Development critique: From evil state to civil society

The last two decades have seen the proliferation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) across the underdeveloped world. Since the development enterprise involves the exclusion of the third world masses, civil society's inclusion takes the form of partnerships with NGOs as "apolitical" and "responsible" representatives of disenfranchised people. In many small countries, they have, as "genuine reprsentatives" of civil society, acquired a quasi autonomous status, the larger among them being treated practically on par with the state, particularly by multilateral aid organisations. It is only recently that the activities of these development organisations have attracted critical scrutiny, and some of these studies see NGOs as purveyors of donor country agendas and various other formulae that pass by the name of international consensus. The historian, Akira Iriye, for instance, argues that more than any other US enterprise in the 20th century, NGOs have shaped the "American Century" by transporting the core American values of association, civic culture and democracy to the rest of the world. While Iriye's conclusions on the origins and forms of NGOs are debatable, his recognition of the growing significance of NGOs in modulating the North-South relations is incontestable. NGOs have become crucial agents in sustaining the rhetoric on democracy, development, civil society, human rights and good governance around the world. These dominant discourses become powerful lubricants facilitating the day-to-day interaction between the donors and the recipients.

Nepal's own experience and transformation in the past decades is intelligible only against the backdrop of this transnational flow of ideas and agendas.

Government and the non-government

As in many third world countries, the relationsip between the Nepali state and NGOs is often uneasy and contentious. The tension emerges primarily from the fact that both the government and the non-government sectors often compete with the same donors for funds. Having been the sole conduit for Western development aid until the relatively recent advent of NGOs, the government sees the latter as a rival in times of shrinking resources. The growing trend among donor countries to channel development funds through NGOs, coupled with the numerous structural adjustment requirements of the Fund-Bank, has led to a scaling down or even complete termination of many government-run services and programmes, even as NGO operations are on the rise.

It is misleading to think of the structure of NGOs and their mode of functioning as being very different from the large centralised and routinised structure of state. Given the growing ability of the NGOs to plan, generate data, create subjectivities and produce other state-like effects in the "Age of Globalisation", anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, argues that NGOs and multilateral organisations are "state-like institutions". The NGO world is an alternative bureaucracy with its own hierarchies structured along the lines of nationality, class, gender, caste and race. Janus-faced, the non-government mimics rather than denies the government.

Even as NGOs in Nepal have imbibed the quintessential 'jagiray' (a typical government employee mindset) attitude and adopted the hierarchy, bureaucracy and power structure of the government, civil servants have begun aspiring to the higher pay and perks of the NGO sector. The significant differences in remunerations and resources available to development NGO employees has been a cause of envy and resentment among government employees. Ironically, as NGOs come to resemble and behave like government bureaucracies, the strident calls for a rollback of the state and the end of state sovereignty have become familiar, both as observations of facts and moral imperative in the interconnected discourses of free market, NGOs and globalisation.

However, the hasty announcement of the economic and political obsoleteness of the nation-state obscures the fact that "globalisation" is a highly discriminating historical process that rewards some regions at the cost of others. The false equivalence implied in the celebration of globalisation masks the cold reality. Whereas many third world states have seen a rapid decline in autonomy, other states have accumulated the sovereign surplus to the extent that destinies of other nations can still be unilaterally effected. Despite the various promises of globalisation, international civil society, peace dividends and the new world order, the basic imbalances of interstate relations and possibilities have hardly altered since the end of the cold war.

During the Panchayat period some degree of regulation and supervision was maintained by the Nepali state over NGOs through the office known as the Social Services National Coordination Council (SSNCC). With the advent of the multiparty system in 1990, however, NGOs have been deregulated and the purview of SSNCC (now known as the Social Service Council) much reduced. While NGOs managed to free their operations from local authority following the 1990 political changes, their dependence on donors states for programmes and funding remains intact. Even radical advocates of NGO autonomy have tended to ignore this vital contradiction.

