As political leaders and others deliberate on the names and numbers of provinces for a federal Nepal and others alike decide on bandas to counteract the proposals, what seems to have escaped the mind of many is a vision of Nepal as a ‘multicultural’ state. Considering the demographic reality of the country, the Interim Constitution has already declared Nepal a “multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious, and multi-cultural” state, but this concept
of a Nepali state that is encapsulated by the term ‘multiculturalism’ seems to be missing from the current debate.
As I write this, I am reminded of a very insightful article by Mohana Ansari, member of the National Women’s Commission, published a few months ago in Kantipur, arguing that lack of awareness about the value of educating children is no longer a concern amongst Muslims in Nepal. However, the main reason young Muslim girls are reluctant to attend schools at higher levels is the requirement to wear uniforms consisting of short skirts, particularly when they reach secondary and higher secondary levels.
One might wonder what short skirts have to do with federalism, or multi-culturalism, for that matter. But, as Ansari writes, the principals of the schools in Biratnagar, Itahari and other areas where the population of Muslims is not insignificant, have said firmly that bending the rules for the sake of any community is not possible.
If we cannot recognise the cultural differences of social groups in democratic societies such as ours, then what are we heading towards? Multiculturalism, state restructuring, federalism, these might mean many things to many people, but the basic tenet needs to be that in
democratic societies, different groups should be entitled not only to non-discrimination and inclusion in the economic and political domains of the state, but also to some form of public recognition of their differences.
‘Multiculturalism’ as a state policy was gradually adopted in countries like Canada and the UK in the 1970s and became popular in the late 1990s even in countries like France and Australia. For these countries, multiculturalism was a strategy to define the relationships between immigrant groups and thehost society. More specifically, as political theorist Harihar Bhattacharyya reminds us, the discourse of multiculturalism in these Western states have been taking place in the context of them already having evolved as culturally more or less homogenous nation-states that now have to accommodate and incorporate their minority groups into a dominant national ethos of liberal democracy.
That the issue to be addressed in these countries related primarily to recent arrivals, such as North Africans in France and migrants from its former colonies in Britain, is in sharp contrast to countries like Nepal or even India, which have always been multicultural societies. What we are hence confronted with here in Nepal is the need to incorporate its diverse citizenry as an integral part of its national polity.
To this effect, the nature of engagement required of the Nepali state, vis-à-vis its minority groups like the Muslims, is completely different from that of the Western states. In these countries, it might suffice to accommodate the religious needs of its immigrant Muslim
communities such as by organising cultural fairs, making available burial sites, prayer spaces, granting permission to construct mosques, and so on. But after events such as the London train bombings of 2005 and the riots later that year in France, these states also had the option
of rethinking the whole concept of multiculturalism.
That is at the heart of the debate on head scarves in France, which led former president Nikolas Sarkozy to declare that multiculturalism has failed “because some were more concerned with the identity of immigrants who were arriving, while they didn’t care enough for the identity of their host country.”
Sarkozy went on to say: “It can only be a French Islam, and not an Islam in France.” But the nature of policy interventions required in countries like Nepal would be completely different. Taking the example of Muslims one more time, although there might be Muslims who are recent immigrants, many Muslims have been living in Nepal even before the creation of the state itself, while others came with the territory when the four districts of Naya Muluk were ‘gifted’ to Nepal in 1860. In that sense, the Muslims of Nepal are not newcomers and are as Nepali as any other community living here. What we thus require are a set of political and
institutional measures that would ensure accommodation of the country’s diversity while also addressing the issue of exclusion of marginalised groups in the country’s political and economic domains.
In the context of today’s Nepal, federalism is viewed as a means to achieve self-determination for socially excluded groups. But self-determination by one group cannot be at the cost of any other, whether dominant or excluded. That exercise of self-determination by everyone is possible only when multiculturalism is allowed space to grow in all spheres of life. In other words, the ideal of multiculturalism should allow the notion of individual citizenship and the rights inherent therein to harmonise with the ethos of different socio-cultural communities.
In the short skirt example, this would mean respecting the cultural norms of Muslims and allowing girls from that community to wear a different outfit to school, or changing the school uniform entirely to make it acceptable to them. It definitely does not consist of refusing
outright to accommodate the requests of teenaged Muslim girls and their parents, thus denying one of the most deprived groups of Nepali society its right to education. Had the essence of multiculturalism been understood and embraced by our society, the approach of these schools would have definitely been different.
The Interim Constitution acknowledges Nepal’s demographic reality by at least defining Nepal as a multicultural state, but unless concrete measures are taken to provide recognition of social diversity, the ideal of multiculturalism is likely to be no more that mirage.
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