Nepalmountainnews Report | 31 Mar 2008
By Biswo Poudel
The power of prejudice over the minds of mankind is very extraordinary; hardly any extremes too distant, or absurdities too glaring for it to unite or reconcile, if it tends to promote or justify a favorite pursuit.
David Cooper (1772)
Aspiring ‘hate’ leaders tend to supply the apocryphal tale of past atrocities to their prospective consumers to expand their support base. After the Gaur or Kapilbastu massacres, stories of indiscriminate dismemberment of bodies and ravishment of Pahadi women were circulated among the Pahadi population in Nepal by those who stood to gain by perpetrating hatred. Since there is not much demand of hatred against the Madhesis among the Pahadi population, supply of such hatred slowly petered out. Madhes, however, has a long list of genuine grievances against the Pahadis, and hence there is relatively more demand for hatred against the Pahadis. Leaders like Goit and Jwala, therefore, are having days of busy merchants, and to meet the demand, they supply phony tales of supposed Pahadi atrocities too.
In the aftermath of the pact between the government and the Madhesi parties, it is worthwhile to think about the future of the regional parties. Will they survive? How many of them will eventually survive? Should they survive? And conditional on the fact that we won’t change our electoral system, will they contribute to more or less hatred in our country? How should those aiming to build a tolerant and prosperous Nepal deal with regional parties? This article is an attempt to explore this issue and make suggestions about how to contain possibly catastrophic hatred.
In two-party systems, political scientists agree that both parties try to attract the median voter. This means the parties compete to be more moderate while keeping their base intact. Systems such as proportional representation in the presence of multiple parties, on the other hand, create incentives for hatred and extremist politics. Under such system, all the Madhesi parties will have incentive to serve stories of hatred to attract more Madhesis in their rank and all hatred mongering parties can survive by accumulating hate votes, even if the hate vote is highly dispersed, over the whole Madhes.
Fortunately, the presence of direct representation for a fraction of total seats has at least already acted as a deterrent to hate mongering. For example, Upendra Yadav, while welcoming Pahadis in his party, recently claimed Pahadis living in Madhes are Madhesis too, a position several prominent Madhesi writers had disagreed with in the past.
The economic aspects of hatred are equally salient. Harvard Economist Ed Glaeser noted, in his work on the political economy of hatred, that some groups find it economically beneficial to divert hatred towards possibly innocent groups. For example, as the Maoists spread awareness and started recruiting poor and low caste Madhesis in their rank (even if their motive might be disingenuous), the landed and moneyed class that now forms the core of some Madhesi parties suddenly started pointing towards the poor Pahadis who migrated to the terai as the source of Madhesi privation. They probably stand to gain both politically and economically with this ploy; while ordinary Madhesis’ anger is diverted towards the settlers, the Maoist threat has all but vanished from the terai.
How will hatred evolve in Pahad and the terai? Economists likely think that if interaction with the group that is a potential target of hatred benefits the haters, then hatred will grow. For example, if Madhesis are only moderately rich in Mustang, it is unlikely that they will be hated there. However, if they are very rich, there will be a lot of people who gain by hating them (for example, competitors, wanna be expropriators).
In the tarai, where most of the Pahadis are relatively well off, and the Madhesi population is relatively poor, hating Pahadis also creates the possibility of economic benefits to the haters.
These arguments point to the policy implication that guaranteeing property rights and allowing unrestricted capital mobility within the country may help reduce hatred.
If the candidates running in elections in all constituencies are homogenous in their background, there is likely to be less hatred as they all vie to attract votes of the target group. A brief look at people running in this CA election looks reassuring from this perspective.
Hatred, economists think, has increasing returns. It is more and more difficult to fight hatred when the number of haters increases. For example, in the aftermath of annexation of Sikkim and Rajiv Gandhi’s economic embargo of Nepal, the number of India haters in Nepal has become so high that in conversation among Nepalis, people rarely become upset if someone makes anti-Indian remarks. Once it acquires a certain number of adherents, hatred induces a positive feedback mechanism, and it becomes difficult to eliminate it, at least endogenously. If the number of political parties in Madhes increases, and if they all serve hatred so that the number of haters surpasses a critical threshold, it will become very difficult to reverse the hatred in the long run. Hateful regimes, as Glaeser notes in his work, have rarely disappeared without external and exogenous pressure.
This article provides clear policy implications for Nepal: The government must work hard to maintain law and order, and preserve property rights of individuals, parties need to give tickets to candidates of similar background in electoral regions, and the government must do all it can right now so that parties serving hatred don’t get larger audiences. A country always gains by having two national parties, both committed to democracy and competing to attract the median voter. If the government is committed to ensure justice for all, there won’t be any need for regional parties, nor can any such parties survive anyway.
(The writer is affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley.)-Post
Related News
(Digg)
(Technorati)
(Blinklists)
(Del.icio.us)
Print 
RSS 
Comments(0)