While civil servants resent the impunity with which NGOs can today operate largely outside of state purview, the NGO world has its own list of complaints against the Nepali government, ranging from inefficiency to corruption. A degree of malevolence may also be attributed to the political and therefore biased state when it opposes the supposedly apolitical and neutral NGOs and "civil society". In the words of anthropologist William Fisher, NGOs are idealised as "disinterested apolitical participants in a field of otherwise implicated players". Indeed, claims of efficiency and political neutrality constitute the moral high ground of NGO intervention. The underlying tension between the government and the development establishment was brought to the fore at the official celebration, held in January 2001, of the 50th anniversary of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) involvement in Nepal. At the function attended by late King Birendra and the prime minister, the US ambassador thought fit to admonish the government and political parties to deliver on democracy, facilitate development, and to end corruption and misgovernance. Despite the public furore kicked up by what was seen as undue interference in Nepal's internal affairs, the government chose to maintain a diplomatic silence on the episode.

Through a choice of forum and form, the US envoy, in one speech, unified the ideologically powerful discourses of governance, development and democracy, leaving no sovereign space for a regime that depends on the West's democratic certification to sustain its own claims to rule. Earlier, in 2000, during a serious power tussle within the ruling Nepali Congress Party, the World Bank had expressed extreme "concern" when the elected prime minister changed his finance minister. Even though the government and the new finance minister reaffirmed their commitment to the ongoing economic reforms mandated by international financial institutions, the World Bank warned about the threat to the market economy from such a change in personnel. The Bank's intervention was locally interpreted as an attempt to strengthen one faction of the party against the other.

The two examples from Kathmandu illustrate the new fusion of diplomacy, democracy, development and civil society as a potent foreign policy instrument in managing the global South. The asymmetry of the global order creates an ironic third world condition where one takes one's ethics from the money-lender and democratic exhortations from the most undemocratic of institutions. These opportunities for intervention sustain historian Geir Laundestad's observation that the "American century" is basically an "empire by invitation". Many of these nation-states find themselves facing a novel assault from two inter-related global processes. The "globalisation" of capital, culture and politics chips away at the political, economic and cultural manoeuvrability of these governments, while NGOs and other non-state actors usurp the welfare and other service delivery functions of governments. Thus, traditional internal and external challenges facing vulnerable states such as Nepal are compounded now by new assaults.

Even though development NGOs are invariably presented as non-political, in reality they achieve a series of political effects in different spheres of society and government. The process of NGO development has the potential to undermine local regimes by creating alternative centres of resources and authority beyond the purview of the state. Nepali officials often complain of the lack of coordination between the government and various NGO programmes and within NGOs themselves as well. Charges of religious proselytisation under the pretext of development have also ruffled the sensibilities of a "Hindu state". NGO claims of efficiency and flexibility are beginning to be questioned on several counts. It is apparent that uncoordinated programmes from a multiplicity of actors often leads to duplication in some areas and a total absence elsewhere. A large part of the cost effectiveness and flexibility of NGO delivery rests on labour practices identified by geographer David Harvey with the dispersal of late capitalist production practices in the third world so as to maximise regional labour cost differentials. By hiring temporary, short-term and casual staff bereft of job security, pension or other benefits, employers can maintain a "lean and flexible" work force. Claims of NGO efficiency aside, serious cases of misappropriations – a practice usually associated with the government – have also been reported about the development establishment in Nepal' Auditor General's report.

The relationship of the NGOs with various political formations in Nepal is similarly complex. The Maoist guerrillas who have been waging a bloody campaign in the rural hinterland have on occasion accused the NGOs of working as imperialist stooges to divert the rural masses from real contradictions and struggles. In some areas, Maoists are said to have asked NGOs to hand over their budget to the party. On the other hand, parliamentary political parties engaged in electoral politics negotiate with NGOdom for resources, programmes and employment for their constituencies. As such, NGO pretensions of transcending politics and profit appear quite untenable.

NGO development, development NGO

One cannot talk about NGOs in Nepal outside of the development discourse: if one is the delivery, the other is the package. Hence the use of the term "development NGO". Under the tutelage of erstwhile colonial powers, development became the rallying cry of the modernising state in the 1950s and this project has ridden many horses to reach its yet elusive destination. After the experiment with and failures of various approaches, development NGOs were ushered into Nepal in the 1980s to deliver "development", thereby effectively ending state monopoly on development and external relations. The government and its opposition – the "non-government" – for the first time came to stand as structural equivalents in relation to global donors. It is this equivalence that provokes so much collusion and competition between the Nepali state and non-governmental organisations.

