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    The Partial Revolution: Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal
    The Partial Revolution: Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal
    The Partial Revolution: Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal
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    The Partial Revolution: Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal

    By Michael Hoffmann

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    Located in the far-western Tarai region of Nepal, Kailali has been the site of dynamic social and political change in recent history. The Partial Revolution examines Kailali in the aftermath of Nepal’s Maoist insurgency, critically examining the ways in which revolutionary political mobilization changes social relations—often unexpectedly clashing with the movement’s ideological goals. Focusing primarily on the end of Kailali’s feudal system of bonded labor, Hoffmann explores the connection between politics, labor, and Mao’s legacy, documenting the impact of changing political contexts on labor relations among former debt-bonded laborers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBerghahn Books
    Release dateJan 29, 2018
    ISBN9781785337819
    The Partial Revolution: Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal
    Author

    Michael Hoffmann

    Michael Hoffmann is a Research Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Regional Studies (ZIRS) at the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. Previously, he worked as a senior research fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin, as a post-doc fellow at the Institute for Cultural and Social Anthropology in Cologne and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany.

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      Book preview

      The Partial Revolution - Michael Hoffmann

      THE PARTIAL REVOLUTION

      DISLOCATIONS

      General Editors: August Carbonella, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Don Kalb, University of Utrecht & Central European University, Linda Green, University of Arizona

      The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neoliberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary frameworks, which reflect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged, ethnographically informed, and theoretically incisive responses.

      For a full volume listing, please see back matter

      THE PARTIAL REVOLUTION

      Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal

      Michael Hoffmann

      First published in 2018 by

      Berghahn Books

      www.berghahnbooks.com

      © 2018 Michael Hoffmann

      All rights reserved.

      Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      ISBN 978-1-78533-780-2 hardback

      ISBN 978-1-78533-781-9 ebook

      CONTENTS

      List of Tables

      Acknowledgements

      Note on Transliteration

      Introduction  The Maoist Victory Rally

      Part I. Politics in the Town

      Chapter 1       Urban Festivals and Post-Conflict Patronage

      Chapter 2       The Occupation of Symbolic Space in Town

      Chapter 3       Learning to Protest: The Freed Kamaiya Movement

      Chapter 4       Maoists and Labour Unions in Town

      Part II. Labour Relations in a Brick Factory in the Hinterland

      Chapter 5       Red Salute at Work in a Brick Factory

      Chapter 6       The Revolutionary Legacy and Debt Bondage

      Conclusion     The Partial Revolution

      Appendix

      Glossary

      Bibliography

      Index

      Photographs

      TABLES

      1.1     Caste/ethnicity in Tikapur

      2.1     Type of employment undertaken by freed Kamaiya in Ramnagar, May 2009

      6.1     Advances given to various categories of brick kiln workers

      6.2     Average wages for different jobs in Gokul’s brick factory

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      This book has taken a long time to write and I owe a lot of people a great deal of gratitude. My greatest debt is to the people of Tikapur and its surrounding villages, who welcomed me into their homes, invited me for a meal and sometimes even hosted me for a few nights, often at great personal expense. Without their help and patience in answering my questions, this book project would not have been possible. I sincerely hope that if anyone from Tikapur and its surrounding villages in Kailali district in far-western Nepal ever reads this book in the future, he or she will feel that I have done justice to the complexities of both the impact of the Maoist revolution and the transformation of bonded labour to new forms of labour relations in their area. I should also thank all those respected state bureaucrats, members of various political parties, labour unionists, labour contractors and local industrialists who received me and hosted me.

      To respect my informants’ privacy, settlement names have been changed throughout the book and all personal names have been turned into pseudonyms apart from those of well-known public figures. I have called the ex-bonded labourers’ settlement where I spent most of my time ‘Ramnagar’, which is literally ‘Ram’s village’ in English – invoking a Hindu deity that is commonly associated with strength and braveness. This was done as many of the formerly bonded villages that I got to know over the years carry the names of powerful Hindu deities to indicate to outsiders the unity, strength and braveness of their communities.

      I am also deeply indebted to the various institutions that funded me during various stages of the research and writing of this book. Throughout my Ph.D. studies at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences I received a travel fund from the University of London and departmental grants from the Department of Anthropology to support my field research. I also received an Alfred Gell Memorial Scholarship from the Department of Anthropology and the Bagri Fellowship at the Asia Research Centre of the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. During my postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the Department of Social Anthropology and the Global South Studies Centre at the University of Cologne, I was generously funded, allowing me to proceed with the writing of this book. For all this financial and institutional support I am very grateful.

