Living on the Margins. Minorities in South Asia - EURAC

such a collusion and has systematically perpetrated acts of violence against them. The
state has not enabled realization of legitimate political rights of the Muslims as evinced in
the Muslim democratically elected authority being sidelined for favouring the Karuna
faction.
Mahendra Lawoti in Inclusion and Accountability in a New Democratic Nepal, retruns
to his policy prescriptive approach in analyzing institutionalized exclusion that underlay
Nepal’s Maoist conflict. The new edge is that before him is the unfolding process of the
construction of ‘Naya’ Nepal. Lawoti in suggesting ‘guidelines’ - for the direction of
future electoral and land reforms, the restructuring of the state along federal
arrangements, and the constitution of two tier representative institutions enabling greater
inclusion - exhorts Nepal’s new leaders to learn from the problems Nepal witnessed in
its previous democratic practice in the 1990s. He singles out centralization and exclusion
as the two principle factors that braided with poverty and inequality to fuel the
insurgency and exacerbate ethnic tensions.
Democracy as practiced since the 1990s, through the FPTP electoral system and large
undemocratic political parties, further reinforced the absolute monopoly of caste hill
Hindu elite males (CHHEM) to the continuous exclusion of indigenous nationalities,
Madhesi, Dalits and women. Also, the centralization of the polity was facilitated and
reinforced by the centralizing political culture. The society ingrained by the caste system
and patriarchy maintained in-egalitarian values that favored certain caste and gender
groups. It was not a culture or structure of governance that made for accountability.
The volume focuses on a subset in the field of minority rights, that is, indigenous peoples.
Tapan Bose in a macro analysis in “The Indigenous Peoples :Victims of the Politics of
Denial” and Pradip Prabhu in a micro study on “Tribal Land Alienation in
Maharashtra: Legality, Illegality and Praxis” - engage with structures of
epistemological and political disadvantage and discrimination that have rendered the
“tribal” communities so vulnerable in their encounter with the mainstream . Within the
international framework of rights, indigenous peoples are morally, if not legally,
recognized as entitled to group rights and customary rights over land, as enshrined in the
UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007).
However as Bose argues, “Governments of the Asian region have taken advantage of the
confusion in the UN definition” (of indigenous peoples cast as ‘First Nations’ colonized
by overseas powers) “to exclude millions of tribal peoples of Asia and Africa from the
designation of indigenous peoples.” Bose emphasizes a continuity between the colonial
and postcolonial construct of the identity of ‘tribe’ with its pejorative connotations. This
was socially rooted in the racist hegemonic ideology propagated by colonial academics
and now by contemporary Asian ones. Its corollary is the colonial-post colonial
continuity in the politics of internal colonialism. Bose argues that “the real reason for
excluding the tribal peoples of Asia is not lack of conceptual clarity, but a political one.
And therefore, it is a political debate, which needs to focus on the reality of
powerlessness of the tribal peoples and their struggle for justice.”
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