What started as an NGO trickle in the 1980s turned into a tide in the 1990s and later. The growth in the number of NGOs in Nepal has been phenomenal – over 11,000 NGOs had been registered by the year 2000 compared to only a few hundred that existed in 1990. NGOs have become so ubiquitous of late that their pervasiveness has become the other distinguishing feature of a third world condition where per capita NGO distribution is inversely related to per capita income. In the absence of an effective monitoring agency, it is impossible to estimate how much foreign money is injected into these NGOs and how that budget is spent. A rough estimate, however, is that NGO funding compares favourably with the government's annual budget of approximately USD one billion (roughly 50 percent of that budget is provided by foreign loans and assistance).

The exponential growth in the number of NGOs has been matched by the range of issues they are currently engaged in. They work not only in traditional sectors such as education, agriculture, irrigation, forestry, drinking water, health and nutrition but also in newer arenas like environment, income generation, gender mainstreaming, trafficking of women and girls, microcredit, democracy strengthening, human rights and AIDS. As the NGO system continuously reinvents itself to fit the ever fickle funding priorities of the donors, "civil society", "transparency" and "good governance" have become the cutting edge of NGO discourse since the late 1990s. The built-in obsolescence of the NGO mode of development has given rise to a unique form of development entrepreneurship that has to keep up with the shifting fads of funding.

Analytically and historically, the NGOs created or used by the development industry in Nepal must also be distinguished from the traditional community institutions such as guthi, parma, dhikur and non-profit organisations such as Paropakar Sanstha and other initiatives that mobilise resources and work for community improvement, service delivery and charity. Such efforts are motivated by a sense of community, self-help or the transcendental values of dharma. In the NGO­sponsored din of civil society, these sustainable roots of social engagements have largely been eclipsed in the public consciousness.

For every development NGO that is up and running, there are many others that are waiting in the wings with funding proposals meant for donor eyes. Some NGOs are situated at the local level, while others work at the district and regional levels, and still others straddle the national and the global as INGOs (international non-governmental organisations) based in the donor countries with branches and programmes in the developing world. It is the hierarchical chain that connects the recipient "youth club" in a remote Nepali village to Northern donor states through several layers of national and international interlocutors to reproduce one important facet of the "global civil society".

While recognising the difficulty of formulating a formal definition of an NGO, it is still possible to sketch the basic vector of NGO enterprise as a unique creation of the development industry's mediation with the third world. This (pre)condition of NGO engagement is a double-edged sword – while the linkage provides the knowledge claims and resources to act in this world, the action itself generates further dependencies that create a paradoxical subject position of agents without an agency.

Promise and performance

Popular assessment of the performance and contribution of NGOdom tends to be quite cynical in Nepal. Nevertheless, no public function is complete without the expression of faith and hope by politicians, civil society leaders, bureaucrats, donors and development practitioners on the role of the NGO sector in uplifting society and democratising the nation. How is one to make sense of this apparent contradiction? Even rural villagers who are often sceptical of NGO development often request researchers to "bring some NGOs" to help them out. One way to understand this apparent contradiction is to examine the two decades of NGO intervention in Nepal in terms of its proclaimed goals and unstated consequences.

Nepali society has imbibed and reworked the discourse of bikas – the Nepali-language equivalent of "development" – in more ways than is often recognised. In its evolving usage, this Nepali neologism also carries the sense of evolution, superiority, advancement, power and betterment. The polyvalent nature of bikas enables it to provoke a gamut of emotions, ranging from profound material aspirations to a warm and fuzzy sentimentality of neighbourhood upliftment to a sense of betrayed disillusionment with the powerful.