      I would additionally like to thank a number of people for their generous support in Nepal, the UK and Germany. I am particularly indebted to my Ph.D. supervisors Prof. Jonathan Parry and Prof. Laura Bear from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. Both have guided me through the process of preparing and writing a doctoral thesis with great skill. Their questions and comments on my work were always sharp and insightful. I would also like to thank Alpa Shah and Geert de Neve for reading and commenting on my work about western Nepal. Likewise, the comments of the anonymous reviewers at Berghahn Books helped me clarify some of the arguments presented in this book.

      Throughout the early stages of my work, I also benefited from the stimulating and fruitful discussions at the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences weekly ‘writing up’ class and the biweekly seminar series on ‘Ethnographic Perspectives on Work and Labour’. The many comments and suggestions offered on various chapters of this book have helped to sharpen its analytical focus and to enrich the writing process. For this I thank the seminar participants: Maxim Bolt, Thomas Boylston, Kimberley Chong, Alana Cant, Katherine Fueberg-Moe, Aude Michelet, Luca Pesc, Denis Regnier, Dave Robinson and Miranda Sheild Johanson.

      As I went on to postdoctoral studies I had the privilege to work in the research group ‘Industry and Inequality in Eurasia’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Here I met academic colleagues with whom I could engage in insightful discussions about my work on Kailali district in far-western Nepal and I benefited from frequent exchanges on our common interests in labour issues. Amongst others I would like to thank particularly Catherine Alexander, Dina Makram Eibeid, Chris Hann, Eva Kesküla, Dimitra Kofti, Andrew Sanchez, Christian Strümpel and Tommaso Trevisani for their comments and their reading of some of the work that this book is based upon.

      While there are more friends and colleagues in Nepal than can be named here, I would like to express my particular gratitude to Mr Uttam Adhikari, who provided much hospitality, humour and intellectual support while staying in Tikapur. A debt of gratitude is also owed to Mr Pushba Chaudhary for his extremely valuable help and enthusiasm while working as a research assistant throughout the main portion of fieldwork that this book is based upon. I also extend my thanks to Mr Kucchat Chaudhary, who worked with me as a research assistant on later field visits. Both of them have always been generous and unselfish collaborators and I always had very stimulating and insightful discussions with them throughout my time in Nepal.

      I am also deeply indebted for the many inspiring and stimulating discussions with friends both during and after my fieldwork in Nepal, and I owe them much for their hospitality and friendship: Nikhil Archaya, Eirini Avramopoulou, Thomas Boylston, Irene Calis, Giovanni Dascola, Ankur Datta, Tommaso Dolcetta, Cesar Estrella, Kiran Hacker, Safik Iraki, Leonidas Karakatsanis, Tobias Kecht, Nicolas Martin, Durlap Pun, Rocco Santangelo, George St. Claire, Hans Steinmüller and Thomas Rodgers. Finally, I would like to thank Kjersten Lato for her affectionate support and encouragement, and for her great interest into my work.

      NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

      The first instance of all Nepali, Hindi and Tharu words are italicized, and thereafter italics are dropped. For the sake of simplicity, the plural of Nepali, Hindi and Tharu words is denoted by the addition of an ‘s’. English translations have been used where they are adequate to convey the meaning of the originals.

      Financial costs are given in the original currency, either Nepali Rupees (NR) or Indian Rupees (IR). The exchange rates in 2008 and 2009 were approximately 1 Nepali Rupee to £0.008 (€0.0095) and 1 Indian Rupee to £0.013 (€0.015). Likewise, land area is given in Nepalese khatta, with one khatta being equal to approximately 339 square miles or 3,645 square feet.

      Nepal and Kailali district

      Tikapur and its rural hinterland

      INTRODUCTION

      The Maoist Victory Rally

      Two white jeeps appear on the horizon. As they slowly approach the city along the dusty road, two figures standing on their decks become visible, recognizable as the popular local UCPN Maoist politicians Rulpa Chaudhary and Saikdheja Chaudhary, both young women belonging to the Tharu ethnic group. They are followed by thousands of Maoist sympathizers, supporters and party cadres. While walking, cheering and dancing along, many hold aloft their Maoist flags and sing victory songs. The cavalcade moves along at a walking pace, stopping repeatedly as supporters reach out to shake the hands of the two politicians. The scene has the feeling of a heady celebration.

