charitable individuals and organizations. And acts of charity must bring no further harm to those helped.
Should Nepal and India talk now?
There is hardly a foreign policy wonk in either Nepal or India who is not publicly in favor of dialogue to resolve the outstanding border dispute. Yet it is also hard to see what the two sides will discuss—much less resolve—if they talk now. The mutual distrust is far too great. The risk is that they will talk more as their country’s aggrieved representatives than as cool-headed negotiators, further complicating matters.
As Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali has said, Nepal’s bottom-line is the pullout of Indian troops from Kalapani. But at a time of escalating border tensions with China, the Indians will not be ready to withdraw from Kalapani, the strategic outpost that helps them keep a close eye on the PLA garrison in Taklakot. In that case, what other alternative will Nepal offer to India?
The last thing PM KP Oli—widely criticized for his bungling of the Covid-19 response, and cornered in his own party—wants, is to be seen as compromising on national sovereignty with India. The Nepali blood still aboil, anything short of getting India to fully agree to the new map will be viewed as treason back home. On the other hand, if he can hold his ground against the big brother, Oli will place himself well going into the ruling party’s impending general convention and, after that, the next round of national elections.
Oli, who returned to power on the back of his resolute stand against the Indian blockade, has no other political card up his sleeve. Even if his government badly botches the Covid-19 response, even if it appears to be profiting from people’s misery, even if it has dashed most public expectations, Oli reckons people will still forgive him if he refuses to blink against India. Traditionally, a strong anti-India posturing has been a foolproof path to power, more so in times of Nepal-India hostilities.
The more uncompromising the Nepali negotiating team appears on Kalapani, the greater will be the belief among its Indian counterpart that Oli really has sold his soul to China. The Nepali prime minister has not helped his cause with the Indians by belittling India’s national emblem and blaming it for Nepal’s corona crisis. Nepal’s unconditional support for recent China’s actions in Hong Kong will also have been noted.
If the two sides get talking, the Indians could propose a complete rewriting of bilateral ties—this time with the sole intent of securing India’s security interests. With an end of the ‘special relations’, India won’t be obliged to make any concessions to Nepal. But if they really propose to, say, regulate the open border or cancel visa-free access to Nepali citizens, will the Nepali side be able to accept the proposals? I am unaware of any kind of homework in Nepal on how the country will deal with this kind of monumental change in its foreign policy.
Nepal-India relations are on the verge of derailment, and it won’t be easy to bring them back on track. One hope could be that, special relations or not, the ever-present threat of China usurping India’s strategic space in the region will make India amenable to compromise, if only partially, in Nepal’s favor.
But that is a risky bet. China has repeatedly compromised Nepali interests at the altar of its business ties with India. It could do so again. What if India, while it engages Nepal, is simultaneously negotiating with China on Kalapani? PM Oli may think Nepal has China’s back on the region. Verbal assurances aside, where is hard proof?
Suffering is good
After enlightenment, Siddhartha Gautam met his five former ascetic companions to share his experience. He said, “Monks, let me tell you about the truth of suffering.”
It may sound strange for an enlightened person to talk of such a seemingly trivial thing. Who wouldn’t know about suffering? And he was talking to the ascetics who were walking examples of suffering! They ate a few grains of food in many days, just enough not to die. They slept on cold, hard floors of cremation grounds. They denied themselves even the tiniest and pettiest things of comfort. Being their former colleague, Siddhartha knew suffering wasn’t new to them. But he still had to talk about it. Why? To liberate them from suffering—the real one which had nothing to do with their bodies, but with their minds.
The five ascetics thought the body was a prison for their soul—the pure substance that they needed to free. The idea of liberating the soul from suffering became their fixation. When something becomes a fixation, one can go to any length. But the enlightened Siddhartha knew the poor guys would get nowhere by torturing their bodies. They needed to fix their minds.
From what the Buddha taught, we know he was helping people live a life of peace and contentment. It would be a life free of dissatisfaction, of course. To find freedom from something, first we need to realize it exists. A physician has to tell the patient that they have certain disease so that they can take the medicine. Likewise, the Buddha tells us to wake up to suffering, or the pains and dissatisfactions, of life.
There are obvious pains that we all face and see: birth, disease, old-age, death. There are natural disasters and pandemics. But there are less severe and less visible everyday pains as well. We have to live with people we don’t like. Our boss refuses us to grant leave from work and our long-planned trek to the mountains is canceled. When we desperately want to have a fresh lime soda, the waiter says they have run out of lemons. After finding a perfect ‘soulmate’, we cling to the ‘bliss’ of their company and fear losing it. The list is endless.
