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BOOK REVIEW

january 12, 2013 vol xlviIi no 2 EPW   Economic & Political Weekly30

Between Donors and Recipients

Mallika Shakya

Looking at Development and Donors:Essays

from Nepal by Devendra Raj Panday (Kathmandu:Martin Cha utari Publications), 2011; pp 419, Rs 500.N

epal’s home-grown discourse on

the developmental origins andimplications of its ongoing poli-

tical transformation remains muffled by 

the clamour of self-styled development

expatriates who dissect development into

piecemeal projects preaching depolitici-

sation. Even though the two warring

parties in Nepal have consistently agreed

that the Maoist rebellion grew out of the

roots of “undevelopment”, little has been

achieved in addressing this nexus. In this

context, the current volume by Devendra

Raj Panday is a timely testimony of Nepal’s

50-year journey that critically analyses the

 various strands linking economic and social

(un)development with political dissent.

Panday is an exceptional developmental

maverick. As secretary of finance during

the panchayat era, he walked out of 

government service to protest the rise

of hardliners, following Nepal’s failed

national referendum of 1981. In recogni-

tion of his contributions to the democratic

struggle in the decade that follo wed, PrimeMinister Krishna Prasad Bhattarai ap-

pointed him as finance minister in the

coalition cabinet that took charge immedi-

ately after the successful democratic move-

ment of 1990. However, Panday became

increasingly disillusioned with Nepal’s

political parties and the aid community.

 A decade later, as the Maoist conflict

deepened, he initiated a popular civil

society movement and was the first inte-

llectual to meet Maoist supremo Pushpa

Kamal Dahal (Prachanda) with a simple

message: “Give up violence, and enter open

politics. The entire left and social demo-

cratic space is vacant, and you will be

successful”. His call was answered in kind.

Baburam Bhattarai, the Maoist ideologue,

acknowledged Panday’s 1999 book – Failed

 Development: Reflections on the Mission

and the Maladies – in his own writings

and claimed that the Maoist movement

 was Nepal’s “last chance for development”.

Panday’s current book –  Developmentand Donors – is set in the exuberant New

Nepal of 2006 where Nepali civil society 

had joined hands with political parties to

launch a popular movement which oust-

ed monarchy and negotiated a peaceful

end to the decade-long civil war. The in-

ternational civil society of aid donors

contradicted their Nepali counterparts

in this historic moment. Despite having

preached depoliticised development for

decades, they sided with the dictatorial

king in trying to dissuade political parties

from joining the popular movement even

as it was gaining momentum. Panday 

 writes, “[I]n the nick of the [sic] time, [the

donors] forgot the poor, the women, dalits

and janajatis and others who are variously 

handicapped and whose need for em-

powerment the donors never tire of 

preaching” (p 362). His assessment of 

Nepal’s 2006 revolution was that it “con-

stituted a political victory of the people of 

Nepal over monarchy and a moral victory over its powerful international partners”.

It is sad that donors have since

shrugged off their political intervention

and have gone back to preaching depo-

liticised development. The unequal pow-

er equation between donors and recipi-

ents has made it convenient to let go of 

the past. Even so, Panday’s caution that

such a loss of memory should be the first

thing to be prevented if development is

to take any clear direction in a nation

deserves attention.

How does one even begin to understand

the long and complicated series of events

and counter-events that led to the massive

showdown of 2006? Panday disentangles

this conundrum through 24 essays written

over a span of almost 27 years. Some were

 written during the autocratic panchayat

period, others in the time of democratic

promises and growing disillusionment,

and the rest in the immediate moments

of the Maoist civil war and their main-streaming into democratic politics. Or-

ganised into these three broad sections,

the essays reflect Panday’s experiences –

initially as a development bureaucrat

and later as a civil society leader – criti-

quing Nepal’s development and politics.

The Panchayat Period (1960-90)

Chapter 2 questions the aid industry’s

portrayal of Nepal as an anonymousand timeless geography that lacked any 

other character except being ripe for

“objective” interventions. The develop-

ment reports of the 1970s and 1980s did

not grant Nepal its individuality. No

efforts were made towards understand-

ing whether Nepal was declining or pro-

gressing, nor was it acknowledged how

developmental interference had led to its

gradual decline in terms of the moral

compass of sincerity. The only “exception”

granted to Nepal, as Panday points out,

 was on its social stubbornness to resist

modernisation. Arguments were made,

for example, that the reason Nepal suf-

fered from land erosion and low agricul-

tural production was because the Nepali

continued to live in remote hills instead of 

migrating to its flat lands.

Panday links this imposed anonymity of 

Nepal’s developmental issues and efforts

 with its excessive dependence on foreign

aid for development. Chapter 3 points outthat the entire budget of Nepal’s First

National Plan (1956-61) came from foreign

aid, a dependency that continued through-

out the 1970s and 1980s. As the saying

goes, “whoever has the stick leads the buf-

falo”, so it should not come as a surprise

that Nepal had little ownership of its

developmental trajectory. A case in point is

the major paradigm shift Nepal made in

the 1980s, manoeuvring away from an

“economic development strategy” towards

a “basic needs strategy”. Panday says virtu-

ally no questions were asked on why and

how such a monumental change was

being proposed and accepted. It allowed

donors to evade questions about the trick-

le-down mechanism that had earlier been

assumed to automatically trigger economic

growth and achieve equitable distribution.

It also meant that the Nepali policymakers

did not have to acknowledge that they 

did not have a strategy of their own.

Chapter 4 further probes the develop-mental politics of unquestioning. For

example, the World Development R eport

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 Agarwal, Pawan, ed. (2012); A Half-Century of Indian Higher Education: Essays by Philip G Altbach (NewDelhi: Sage Publications); pp xxii + 636, Rs 995.

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