      It is mid April 2008, four days after the historic Constituent Assembly (CA) elections, and we are in Tikapur, an unremarkable town in Kailali district, in the western lowland region of Nepal. The election represented a major milestone in the political history of the country. After a decade-long civil war from 1996 to 2006 and two subsequent failed attempts to hold elections, this one was decisive. It would ultimately determine Nepal’s future constitution.

      Before the victorious candidates arrived in Tikapur, a large group of Maoist supporters gathered next to a square in the city centre. Among those waiting was Gunaraj Lohani, who led the Maoist All-Nepal Teacher’s Organization. The Maoist supporters cheered in eager anticipation of the arrival of the victors and threw red vermillion powder onto Lohani to bless him. Within the crowd were other familiar faces, leaders of the local slum-like settlements of Ramnagar and Ganeshnagar, which were inhabited by Mukta Kamaiya (freed bonded labourers).

      This book focuses on these individuals, who, until the Nepali government put an end to the practice in 2000, served as Kamaiya (debt-bonded labourers). The decision to abolish this system came after a decade of agitation by a host of nongovernmental organizations that together constituted the Kamaiya liberation movement. After the government resolved to end bonded labour in the western Terai region and threatened to fine landlords who retained such workers, many of the latter became free men and women overnight. They came to form a landless proletariat, a section of which would go on to organize a Kamaiya-led movement, the Mukta Kamaiya Samaj (Freed Bonded Labourers Society). Throughout the second half of the ‘people’s war’ between Maoists and the state, this movement captured public land in urban areas and in rural community forests in the western Terai (lowland) region. In Tikapur, a local airport, parts of the university campus and a high school compound were occupied and six settlements for ex-Kamaiyas, known locally as bastis (slums), were established.

      The freed Kamaiya had come to join the victory rally of the Maoists, though none of their leaders were members of the Maoist Party. All of them had been sympathetic to the Maoist cause, however, and particularly to the Maoist politician Rulpa Chaudhary’s idea to distribute five khatta (1,690 m²) of land to each freed Kamaiya household in the region. It was no surprise then that they had joined the victory rally and supported the Maoists. A few days before, following the elections, a freed Kamaiya had told me, ‘[e]ven though openly we [the freed Kamaiya] have no candidates, we all secretly support the Maobaadi (Maoist) Party’. I was eager to document this historic event by taking pictures of the Maoist caravan entering the city. Passing the heavily fortified outpost of the local armed police, a large crowd of a few thousand Maoist supporters entered the town. They cheered enthusiastically when they saw me, a foreigner, documenting their historic victory. The rally moved slowly in a circle through the town, passing the shopkeepers in the bazaars and the local municipality building. Alongside were many silent and curious inhabitants of Tikapur, observing the parade from outside their homes.

      The three local leaders of the Mukta Kamaiya, Jagdhish, Daniram and Bishnu Chaudhary, were standing on the roadside waiting to greet the Maoist politicians. Upon the procession’s arrival, ‘Jagdhish Sir’, as supporters in his settlement used to call him, walked over to the jeep and gave flower garlands and tikka to the two successful candidates. Rulpa and Saikdheja were from different social backgrounds. Mrs Rulpa Chaudhary, the local Maoist direct candidate, came from a so-called martyr family; her brother and father had been killed during the conflict by government security forces. Moreover, Rulpa’s husband was a senior PLA (People’s Liberation Army) commander at a camp about 15 km from the town. Saikdheja, meanwhile, had worked as a domestic child servant during her youth, and prior to her entry into the Maoist Party had served as an active member of the Mukta Kamaiya Samaj.

      The purpose of the UCPN (Maoist) rally was not only to celebrate their landslide victory in the election, but to also give a clear demonstration of their power in the local area. In this historic event, the former guerrilla-turned-electoral party demonstrated its ability to draw together a vast crowd of supporters, thereby flexing its political muscles in front of the urban middle classes.