A case in point is the contemporary practice of naming children Bikas. Prior to the 1950s, there was hardly anybody with that proper name. Its addition to the Nepali cultural repertoire is indicative of Nepal's ambivalent encounter with development. First, Bikas as a name is given only to boys, even though grammatically bikas is a gender-neutral term. Naming a child involves the ultimate investment of desire and hope. Which begs the question, what sort of masculine inflections are present in development to cause bikas to be born only as a male child? Second, Bikas has tended to obliterate the particularity of Nepali middle names, which serve to qualify the first name. But those who christen their male progeny Bikas do not generally find it necessary to give them a middle name, as if subconsciously emphasising the point that "development" needs no further qualification.

In more material terms, it is conservatively estimated that between thirty and forty thousand people are employed in the NGO/development sector. In a country with massive unemployment as well as underemployment, this is by no means a minor contribution. In fact, if NGO and civil society funding was to suddenly dry up, it would cause serious economic and political crises. NGOs have become an alternative sector of employment for thousands of educated youths crowded out of the bloated civil service and anaemic economy.

The expansion of NGOs has directly and indirectly contributed to the emergence of new services and markets. One of the most notable of these spinoffs is the rise of "action research" firms and consultancies that cater to the NGO/development sector. Sociologist Gopal Singh Nepali observed a shift in the focus of social inquiry within Nepali social science from fundamental research to project application. Due to the prestige attached and – more importantly – higher remuneration, a significant number of academics and other professionals have been lured to work for NGOs and the development industry. Questions of merit and relevance aside, one cannot deny the phenomenal growth in the production of "Rapid Rural Appraisal" (RRA), "Participatory Rural Appraisal" (PRA) and various project-related feasibility, evaluation and follow-up studies from all corners of the country.

Since sociologists and anthropologists have for long been identified as development's cultural interlocutors, the prospects of development recruitment has fed an explosive growth in sociology and anthropology programmes in Nepal's colleges. At Tribhuvan University's Central Department of Sociology/Anthropology – established during the early 1980s, a period which roughly coincides with the early years of NGO proliferation in Nepal – the admissions pressure swelled to such an extent after 1994 that it led to campus riots. The demand was so high and the political pressure so strong that the university ended up opening several new MA programmes in Kathmandu in what by then had become the hottest discipline for university students, leaving earlier stars like economics and political science by the wayside. The new market and the intellectual climate have affected not only enrolment choices among students but also the course content. The department originally started out with a strong focus on general theory and research, with only a minor emphasis on development issues. The market demand has now tilted the curriculum's emphasis towards applied courses in rural development, project design, appraisal and management.

There are other consequences of the growth of the NGO-development economy such as in the hotelseminar industry. Organising conferences, workshops and other talk-shops – especially in hotels and their inhouse conference rooms and restaurants – is a phenomenon largely popularised by the development industry in Nepal. In the past few years, hospitality services targeted to NGO clientele and their budget have begun cropping up even in district headquarters and towns. In the public imagination, there is perhaps no more powerful an emblem of "development" than the shiny late-model four-wheel-drives in which development professionals ply themselves back and forth. These fuel-guzzling Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) are the defining signatures of the development establishment in Nepal and there is no sight more seducing than development's hot wheels cruising through Kathmandu's pedestrian alleyways. The large all-terrain vehicles were introduced and popularised by the development sector in the 1990s – ostensibly for use in the inhospitable hinterland but curiously seen mostly in the capital city. The development NGOs and donor agencies have been the ones to have introduced new tastes and high consumer aspirations among the upwardly mobile classes of the country. The shifting contour of taste and desire is in line with anthropologist Stacy Leigh Pigg's analysis of the development discourse in Nepal. Pigg wrote in 1992 in Society for Comparative Study of Society and History:

In daily life, bikas becomes the idiom through which the relationship between local communities and other places is expressed… bikas is quantifiable in this way because in common usage it connotes new things: new breeds of goats and chickens, water pipes, electricity, videos, schools, commercial fertilisers, roads, airplanes, health posts, and medicines. Bikas comes to local areas from elsewhere; it is not produced locally.

Such reorientation of time and place has been a significant part of the development enterprise in Nepal. This notion of dissolution and rearrangement of time and space is evident in the Nepali government's 1999 decision to change its office hours to nine-to-five from the earlier ten-to-five schedule, and the introduction of the five-day working week. The new timing was implemented in Kathmandu valley alone.

