The Politics of Earthquake

The devastation Saturday’s earthquake has left in Kathmandu is enormous. Thousands have died, century-old monuments collapsed. While international aid is arriving and anger against the perceived incompetence of the authorities is building up, the more affluent and fortunate are moving back into their houses while many of the urban poor remain out in the open. Yet, we only learn slowly about the scope of devastation in the worst hit areas outside the valley where dozens of villages have been completely destroyed. Hundreds of thousands are homeless, so much is certain. Whole valleys are cut off and helicopters remain in short supply while 150 mountaineers have been airlifted from Mount Everest’s high camps in a difficult, high altitude rescue mission.

Nepal is among the poorest countries in the world and already, before the earthquake, the status of its infrastructure has been precarious. The few roads were in very poor condition, daily load-shedding amounted to up to 16 hours while half the population remains unconnected to the electricity grid. Similarly bad is the supply with fuel and cooking gas. Added to this is the increasing shortage of water, most dramatically in Kathmandu, but also in a growing number of small towns.

It will take years just to restore the country’s physical infrastructure to the bad state it had before the earthquake. It hit at a point when, for the first time in many years, major improvements in roads, dams and pipes seemed not totally utopian. The main reason for this is the economic boom in China and India and the slow realisation on both sides that an impoverished Nepal is not a buffer state but a security concern for the wider region. China has been strongly supporting the construction of new road connections through the Himalayas and is currently extending its railroad network towards the border with the plan of eventually connecting Kathmandu to it. India is mostly interested in the one export resource Nepal has to offer: hydropower. The two major unbuilt dam projects have recently been handed to two large Indian infrastructure developers with close connections to the central government in Delhi. These altered circumstances did not go unnoticed by the established donors in Nepal. Especially the World Bank is keen to re-enter the hydropower sector it left twenty years ago after the controversies around Sardar Sarovar and Arun-3. This is hardly surprising given the Bank’s declining importance and the fact that currently more than 400 licenses for dam projects are in the pipeline. So already before the earthquake, a new era of donor competition dawned on the horizon.

Since 1947, India has been the main foreign power in the country and whenever major political change occurred, ‘Delhi Durbar’ was one of the main places where the country’s future was decided. For decades, Nepalese politicians have tried to balance this with a stronger Chinese influence and recent developments imply that Beijing is indeed aiming at a more active role. At the moment, it is investing only a fraction of what it spends in countries of similar size in Africa, but it recently announced a fivefold increase in development funding for the southern neighbour. How is all of this connected to the earthquake, one might ask. For instance, in a highly surprising move, the government in Kathmandu has declined a Taiwanese offer to send search and rescue teams. The assumption that this is very directly connected to the growing Chinese influence is hardly far-fetched. Once the dust has settled and the immediate relief efforts are over, we are likely to experience a growing rivalry between the two powerful neighbours about who will rebuild what.

Beyond that, the earthquake tells us more about the qualities and potentials of different infrastructures: Though interrupted at times, the access to mobile Internet was surprisingly stable in the hours following the first tremor. In combination with a new safety check feature on popular social media sites, this gave people the possibility to know who was safe much quicker than in any major disaster in history. Especially to those abroad, like me, this tool gave peace of mind. At the same time, the politics of connectivity around this feature starkly reminded me of my friends’ different class positions. My upper-caste, upper-middle-class friends in Kathmandu were marked ‘safe’ within a couple of hours while my indigenous friends in the countryside remained unaccounted for until I finally reached them by phone.

This brings me back to the question of who gets evacuated by helicopter from a fully equipped high camp on an eight-thousander and who is left without help in a devastated village a few minutes of flight time outside of Kathmandu. This became even more manifest when a friend told me about the Israeli initiative to fly out 26 surrogate babies to Tel Aviv while leaving their biological mothers behind. Apparently, this is what is happening when you rent out your womb: you become infrastructure, a foreign female body used to make life that can easily be disposed of after delivery. To make the point even clearer, on Monday the Israeli Attorney General decided that heavily pregnant surrogate mothers will be allowed inside the country. After all, they carry fetal citizens.

Finally, I wonder how the earthquake will affect the less material, political infrastructure of Nepal. Is there a chance it could lead to a new form of common sense so desperately lacking among the current political leaders? Writing this comment I had to think about one of my best friends who once told me: “We need one more revolution…a cultural revolution.” He was referring to the widespread disappointment among indigenous and marginalised groups about the course of the Maoist insurgency and the protracted peace process. Recent reports hint at growing unrest in the most severely affected districts around Kathmandu. In Dolakha, for example, people have set the district administration office ablaze because they accuse the government of negligence. To be sure, similar incidents happen on a regular basis, even without an earthquake. Given the experience of the last decade, it seems more likely that the disaster will prolong the political gridlock and further deepen the divisions between Kathmandu’s elites and those outside the valley who feel cheated out of the promise of a new, inclusive Nepal striving to overcome centuries of discrimination.

The author is an anthropologist working on infrastructures and their absence in Nepal, currently at the University of California Los Angeles