While the grosser ones like disease and old-age are physical, the subtler ones happen in the mind. Death or separation may only happen once, but the fear of it haunts us all the time. We are all trying to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic right now. The virus may or may not affect us at the physical level, but at the mental level it has already deeply affected us. We create most of our sufferings in the mind.
So what does it mean? Often, we are born and we die without actually knowing what’s happening. Most of us fail to see these things as suffering—they form part of ordinary routine life. Ignorance may be bliss, and if you are happy with it, that’s okay. But that’s not a wise choice. Knowing is more interesting than not knowing. Recognizing our subtle sufferings and knowing how our minds create them may open us to a higher possibility, just like the Buddha and other enlightened masters.
In support of Nepal’s EV tax
The government decision to increase the excise and customs duty on electric vehicles (EV) was widely criticized as a reversal of the policy to promote electric transport. As a symbol of that protest, 17 eminent civil society leaders submitted a memorandum calling on the Prime Minister to reconsider.
Those protesting the EV tax have erred in their judgement. The new EV tax still retains the policy of promoting EV but ends an unreasonable subsidy to car buyers. Protestors have confused two objectives. First, the objective of promoting purchase of EV over conventional fuel vehicles. Second, the objective of making private vehicle affordable.
Promoting EV
Even with the new tax, EV remains comparatively cheaper than the equivalent conventional fuel vehicles.
The effective tax on EV has increased from approximately 30 percent to 140 percent. In contrast, the equivalent taxes for conventional fuel vehicle are 260 percent. Taxes on conventional vehicles are still 85 percent higher than for EVs.
Consider this example. Suppose the base price of a petrol car is Rs 100: it will incur Rs 260 in taxes and cost the consumer Rs 360. The base price of an EV is approximately 30 percent higher than the equivalent petrol car. Starting at Rs 130, the EV will then pay Rs 182 in taxes and cost the consumer Rs 312.
Even with the new tax, EV still remains comparatively cheaper. And this is without accounting for the fact that EVs are cheaper to operate and run than conventional fuel vehicles. The new EV tax hasn’t changed the policy promoting EV.
Making private vehicles affordable
The new taxes will increase the price of an EV.
An EV with a base pre-tax price of say Rs 15 lakhs will now cost the consumer approximately Rs 21 lakhs more in taxes. Previously, the taxes would have been Rs 1.5 lakhs. The consumer must now pay Rs 19.5 lakhs more.
It is this price increase that protestors are really arguing about. The new EV tax has made private vehicles unaffordable for many.
No government in Nepal has ever had a policy of encouraging private vehicle ownership. Only a small fraction of Nepalis can afford a private vehicle. With limited government revenue, reducing import taxes for private vehicle ownership can undermine spending on other development needs.
Put this into perspective. Last year, approximately 590 EV passenger cars were sold in Nepal. With the new EV tax, the government would have raised approximately Rs 115 Crores. Based on this year’s budget, that would have enabled it to educate 43,928 school and college students, or helped 605,526 women access institutional health care for safer motherhood, or provided 143,813 babies access to medical care, or distributed financial support to 191,863 farmers.
Making EVs, or for that matter private vehicle ownership in general, affordable for all Nepalis is a great goal. But it cannot come at the expense of depriving the basic needs and livelihoods of millions of poor Nepalis. The poor have as much a right to a future as protestors have to affordable cars.
Civil society activism
The EV tax debate is a stark reminder of our harsh realities. Even a well-intentioned government with efficient honest systems (impossible to begin with!) will struggle to balance our multiple urgent needs and fiscal constraints.
Opposition to the EV tax must empathize with these broader challenges. It cannot merely be a revolt of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.
As civil society, we must mobilize to pressure government to perform. But we must also supplement what the government cannot or will not achieve. Where government cannot, we must lead ourselves into the future we desire by collectively mobilizing voluntary individual action.
There are cheaper and better ways of reducing urban air pollution. EVs help—don’t get me wrong—but in Nepal, the bigger impact will come from reducing vehicles on the road.
We can do more to improve public transport (incidentally, tax on EV public transport has been left unchanged). Rich people can ride buses too! Create voluntary car-free days. Cycle or walk short distances. Popularize the pedal (or electric) rickshaw. Close urban centres to vehicular traffic.
We can put pressure on the government to reduce fuel imports by doubling taxes on conventional fuel vehicles, and impose a pollution tax on fuel oil.
We can demand greater accountability on the taxes we pay. If we will shell out 140 percent tax on EV, perhaps we should focus our protest to know precisely where it goes.