The fragmentation of the old rhythms and its reorganisation into market-centred work, leisure and consumption patterns go on simultaneously. The businesses and media have been quick to promote the weekend as ideal for recreation and leisure. Retailers report that the sale of liquor, beer, cigarettes and snacks, and renting of video cassettes shoots up during the weekend. The rapid growth of a new leisure economy in the valley over the past decade has also witnessed the rise of the "dance restaurant" phenomenon, where men can drink, eat and gaze at lightly clad girls performing raunchy numbers on brightly lit stages. There has been a rapid growth in the number of these soft-porn establishments that introduce the sexuality of young, out-of-town women to Kathmandu's emerging cosmopolitan commodity market.

The government has resisted calls to revert back to the old office schedule, reasoning that since all NGOs and development agencies stationed in the capital – usually referred to as "counterparts" – start work at nine the government must synchronise its own timing with their schedule.

The Bank, the casino and Mao

There is almost a poetic quality to the ethical disconnects between the social and material coordinates of the Western development establishment and its proclaimed constituency, the impoverished masses. The World Bank, the major driver in the global poverty alleviation mission and a major champion of the NGO mode of development, is ensconced in the regal wing of a premier luxury hotel-cum-casino complex in Kathmandu's most expensive neighbourhood. The absolute distance from local poverty could not be starker than in the seamless blending of the Bretton Woods institution with the ritzy hotel and casino. Physically and metaphorically, it is difficult to distinguish where the Bank begins and the opulence and decadence of the casino ends. The inability of the "development set" to find something amiss in this breathtakingly tragic juxtaposition says it all.

Compared to the impressive results in the creation of new employment, services, economies and tastes, the manifest goals of development NGOs, with a few exceptions in community forestry and public health, have been mostly paltry. There has been no significant improvement in the fortunes of the majority of poor rural dwellers who officially continue to constitute development's "target group". If anything, the target base is getting larger with the gap between the small affluent class and the masses widening further as more and more people sink below the poverty line. It is as if the concerted global assault on poverty has taken the poor as collateral damage: a staggering 71 percent of the 23 million Nepalis live under the poverty line, which is defined as an annual income less than USD 150.

The degree of disillusionment comes partly from the way development advertises itself as the cure-all for the third world. Given the inherent contradictions and limitations of the development project it is too much to expect the development NGO band-aid to cure the economic, political and cultural ravages of the world systems and comprador collusions. In some ways, development efforts are an eerie throwback to the poorhouses, orphanages and soup kitchens of the Dickensian era: services intended to address the worst abuses of bare-knuckle capitalism and defuse urban disorder without having to rectify the processes that produce the injuries in the first place. The late capitalist order also finds itself in the same position of having to pursue similar fire-fighting gestures in the global village to normalise itself

Urgencies of this sort prompted the World Bank to chart a strategic shift from the infrastructure and growth-oriented development to poverty alleviation under the leadership of Robert McNamara, the US secretary of defence under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who obviously understood the dangers of rural radicalisation from his leadership during the Vietnam war. In this sense, development, like other allied narratives of civilisation, enlightenment and democracy, can be seen, to borrow Ranajit Guha's inimitable phrase, as a "prose of counter-insurgency". While the possibility of rural radicalisation has generally receded for the world as a whole following the end of the cold war (a historic understatement, it was anything but a "cold war" for millions of people in the third world who felt its heat in more ways than one), the red spectre has raised its head with a vengeance in Nepal. This is development's double jeopardy in Nepal: neither an alleviation of poverty nor a forestalling of rebellion. As a consequence, the Nepali state now totters between being a "soft state" and a "failed state".

The revolutionary ideology of Maoism comes to Nepal through a rather circuitous route. Essentially the historically contingent blending of Marxism to specific Chinese conditions, Maoism as praxis is currently being promoted in different parts of the world, including Nepal, by the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) centred in the West with support nodes mainly in South Asia and Latin America. It is apparent that there are major historic and objective differences between the Nepali Maoists and Maoism, just as some discontinuity existed between Mao and Maoism. As another derivative discourse profoundly affecting Nepal, how will Maoism perform in Nepal in comparison to the earlier promises of democracy, development and market economy? History will probably be the judge, but until that time what is certain is that hundreds of thousands who had absolutely nothing to do with the present mess will pay dearly for the greed and hubris of a few unless the virtues of reason and compassion prevail.

