Nepal: Bhattarai's bureaucrats undermining inclusive development
Nepal can neither be just, peaceful nor fully democratic unless the aspirations of the marginalised groups are addressed. Instead, they are seeking to reverse even the existing achievements. This is counter-revolution—quiet, insidious, and invisible... The most striking thing is that these interventions have happened under this political dispensation... Nothing can be more ironical than a Maoist-Madhesi government denying the use of the term “structural discrimination”.
For the past year-and-half, the UN system has been collaborating with the National Planning Commission (NPC) to frame the UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) for 2013-17. This document will guide the work of all UN agencies in the country; it will determine their priorities, budgetary allocations, and the agenda. UNDAF will also end up influencing other development agencies, many of whom are making their own medium-term plans. Given Nepal’s overwhelming dependence on donors—70 percent of the development budget comes from them—their importance cannot be under-estimated.
The first meeting of a joint government-UN steering committee on UNDAF was held in August 2011. They together identified eight core priority areas; both the UN and the government appointed individuals to work together on each of these issues. Regional consultations were also held with a wide range of stakeholders, including government. Three drafts of UNDAF were circulated in the joint meetings—the third in April-end this year—which the NPC also passed on to other line ministries, and there was a broad agreement. When the final draft was presented in June, foreign ministry bureaucrats are learnt to have raised some new objections. Then, on July 4, the NPC threw a bombshell at the UN. It backtracked from previous understandings and proposed major revisions in UNDAF’s aims, outcome, strategies and implementation. The UN was also handed over the UNDAF document with the government’s track changes.
This writer has obtained a copy of UNDAF, with the government’s track changes. And it is proof of the backlash by the Bahun-led conservative bureaucracy on issues of inclusion and marginalised groups. Take one example. The original text reads, “Empowering vulnerable groups and reducing discrimination based on gender, caste, religion, culture and language is a priority area…and is likely to remain so in successive government plans. ‘Ending discrimination based on class, ethnicity, language, gender, culture, religion and region and addressing the problems of women, Dalits, indigenous people, ethnic minority (Janajatis), Tarai communities (Madhesis), oppressed, neglected and minority communities & the backward areas’ are explicitly included in CPA (Comprehensive Peace Agreement) Art 3.5.”
The NPC and foreign ministry mandarins want the basis of discrimination—”gender, caste, religion, culture and language”—deleted. Even more revealingly, they have removed the “ethnic minority (Janajatis)” group from the CPA provision itself. Not only is this an effort to dilute the theoretical underpinning of discrimination, it subverts the peace agreement, especially with regard to Janajati groups. That it coincides with their rising assertion cannot just be a coincidence... Read more:
