The Double Life of Development: Peasants, Agrarian Livelihoods, and the Prehistory of Nepal's Maoist Revolution a DISSERTATION
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The Double Life of Development: Peasants, Agrarian Livelihoods, and the Prehistory of Nepal’s Maoist Revolution A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Dinesh Paudel IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Vinay Gidwani and Abdi Samatar October 2012 © Dinesh Paudel 2012 Acknowledgements This dissertation is the cumulative outcome of the efforts of many individuals, institutions and communities. Any attempt to list them all — let alone offer sufficient appreciation and acknowledgment — will remain incomplete. I am forever indebted to them for their constant and transformative inspiration and intellectual and moral support, which made this work possible. The formality of “Acknowledgements” does not really capture and leaves far too understated my appreciation to my advisors Vinay Gidwani and Abdi Samatar for their tireless intellectual guidance, inspiration, patience, critical insights and unconditional support over the last five years. I have been privileged to learn from their academic acumen and commitment to change. Their incisive comments and thorough engagements in various stages of my research have taught me nuanced ways of approaching political praxis, geography and development. My sincere gratitude to them for their help in shaping my academic path and ways of thinking about the world that I hope to carry with me into my future endeavors. Likewise, I am indebted and grateful to Eric Sheppard and Dean Current, who served on my committee and also remained a special source of intellectual inspiration and academic support in my research. Their ideas are imprinted in this dissertation. I feel particularly fortunate to have worked with many scholars at the University of Minnesota. I want especially to acknowledge the scholarly support and encouragement provided by Helga Leitner, Bruce Braun, George Henderson, Katherine Klink, Ajay Skaria, Richa Nagar, Rachel Schurman, David Faust, Michael Goldman and Dennis Baker. The most exciting part of my dissertation writing was working, sharing and collaborating with fellow graduate students at the University of Minnesota. I am especially thankful to Omar Tesdell, Basil Mahayni, Chris Strunk, Ursula Lang, Ivan Biolostosky, Sian Butcher, Noah Ebner, Ilona Moore, Renata Bloomberg, Bill Lindeke, Tim Curry, Marvin Taylor, Jerry Shannon, Elizabeth Tesdell, Lalit Batra and Pushpa Ghimire. I am grateful to Bonnie Williams, Jody Larson and Glen Powell for their friendly administrative support in the Department of Geography. Perhaps acknowledgements mean nothing or are undesirable, but my dissertation project would not have been possible without the support and care of the peasants of Thabang Village in the Rapti region of Nepal. Their enlightening history of struggles, passion for change and unconditional acceptance of my presence not only made this research possible by providing “information” but most importantly offered an intellectual break in the conventional understanding of peasants politics. I owe a tremendous, immeasurable debt to people living in Thabang and other areas of the Rapti region. I sincerely want to thank Chadra Barme, Roshan Chaudhari, Punita Chaudhari, Samjhana Gharti Magar, Santosh Budha, Burman Budha and Purna Bahadur Roka for assisting me during my research in the Rapti region. Similarly, Andrea Nightingale, Bharat Pokharel, Michael Nurse, Brieke Steenhof and Jane Carter were a tremendous help at the initial stage of this research project. Thanks to Govinda Paudel, Dil Bahadur Khatri, Ganesh Paudel, i Stephanie DeMoss, Patrick Robinson, Silvia Lafranchi and many others who supported this research in various ways. The research for this dissertation was made possible by the financial support of a Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC) International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF), a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Minnesota and other fellowships and financial support from the Department of Geography and the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota. I am grateful to the Department of Geography at the University of Minnesota for giving me the chance to take this intellectual journey and providing me an opportunity to learn from inspiring scholars. Several national organizations and community groups in Nepal provided logistical and other support. I would like to acknowledge the support provided by Nepal Swiss Community Forestry Project, Livelihoods and Forestry Program and Forest Action Nepal during the various stages of this research. Despite everyday odds and struggles, my parents created the conditions of possibility for this research. They thought that