As political entrepreneurs, the communist rebels have fully seized the opportunities created by a progressively enfeebled nation-state, a distorted development mission and an utterly corrupt democratic regime. Just a few short years ago it would have been impossible to imagine Nepal turning into a fiery cauldron of violence. Who could have foreseen the thousands of internal refugees piling up at district headquarters and tarai towns? It is as if in a nighmarish instant the enchanting hills and valleys of one's childhood have turned into killing fields where the peace, however imperfect, has been drowned by the tears and terror of widows and orphans.

The strains and stresses of the current war in Nepal have lifted the veil on many of the dominant claims and rhetoric. If the hapless casualties of the "people's war" expose the contradictions of the Maoist promise, the state's urban bias has also come to the fore as it takes charge of the towns and deserts the rural hinterland to the rebels. The Maoist war has been even more severe on those who have made careers out of nurturing the transplanted discourses of "human rights" and "civil society". These careerists, truly, are threatened with bankruptcy.

The general indifference displayed towards the summary intimidation, brutalisations and lynchings of the weak and the vulnerable in hinterlands is in stark contrast to the righteous indignation expressed when the urban intelligentsia – a constituent element of the new civil society – are caught in the fray. The selective engagement with partisan constituencies has eroded some of the credibility of the universal claims of human rights and civil society and left it exposed as another privileged discourse of a self-referential community. If the higher ideals of human rights are to have meaning and significance, then its moral compass must be broadened to empathise with all sections and classes and it must be willing to censure all life-negating deeds, whether it be of the market, political formations, transnational forces or the state. As has become amply clear, the state does not enjoy a monopoly on terror and violence any longer, if it ever did.

It is ironic that the current "people's war" should burn those at the bottom the most – the very constituency on whose behalf the war is supposedly being waged. Invariably the victims on both sides so far have been ordinary peasants, low-level policemen, rural teachers and average villagers whose deaths do not provoke national and international sympathy or condemnation. It is difficult to imagine how their alleged crimes will ever justify the revolutionary justice they were meted out. These lowly deaths augment the kill ratios without inviting urban and international public opinion backlash against the perpetrators. It is rather miraculous that over the past seven years of a guerrilla war that has claimed over 7000 lives, no one of national-level political or military significance has been killed on either side. The apparent avoidance behaviour by top leadership on both sides raises the possibility of a gentleman's agreement between the protagonists to keep the carnage confined to the rural backwaters and not to raise the stakes. On rare occasions when the rebels have targeted the high and mighty in Kathmandu for symbolic intent, the punches have always been pulled: an empty shed, the metal gate, or a boundary wall has been the extent of the class warfare. Such feints pale in comparison to the deadly force employed against the general population. The increasing spectacle of gratuitous violence, maiming and wanton destruction of life brings to mind the playwright Bal Krishna Sama's prophetic lines on misfortune's jealous penchant for favouring the dwellings of the poor. It is indeed a strange justice where the downtrodden and the inconsequential in the status quo become the preferred revolutionary offerings.

For the global development regime these local debacles are nothing more than minor irritants as development itself keeps ahead of its failings by retroactively shifting the goals to justify the results at hand. When the plug was pulled on the growth-oriented modernisation mission in the 1970s, the new discourse of "poverty alleviation" and "basic needs" managed to turn what was looking like a rout into victory. Twenty-five years later, there are more poor than ever before, and "development" needed a deft manoeuvre that would rescue it from the march of poverty. The second crisis in development was salvaged by the brilliant proposition that development is primarily about democracy and civil society — the material prospects apparently being mere secondary consequences. With most of the world now under some form of parliament and multi-party elections, development can be certified to have delivered again.

