The Double Life of Development: Peasants, Agrarian Livelihoods, and the Prehistory of Nepal's ...

275 Pages·2012·1.75 MB·English

by  Dinesh Paudel

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,
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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 2006, it seemed that the revolution had been achieved.
However, the revolutionary alliances built over time quickly started to unravel, making
visible differences between the aspirations of rural working classes and peasants and the
interests of the urban bourgeois party leadership. Urban business classes and techno-
bureaucratic intellectuals emerged as important sources of power in the newly emergent
national alliances. The intellectual and political thrust of these alliances coalesced around
the interests of national and international bourgeoisie, who reinvented the old explanation
about the Maoist revolution of the 1990s, recasting it once again as a ”developmental
problem” to be fixed by economic means.
Development reappeared as the force that would secure a durable peace in the
revolution’s aftermath, and the reinvented ideology of development conferred power and
legitimacy upon the interests of the middle classes and urban intellectuals. Soon, a
neoliberal agenda of economic reform and elite-centered, ethnic-identity politics took
precedence over the issues and concerns of peasants and marginalized communities. The
quick arrival of counterrevolutionary possibilities exacerbated factionalism and splits
within the Maoist party. Despite the fact that the Maoists remain in power, the desperate
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socioeconomic conditions that catalyzed the revolution in the 1990s are largely the same.
If we compare the contemporary scene with the prehistory of the Maoist uprising, the
conditions of possibility for another organized revolt are startlingly alive. But recovering
that heterogeneous prehistory, now in danger of being lost in the tumult of the revolution
and post-revolutionary era, may yet have salutary effects on how we understand the
promises and perils of the revolution and imagine future possibilities not only for Nepal
but for South Asia in general.
The dominant narrative so far has characterized Nepal’s Maoist revolution as an
unexpected rupture in history. The revolution was understood as a disjuncture in
mainstream politics on the subcontinent, even though it was one of the most powerful
rebel movements ever witnessed in South Asia. One cause of this hubris lies in the
paucity of scholarly analysis on how the Maoist movement emerged. What were its
historical conditions of possibility? The reasons for such oversight are no doubt manifold:
One is that the rapid spread of Maoism in the region was unthinkable until recently, given
the global defeat of communism, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
collapse of the Soviet Union. It was unimaginable also because an otherwise “natural”
ally, China, had devoted much of the last three decades to consolidating its status as one
of the most powerful capitalist states in the world. In fact, the Maoists in Nepal not only
upbraided their northern comrades for being revisionist and reactionary, but also openly
criticized them for building alliances with imperial states and western capital. In short,
what is remarkable about Nepal is that the ideology of the Maoist revolution entered
popular commonsense after the collapse of communist states and ideologies elsewhere in
the world.
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