      This book builds upon this observation and examines how political mobilizations and labour relationships are reshaped by armed revolutionary conflict, and how a feudal system of bonded labour is transformed into new forms of labour relations that involve neo-bondage. At the first level, the book is intended as a descriptive analysis of how the changing political context following Nepal’s Maoist revolution has affected political mobilizations and labour relations among former debt-bonded labourers (Kamaiya) in the urban municipality Tikapur in Kailali district in the far-western Terai region of the country. The first part of the book is concerned primarily with exploring how the Maoist attempt to capture state power at the local and the national levels altered forms of political expression and experience among former bonded labourers. The second part considers the new forms of labour regimes that have emerged out of the period of revolutionary change. The ‘red threat’ that runs through both parts of the book is a discussion of the everyday, indirect and in some ways invisible transformations that have been brought about by Maoist politics and presence in the rural lowlands of western Nepal.¹

      At a second level of analysis, this book is also the first major study of the end of a feudal system of bonded labour, the role of a revolutionary movement in that process and the transformation of that system into new forms of labour relations that involve neo-bondage. It focuses on how this transformation from bonded to new forms of labour relations is embedded in the wider revolutionary context. This is because the Maoist rebellion has helped to produce a young, mobile and urbanizing working class that feels increasingly secure in claiming new social spaces for its emerging pleasures, pastimes and practices vis-à-vis existing hierarchies and customs.

      In the following pages I begin by exploring how the Maoist attempt to capture state power has altered forms of political expression and the experiences of former bonded labourers and assess the new forms of labour regimes that have emerged out of the period of revolutionary change. The book’s main contention is that the Maoist attempt to capture state power has allowed former bonded labourers to experience greater inclusion in Nepal’s polity at the local and national levels and to mediate the new forms of unfree labour that have emerged during the reconstruction of the economy after the conflict. This is argued from two different ethnographic angles. The first part of the book provides an ethnographic description of different aspects of the political life of freed bonded labourers: their exposure to a new urban setting and the patronage of their former masters; the politics of community formation and local development in the neighbourhood; the contentious politics of the freed bonded labourers’ movement; and their engagement with local trade unions. The second part of this study explores the everyday politics of labour that freed Kamaiya are subjected to in a brick kiln on the town’s periphery. Here, I suggest that the contemporary post-conflict situation limits the brick kiln managers’ attempts to bind labour and structures the everyday politics of work in the brick factory.

      One of the central aims of what follows surrounds the question: ‘Did the Maoist revolution work?’ To what extent did the Maoist attempt to capture state power actually succeed in empowering the poor and working classes of Nepal’s society? One of the main contentions of this work is that the Maoist attempt to capture state power contributed significantly to the elimination of some of the worst evils of the old regime and continues to profoundly influence the lives of freed bonded labourers, albeit in unintended ways. The story told in this book is partly an upbeat one, partly a jeremiad. From a worm’s eye view in Kailali the Maoist revolution remains a partial revolution. But before elaborating on this argument in more detail, the next sections will introduce the more general context of Nepal’s Maoist revolution and the ways in which anthropologists have approached it so far.

      A Brief History of the Nepali Maoist Revolution

      By launching its jana yudha (people’s war) on 13 February 1996, the Nepal Maoist movement entered a violent armed conflict with the state’s security forces that lasted nearly a decade.² Their principal revolutionary goal had been to overthrow the old state power and construct a new state (CPN 2004: 154). According to their long-term vision, this naya Nepal (new Nepal) would eventually lead to the formation of a naulo janbad (new people’s democracy), one that would be based, in the words of its party chairman, Pushba Kamal Dahal (aka Prachanda), on a ‘true multiparty democracy’ (Hoftun, Raeper and Whelpton 1999; International Crisis Group (ICG) 2005: 2).

      Exploiting power vacuums mainly in the western highland districts of Rolpa and Rukkum, the movement began to establish itself as a revolutionary force through attacks on local police stations and the extrajudicial killing of enemies. As Ogura (2007: 336) reports for both districts, the ‘strategy of attacking police stations in the villages … was successful since almost all the police posts except that in the district headquarters had been evacuated by the middle of 2002. In the absence of any state authority, the Maoists were easily able to establish their rule over the people’.

      This centring of their activities in the western highland areas led many commentators to initially dismiss the movement as a minor communist splinter group capable of little more than spreading unrest in remote mountainous areas (see ICG 2005). In fact, the Nepali state tended to downplay the movement as a ‘law and order problem’ (Shah and Pettigrew 2009), which certainly facilitated its rapid expansion across the country. In addition, their targeting of exploitative money lenders and landlords, their attempts to curb domestic violence and their introduction of campaigns against alcohol abuse helped the movement gain popularity (ICG 2005: 15). These early efforts were soon complemented by other campaigns; the Maoists began to draw heavily on caste and ethnic issues to garner support and even lobbied against the high tuition fees in private schools to gain the backing of the middle classes. This strategy proved successful, as reports from the ICG suggest that at the end of the conflict, the Maoists had an astonishing support base of around fourteen thousand political workers and one hundred thousand supporters (ICG 2005).