This is Development's development. From the early focus on the building of infrastructural dams, electricity, irrigation, industry and roads, development shifted to basic needs and hunger during the early seventies. The recent paradigm shift to democracy now fully liberates development from the sheer burdens of the body. Like the Cartesian dictum, "I think, therefore I am", the development discourse has now become a state of mind. When economists like Amartya Sen espouse "development as freedom", development becomes primarily a self-referential discourse that can never be judged outside of its own measures of success. It is ironic that development should turn fully ideological after the end of the "ideological war". The only material concession the new development makes to the relief of the poor, is that in a democracy famines are less likely. Development achieves a moral victory by displacing its own economic and social failures into the opaque discourses of democracy, civil society, good governance and bad governments.

Hopes for social movements and civil society

Most social movements in Nepal have been parochial rather than social in nature. Bereft of any economic vision or commitment to broad social issues, these mobilisations have been driven by a single quest for the capture of political power by overthrowing the existing regime, without reforming the nature of the state or economy. The quest for office has metamorphosed headhunting radicals into bourgeois apparatchiks, while pedigreed socialists have come around to embracing privatisation and free market as life itself. This is one reason why even with several regime changes in the last 50 years the nature of the Nepali state has not changed substantially, contrary rhetoric and rituals notwithstanding.

It remains Nepal's singular misfortune that the political forces are always engrossed with changing the regime, but never with altering the substance of governance. As a consequence, the country is made to live from one 'revolution' to the next with the intervening periods muddled through in ad hocism and make-do solutions. For the political elites and counter-elites, establishing rule-based governance and institutional procedures has so far proved less attractive than simply overthrowing the political opposition and ruling through patronage and fiat. The regularity of the ten-year cycle of 'movements' and upheavals would suggest that Nepal has fatefully institutionalised a condition of perpetual revolution. Cyclical upheavals every decade or so preclude a process of accumulative depth in governance and creativity. Instead, each cycle further accentuates the polarisation of Nepali society and the incapacity of the state.

The hyper-fragmentation of society by forces jockeying for brute power has disabled any articulation above or beyond the clique level. This is not a progressive politicisation of the social but the fragmentation of the very spirit of community. It is not surprising that commentators still have to belabour the point about "national consensus" even on minimal issues of providing food, shelter, health, education and ensuring the right to life and limb. Outside of power, there is little space left where broader non-partisan engagements can take place on vital issues. Efforts and initiatives that seek to engage the public and transform the nature of power are hemmed in from two sides: on the one hand the colonisation of all public space by the Party (for a citizen it matters very little whether public space is colonised by one, two or many parties), and on the other the depoliticisation of the remaining by NGOs and the market. If the political parties and their networks have disabled the community impulse by their petty politicisation of life, the NGOisation of society and intellect has circumvented and further curtailed the state rather than reform it.

Some Nepali intellectuals have begun to express despair that a decade of NGO effervescence in the country has not made any significant dent in the country's socio-economic condition or led to any sustainable social movement that would address public issues. These expectations and disillusionments generally tend to erroneously conflate NGOs with civil society, democracy and social movements. By its very constitution, NGOdom in Nepal appears unlikely to play a vanguard role in social movements. Participation in civil society and engagement in social movements presupposes a certain degree of autonomy and commitment that is not feasible from agents lacking agency. But first, what is this foisted civil society – Hegelian ideal, de Tocqueville's civic association or late capitalism's post-class imagining? Or, is civil society the political arm of the transnational economic regime? The fetishised object itself neither explains nor brooks interrogation.

In the context of a surplus of authorised engagements with "civil society", "democracy" and "good governance", authentic movements that surface independently suffer the violence of cognitive deficit. This is a condition in which society fails to perceive and acknowledge impulses that are not sponsored by the logic of development. What is both surprising and promising is that despite the generally bleak climate, Nepal has witnessed a remarkable resurgence in small-scale grassroots mobilisations on issues of community and livelihood. Some of these examples include the creative initiatives of 'untouchable' castes for dignity and equality; struggles by agricultural labourers for justice; and the voices of the rural against domestic violence, gambling, alcoholism, and for women's rights. The fate of the alcohol control movement is a case in point. Despite the enormous social havoc caused by the free alcohol regime in the country, none of the NGOs, INGOs, or other development agencies has deemed it necessary to recognise the enormous potential of these marginal gender awakenings. One activist from Dhangadi in western Nepal who made futile efforts to build a coalition with NGOs and development agencies arrived at this self-clarification: "How stupid of us, when all they want to do is drown the Nepali people with their multinational liquor and beer, why would they ever want to help us control alcohol?"

