Selectively liberal
For someone who is barely known outside Eastern Nepal, Sanjuhang Palungwa pulls a pretty tough punch. Heading his own faction of the Federal Limbuwan State Council (FLSC), he sometimes makes it to the national news, the last time being this past December, when a bandh against the non-inclusion of anyone from the FLSC in the recently formed State Restructuring Commission shut down that part of the country for some days.
For all his pretensions to being a regional satrap, Palungwa is a mild-mannered man in person. When I met him a couple of years ago in Birtamod, I could easily be forgiven for mistaking the dapper little man with a somewhat guarded smile for the local schoolmaster (which, in fact, he had been long ago). Like many other activists, he, too, has his own vision of what Nepal’s future constitution should look like, and his main demand centres around a Limbuwan in which all social groups can live together with dignity. That perhaps explains why, at a time of increasingly polarisation along ethnic lines, the FLSC (Sanjuhang Palungwa) has been able to rope in a number of Bahuns into leadership positions.
When we met, as expected, Palungwa poured out a litany of grievances to explain why he stood for Limbuwan. Nothing new in that but he made one other point that has struck with me.
A few weeks before our meeting, the Tribhuvan University Service Commission had been forcibly shut down by the Chhetri Student Society (presumably of the university) expressing solidarity with something called the Brahmin-Chhetri Joint Struggle Committee to oppose the newly introduced policy of reservations in the hiring of fresh faculty. Palungwa bemoaned the fact that even well-educated people such as university teachers hold rather conservative views, and are not open to the idea of advancement of all the peoples of Nepal.
While not dwelling on arguments for or against affirmative action, Palungwa’s remarks made me reflect on something that had just been published on liberalism within American academia. In their 2010 paper entitled ‘Why Are Professors Liberal?’, sociologists Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse argued that the rather than the self-serving contention by liberals that ‘professors tend to be liberal because liberals are smarter than conservatives’, in all likelihood it is because ‘the American academic profession was institutionalised and...has acquired such a strong reputation for liberalism and secularism that over the last thirty-five years few politically—or religiously—conservative students, but many liberal and secular ones, have formed the aspiration to become professors’.
In other words, you do not become a liberal by becoming a professor, but you become a professor because you are a liberal.
That is a far cry from those who would rather shut down Tribhuvan University than see a socially diverse workforce. Of course, that is partly a function of economics. In Nepal, we rarely have the luxury of choosing what we want to be but most often take up whatever comes our way. That is, unlike with most American professors who are drawn to academic life because it gels with their own personal temperaments and liberal beliefs, their Nepali counterparts are very unlikely to have made a career choice out of ideological persuasion. Had that been the case, the strongest proponents of policy interventions to bring all of Nepal’s social groups at par with each other, whether through affirmative action or some other measure, should have been our scholars.
To its credit, our professoriate has displayed its liberal credentials by standing up to the authoritarian Panchayat system as well as its half-baked version under King Gyanendra. But for some reason, that political liberalism refuses to extend to the social sphere.
Given that university and college teachers are believed to be the enlightened ones in a society, one would have expected them to support issues such as social inclusion. This becomes all the more important since, apart from the fact that they are in a unique position of having a great deal of influence over public opinion, the vast majority of them belong to those very groups that would lose out the most. That is the essence of true liberalism, after all.
In matters of social transformation, support from ‘elite’ social groups is very important, and that was as true for the American Civil Rights Movement as for the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. In both cases, white, particularly those associated with the Left, played a crucial role even though the actual mobilising had to be done by the blacks themselves.
Participation by whites was actively encouraged in the Civil Rights Movement by the black leadership since their presence brought greater publicity to the cause. One of the most significant though tragic instances of this was during what has been called Freedom Summer. In 1964, college students from institutions in America’s north were enlisted to register black voters in the state of Mississippi in an attempt to kick-start political mobilisation at the grassroots. Nearly 90 percent of the 1,000 or so volunteers were white. The killing of two of these white volunteers along with a black activist by the Ku Klux Klan (which has been portrayed in the 1988 film Mississippi Burning) resulted in a wave of support for the movement nationwide that ultimately led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
No such trend is yet evident in Nepal from among those belonging to the dominant social groups, not even from those that claim affinity with the Maoists, the most radical of the political forces, which has been the driving force behind social change over the past decade or so. Nepal’s Left itself does not seem to have been able to identify the main ‘contradictions’ within Nepali society—whether it is to be found in class inequalities or divisions along caste/ethnic lines or the shared aspects of the two—and continuously wavers between adopting one or the other. That probably explains why the significant leftist presence in college campuses seems limited to politicking for narrow partisan, and often personal, gains, and the question of social justice seems hardly to animate our professors.
Liberalism for our times is not dead in our academia; it is yet to be born.
Posted on: 2012-01-05 07:49
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All of them discussed the issue. The result was the same...and we have committed to continue discussions on the issue till midnight.
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