Saroj Giri to present on Rebel Governance and Hegemonic Secularism in South Asia

Yale’s Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence will be hosting a conference from October 2-4, 2009 on the topic of �Rebel Governance�. The conference hopes to create an inter-disciplinary setting and bring together scholars and researchers from beyond political science in order to bridge the gaps among analyses of contemporary insurgencies. It will feature papers presented by speakers from universities around the world, examining the wide variety of political strategies employed by insurgents in order to govern or not to govern civilians involved in their conflicts. Cases studies and specific rebel organizations will be considered comparatively and in context, in an effort to illuminate the reasons behind different types of rebel governance. Other issues to be discussed include the role of external actors influencing rebel behavior regarding governance, governance by related non-state violent actors such as militias or gangs, and the effect of international law on the treatment of civilians by insurgent groups controlling territory. Among the speakers will be Dr. Saroj Giri, who will be presenting his paper �Lure of Central Power and the Logics of Local Revolutionary Governance in Nepal�. Later, he will also be speaking on the related topic of �Hegemonic Secularism, Dominant Communalism� in India at the South Asian Studies Colloquium on October 6, 2009.

Dr. Saroj Giri received his M.Phil and Ph.D in Political Science from the Centre for Political Science at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, where he was actively part of the political debates and activities which form the crucible in which learning takes place in the dynamic campus environment of JNU. He has been a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Delhi since 2005, and has had articles and papers published in a variety of international magazines and journals. He will be presenting his first paper as a part of the �Changes Over Time� panel of the Rebel Governance Conference.

His paper on rebel governance by the Maoists in Nepal starts with the rather provocative statement: �Perhaps there are rebels and there are those who decide to be rebels�so that the latter cannot be properly understood in terms of �rebel behavior� or �insurgent strategies�. He criticizes the Nepal Maoists for transforming from a real political revolutionary party, to merely a rebel group, which finally compromised on its original goals of overthrowing the democratic government in Kathmandu by accepting democracy is a slightly more modified form, when it finally joined a coalition based government with the other political parties in Nepal after the overthrow of the Nepali monarch. Giri asks: �What happened, � to the Nepal Maoists� objective to destroy and replace the �old state� in order to build a new kind of proletarian state power based on direct democracy and the right to recall inspired from the Paris Commune and the soviets?�

The basic hypothesis of Giri�s paper is that once a Communist revolutionary party like the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) started taking over some territories in Nepal and designating them as �liberated zones�, �base areas� and attempted to initiate alternate forms of governance, it increasingly gave up the practice of internal democracy to become �homogenous, undifferentiated units instrumentally serving the upkeep of the revolutionary war.� In other words, the political agenda of revolution becomes predominant, to be pursued by autocratic means if necessary, and the equally challenging task of actually governing and administering the citizens under its control using democratic methods takes a backseat. By analyzing the Nepal Maoist case, Giri is able to single out one of the biggest challenges and internal contradictions facing any serious revolutionary armed movement�how to reconcile its long term military aims of overthrowing a relatively strong state with the medium term goals of actually developing alternate and democratic forms of governance in the areas which come under its control. A study of this as well as other revolutionary movements in South Asia like the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-M) could help theorists compare with similar movements in Peru like the Sendero Luminoso, as well as address more universal questions that the Conference addresses, like the challenges and realities of developing alternate forms of governance by rebel groups. Giri�s cynicism regarding the Maoist insurgency in Nepal and its failure to successfully develop revolutionary alternate governance structures provides a useful opening through which scholars on civil war can question the ability of left wing rebel movements to develop legitimate forms of governance.