Beneath the enigma

AUG 12 -

India is an enigma, a subject of both love and hate in Nepal. It routinely meddles in our internal affairs. Kathmandu’s print and audio-visual media are replete with Sukh Dev Muni’s bean-spilling and its aftermath. To the dismay of staunch nationalists, blessings from India have transparently become a precondition for access to Kathmandu’s seats of power. “Pilgrimage” to Delhi durbars has become a routine affair for our political operators. Evidently, ordinary citizens have absolutely no clue as to what deals are struck behind the dark corridors of power. Do we know what actually transpired between UML’s KP Oli and newly elected president of India Pranab Mukharjee? Quite often, India has become an easy excuse for the ineptitude of Nepali political operators themselves.

India is also a subject of immense expectations. This feeling cuts across left to right of the political spectrum. As one of the two rising Asian giants, it is our potentially big market or great saviour in time of need. It is growing, although as of this writing it is going through a severe industrial slump and debilitating drought in much of its prime farming areas. Many in Nepal have no doubt that its rising middle class, if tapped well, can provide immense cash-potentials for Nepal’s producers, except we do not yet know what exactly Nepal is to export to India.

More importantly, what is utterly missing in these bland assertions are facets of India that do not fit into these rival narratives, but are important for building a just, democratic and ecologically sustainable Nepal. The mainstream media selectively omits the unsavoury truths that do not fit the India-rising storyline.

The hype about India-rising aside, 70 percent of Indians earn less than 20 rupees a day, according to a committee formed by the Government of India under the leadership of economist Arjun Sengupta. In a context of privatised health care, this is one illness away from abject penury for over 800 million people. Much of industrial progress is done with immense cost to both ecology and powerless citizens. Rivers have become toxic dumps. In a recent Amir Khan’s Satyamev Jayate, Manoj Mishra, an Indian activist working on reviving the health of Yamuna River, said that most of lower sections of Ganga and Yamuna are nothing but sewer. There is no life in them. It is a different matter that millions take holy dips in them. South Asians are too spiritual to pay attention to the material reality of the rivers, perhaps.

Across the major states, ground water is depleting at alarming rates, with Panjab and Hariyana, the epicentre of “agricultural progress”, leading the way. Almost all the emerging urban areas—big or small—are becoming increasingly unhealthy. The inequality between citizens is starkly inscribed in the gated world of the rich and the world of penury that exists outside it. Violence against ordinary citizens has become an accepted cost for this progress. Let’s accept that there lies something unsavoury beneath the hype. We can learn what not to do from them.

There is another side of India we often do not hear about. In Andhra Pradesh, over 1.5 million farming families have switched from high-poison agriculture to what they call non-pesticide management (NPM). I have written about some aspects of this great transformation in some of my earlier columns. This is rapidly spreading beyond the Andhra border. Sikkim state has declared it will ensure its agriculture is free of poisons by 2015. Many in Nepal may not know this, but some Nepalis have lent their expertise in this process.

Across different parts of India, novel water management systems have both conserved existing water bodies as well as revitalised the lost ones. In Rajasthan, for instance, Tarun Bharat Sangh led campaigns to build rainwater harvesting structures over the last several decades. The result: several rivers that had gone completely dry have started flowing again.

These are just a few among the tens of thousands of initiatives that we can learn from. This requires a different level of exchange than is currently dominant between these two countries. Kathmandu’s politicians take with them their fellow elites when they go on official visits to India only to meet their counterparts: the Delhi political class and its own elites.

A little over 60 percent of Indians are farmers—most of them smallholder. Roughly 70 percent of Nepalis also farmers, 90 percent of whom own less than one hectare of land. Millions of these farmers are creating vibrant, bio-diverse productive farming practices. They produce much of the food we eat. They vote their respective representatives during elections. Have you seen any farmer in the team that politicians take with them during official and non-official visits across these countries? The answer is a flat no. While this absence is viewed as normal, perhaps we must reassess the goals we want to achieve through diplomatic meetings in order to build a better, more sustainable future for both India and Nepal.

anilbhattarai@gmail.com

Source: http://www.ekantipur.com/2012/08/12/oped/beneath-the-enigma/358625/