Engendering Minorities in Nepal: The Authority of Legal Discourse and the Production of Truth

Abstract

Since the promulgation of the 1990 constitution, conflicts over the rights it enshrines have proliferated in Nepal. Throughout the same period, negotiations between social groups and political institutions have been increasingly phrased in the language of rights, echoing the growing importance of the "rights-based" approach in the international development circuit.1 Although this is a general trend world-wide, what is peculiar to Nepal is that, besides articulating the dialectics of some of the major social conflicts unfolding in the country, the discourse on rights was also at the core of the drafting of the new constitution and one of the main tools of the "New Nepal" building process. In this article, I will underline three features of this discourse and its mobilization in Nepal.