      In military terms, the movement first drew on Mao’s concept of a ‘protracted People’s War’, achieved by encircling towns from the rural areas (ICG 2005: 21). This meant that the movement fought its battles mainly in the villages and the countryside and only occasionally came into the towns. The strategy worked for a while, mainly because the Maoists were initially fighting against a poorly equipped local police force. However, after their second national convention in February 2001, the movement changed tactics. The revolutionaries announced they would follow the new ‘Prachanda Path’, which essentially meant that they decided to come into power and also embrace capitalist development. The new ideology required the complementing of rural revolution with a ‘people’s rebellion’ in the city, as well as the development of nonviolent forces ‘to make continuous interventions in national politics, to use fraternal organisations to carry out strikes and street demonstrations, to foment revolt within the RNA and to seek to polarise sympathetic and opposed political forces’ (ICG 2005: 14).

      As many human rights organizations have documented, after the first ceasefire ended in November 2001, the Maoists began to confront the Royal Nepali Army and claimed to have reached a stage of ‘strategic balance’ in their revolutionary process. According to their estimations this meant that the state’s influence had been significantly weakened and their own regime had turned into a viable alternative. Multiple and simultaneous attacks followed, including assaults on army barracks. The fighting increased significantly and peaked when the state reacted by declaring a state of emergency. In 2004 the Maoists released a press statement declaring that they had successfully established ‘base areas’ that, according to reports, included the western highland districts of Rukkum, Rolpa, Salyan, Jajarkot, Kalikot and Phutan. Though Prachanda declared in a press interview that ‘all rural Nepal had become a Yenan’, my ethnographic material will suggest that Kailali was less a base area than a ‘guerrilla area’ ‘where Maoists and the State are in constant flux’ (ibid.: 25).

      After the second ceasefire collapsed, the conflict escalated further. With support in the form of weapons and military training from the US, India, the UK and Belgium, the state began to crack down heavily on Maoist guerrilla squads, while the Maoists retaliated with heavy attacks on the district headquarters of Bhojpur and Beni in March and April 2004.³ On 31 August the Maoists entered into their ‘third’ and final stage of the revolution: ‘the strategic offensive’. Heavy fighting continued, but the conflict ended only in November 2006, when the Maoists and the Nepali state signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. This essentially meant the end of the insurgency period that had resulted in the deaths of more than 13,000 people, the widespread use of torture, the displacement of approximately 200,000 people, the conscription of about 4,500 child soldiers⁴ and the disappearance of 1,619 ordinary citizens whose fate remains largely unknown to this day (Human Rights Watch 2007; OHCHR 2012; Pettigrew 2013: 13).

      After the conflict officially ended in 2006, the Maoist guerrilla movement turned into a political party. Their armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army, was confined in central cantonments (each with three satellite camps) in seven districts of the country, and their weapons were monitored by United Missions in Nepal (UNMIN). Out of the 30,000 self-declared PLA soldiers who entered the UN-controlled cantonments, 19,602 were subsequently verified as fighters by the United Nations (Pettigrew 2013: 15). In popular media the Maoists were criticized for doubling the number of PLA soldiers before entering the camps and also charged for removing PLA leaders to strengthen their paramilitary-like youth organization, the Young Communist League (YCL) (ibid.: 15).

      In the following elections for the Constituent Assembly held in April 2008, the Maoists managed to secure 220 out of 601 seats and formed the largest political party in the Assembly. One of their first actions in this new political arena was to press for the end of monarchy and in May 2008 the country became a Federal Republic. In August 2008, the Maoist leader Prachanda formed a new coalition government and became the new Prime Minister of Nepal. He resigned, however, only eight months later after a dispute with the president of the Constituent Assembly over the rejection of the cabinet’s decision to sack the chief of the army.

      After Prachanda’s resignation the government became unstable. First, a UML (United Marxist Leninist) leader became Prime Minister but resigned in June 2010. Then the country was without a Prime Minister for seven months until

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