a modern education would make me a good person and give me more options in life. The abstract ideas presented in this dissertation may not make much sense to their everyday struggles, but they are proud of what I have done. It is to my parents that I dedicate this piece of work. My brother, sisters and other family members took on many burdens in Nepal to free me for this research project. Finally, without the love and support of my wife, Sujata Paudel, and the patience and curiosity of our daughters, Apurba Paudel and Ashika Paudel, this dissertation would have been impossible. ii Abstract This dissertation explores the relationship between the long history of developmental interventions and peasant rebellions in Nepal by drawing on ethnographic inquiries of a pre-history of Nepal’s Maoist revolution of the 1990s. Specifically, it interrogates the transformations generated by the Rapti Integrated Development Project (RIDP) in peasants’ moral economy, ecological processes, appropriation of the commons and peasants’ consciousness, and their role in creating the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the Maoist revolution in Nepal. Various developmental schemes successfully enrolled rural villages into development projects, ostensibly to contain an upsurge in rebellious sentiments. Ironically, these same subjects of development later became the backbone of the Maoist rebellion and were instrumental in spreading the armed revolt against the state throughout Nepal. The Rapti region was hailed as a model of success for agrarian development in one era and the locus of the peasant-led Maoist revolution in another. The main question asked in this research was why the Maoist revolution emerged from the Rapti area of Nepal despite the long history of development in the region. My main argument in this dissertation is that development involves simultaneous processes of enrollment and othering of subaltern subjects, which I call development’s “double life”. This is central to how we understand the relationship between development and rebellion in the global South. Developmental conditions are reproduced through hegemonic ideas and practices, and it normalizes certain kinds of knowledge and subject positions, aside from producing economic domination, vulnerability and scarcity. At the same time, development carries the potential to incite political awareness among marginalized groups that can result in a willingness to rebel at the individual level and to engage in collective defiance or revolt. Conceptual and empirical contradictions inherent to development generate such possibilities in particular times and spaces. In peasant society, the enrollment and othering of subaltern subjects are manifested in everyday livelihood practices, in historically evolved metabolic interactions with nature, and in the transformation of individual and collective subjectivities and consciousness. This dissertation demonstrates that the organic intellectuals and activists can articulate these processes of enrollment and othering, reproduced in development, to generate a new commonsense, instigating rebellious consciousness and transformative possibilities. iii Table of Contents List of Tables v List of Figures vi Preface vii Chapter One: Introduction – The Double Life of Development: Enrollment and Othering 1 Chapter Two: Seeds of Rebellion: Peasant Moral Economy and Agrarian Change 53 Chapter Three: Political Nature and Subalternity 99 Chapter Four: Re-inventing the Commons: Capital, Community and Collective Potential 143 Chapter Five: Politics of Empowerment 184 Chapter Six: Conclusion 232 References 241 iv List of Tables Table-1: Local employment generated by the activities of the RIDP (1981-1986) 78 Table 2: History of ecological events and their social relations in the Rapti region 135 Table 3: Major political events and developmental articulation in Nepal 207 Table 4: Training provided by RIDP to development professionals (1981-1986) 217 Table 5: Training provided by RIDP in the Rapti region (1981-1986) 218 v List of Figures Figure 1: The Rapti region, Nepal 6 Figure 2: A Cluster of houses in Thabang Village 70 Figure 3: Map of the Rapti Watershed 103 Figure 4: Hemp and corn farming in Thabang 132 Figure 5: Distribution of benefits from timber commercialization in Dang 172 Figure 6: Timber transportation from a community forest in Dang 178 vi Preface The Maoist revolution of Nepal has now receded into the past, leaving fragmented memories and fractured hopes of transformation. The ideological hegemony of Maoism and the historically developed “rebellious bloc,” which successfully led a decade-long revolutionary uprising in Nepal in the 1990s, began to crumble as soon as the Maoist party entered into a peace agreement and electoral politics in 2006. With the arrival of the Maoists in Kathmandu in