Nepal perhaps faces the worst alcohol problem in South Asia where the economic, medical and social costs of alcohol use is probably far more serious than the combined ravages of AIDS and drugs. Yet due to externally mandated development priorities, AIDS and drugs have managed to overshadow other public health issues in funding as well as recognition. Because of the lucrative nexus between officialdom, the liquor lobby and the media, women's voices against the alcohol epidemic have been denied a fair hearing. But when a movement to free the kamaiyas (a form of agricultural bonded labour) surfaced in Kailali in 2000, everyone – NGOs, civil society, the government and donors – was ready to join in. Morally and politically, the enfeebled remnant of a bygone era offered an irresistible target for loud activism. The fight against the vestigial remains of landordism – appropriately objectified in the media image of one toothless Shiva Raj Pant – was more of a romantic expeditionary foray into the far west, both in the sense of time and space than a sustained engagement, as was amply demonstrated by the neglect of the kamaiyas after they were liberated. In contrast, the initiatives against the abuse of tobacco, liquor and such other injuries of capital and market that complicate class, gender, caste and ideological positionings tend to be either deferred or altogether discredited.

The most insidious form of this cognitive deficit operates by denying any legitimacy and recognition to issues that might be raised outside of party or development patronage. Authorisation through funding becomes the normative worth of any issue and engagement; anything outside of the hegemonic discourses of development and democracy appears weird or even outright sinister. The obstacles to broad social coalitions come in many forms: the hyper-fragmentation of life by the parties on the one hand and the NGOs on the other. The community sense that propels movements appears out of place at a time when the ideology of individualism, free market and privatisation of everything from education, health care and public transportation is intensifying. It is a sign of the times that instead of pooling resources and energies to improve dilapidated drinking water services, tottering public transportation and eviscerated health services, people now seek solutions in private tube wells, exclusive schools and nursing homes. In such a climate, those small signs of community spirit that still manage to surface slowly wither away as society continues to avert its gaze. However, the persistence of such eruptions opens the possibility that the remedy for the fractured polity might come not from the authorised agencies but from these grassroots impulses.

The logic of privatisation and deregulation has been taken to its perverse conclusion in Nepal where fundamental community issues such as drinking water and public security are being turned into market commodities. The drying up and contamination of drinking water supply has given birth to a booming bottled drinking water industry, as well as private tanker-trucks which transport hundreds of gallons at one go from outskirt rivulets to Kathmandu valley's privileged homes. Amidst the background of a rising tide of political and criminal violence, the state has backed out of the "social contract" to assure a minimum level of security. The state's retreat from this vital arena has led to a budding market for private security companies in the past few years. Rather than shoring up the deteriorating law and order situation, the government has instead reduced the fees and duties on firearms to facilitate the privatisation of security.

The efforts of the neo-liberal ideology to frame progress in an antagonistic relationship with the state is both a historic and disingenuous. The discourse meant for third world consumption constitutes an historical amnesia of an experience in which no society – whether Western or any of the new Asian Tiger specie – achieved prosperity with the help of NGO development in the absence of an effective state system. Without a competent regulator and mediator there can be no development, civil society or even market economy, at least nothing more than a rhetoric that gets shriller by the day as if to discursively compensate for its actual absence. There is an urgent need for political parties, the intelligentsia and the market to contemplate creative ways of "bringing the state back in".

A part of this will entail reassessing the dominant discourses relating to free market and development. The inherent cultural and ideological inflections of the dominant ideas preclude off-the-shelf application. Obviously, the one-size-fits-all approach to development and deregulation is not working for Nepal. Two decades of NGO-led development and a decade of market economy have amply demonstrated that there can be no substitute for a reformed and enabling state and its constructive role in society. A socially conscious engagement must transcend both the limitations of traditional party politics and a cynical rejection of the state in addressing the basic questions of the Nepali polity.