High Frontiers: Dolpo and the Changing World of Himalayan Pastoralists

This chapter observes the post-1951 period through the lens of Nepal, with a constant gaze toward Dolpo, to understand how pastoral systems along the Indo-Tibetan frontier were transformed not only by Chinese policies and politics, as discussed in the previous chapter, but also by Nepal’s statemaking actions and rhetoric.

The model of the nation-state—a sovereign, politically demarcated territory—supplanted a traditional model of royal dominion only gradually in Nepal. In collusion with the Raj in India, the Rana prime ministers imposed more than a century of isolation, from 1847 until 1951. Although it was never colonized, the Ranas traded British sovereignty over Nepal’s external affairs for dominion over internal affairs, especially the right to maintain their profitable trade monopolies. But opposition to the Ranas grew among Nepal’s political activists, who were apprenticed in the Indian independence movement. These nascent political parties rallied around the heir to the Shah dynasty, who overthrew the Ranas in 1951.

Early twentieth-century political, social, and economic forces at work throughout the world, but particularly in India, portended the inevitable downfall of the Ranas and their outmoded, isolationist, and feudalistic regime in Nepal. During this period the advent of a number of secret Nepalese political groups in India was closely linked to the development of an independence movement…. When the British finally departed from South Asia in 1947, the Ranas lost the crucial support of an Indian government upon which they had long relied for noninterference in their own despotic domestic affairs. (Bishop 1990:147–48)

Nepal threw open its borders, inviting visitors from other countries, for the first time in a century. A wave of anthropologists, mountaineers, botanists, and other traveling kin began exploring the Himalayan kingdom in the early 1950s, and soon the world became aware of Nepal when the news broke in May 1953 that Edmund Hillary and Tenzin Norgay Sherpa had summited Mount Everest.¹ The conquest of the planet’s highest mountain is a fitting departure point for this chapter chronicling the modern period, and the shrinking world into which Nepal was thrust.

The 1950s were a time of chronic political instability and confusion in Nepal as King Tribhuvan appointed a series of ineffectual governments. Upon this monarch’s death in 1955, his son Mahendra quickened the pace of political and administrative reorganization. By 1959 he had promulgated a new constitution: general elections were held, and a parliamentary democracy in which the Nepalese Congress Party held control was established (cf. Burghart 1984, 1994; Hoftun, Raeper, and Whelpton 1999a, 1999b). This new phase in national politics coincided with the postwar emergence of the international development apparatus (cf. Pigg 1996).

The Nepali nation-state fully joined the international scene during the 1950s, becoming a member of the United Nations, establishing diplomatic relations with many nations, and negotiating political and economic agreements with its neighbors. We see, during this period, the antecedents of the global phenomenon of “development,” which came to structure Nepal’s economy and dominate its national rhetoric. The beginnings of development aid to countries like Nepal can be traced to the economic aid the United States provided to Japan and Europe after World War II as part of the Marshall Plan. As the Cold War commenced, the United States and the Soviet Union provided billions of aid dollars to countries to gain political allegiance, access to resources, strategic military advantage, and so on. Organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund came to structure international finance and determine the economic course of many countries (cf. Pigg 1996). Strategically positioned between the world’s most populous nations, Nepal assumed an importance all out of proportion to its size and population and began to receive millions of dollars from international development agencies.

Deliberating on the causes and consequences of development, Stacey Leigh Pigg writes: “For nearly forty years Nepal’s modern political identity has been linked to global institutions of international development. During this time, the population has been exposed to a barrage of political rhetoric equating the legitimacy of the government with national unity on the one hand and national progress on the other” (Pigg 1992:448). Development is not only about the economic position of a nation-state relative to others: it is a crucial form of identity, a vision of cultural norms and “civilization” in the postcolonial world.² Development programs were mechanisms to bring about economic and social progress and establish national independence, to launch nations on the path to “modernity” (cf. Gupta 1998).

After incarceration for a century by the Ranas, Nepal was to be restored to its former glory, not through renewed territorial expansion, but by entering the world community of nations, entering the modern age, achieving a “developed” state. This required new forms of parliamentary structure and civil service bureaucracy to gain UN membership, for example. But as a means of state unification—for a few to control the country from the center—its goals remained consonant with those of past rulers (cf. Pigg 1992, 1996).

Like other “developing” countries, Nepal began to receive financial and technical assistance from “developed” countries beginning in the 1950s. By the 1960s, foreign aid became a significant portion of Nepal’s gross domestic product. Aiming to improve the agriculture, human health, transportation, communications, and manufacturing sectors, donors undertook ambitious infrastructure projects, like the Lhasa-Kathmandu road that China built (cf. Bista 1991).

China’s attempts to woo Nepal into friendly, if not obedient, foreign relations are clear from the diplomatic record. In 1956, China promised aid worth 60,000,000 Indian rupees—one-third in hard currency, the remainder as advisers, machinery, equipment, materials, and commodities. In 1960, Chinese aid to Nepal represented less than 5 percent of the total foreign aid received by the kingdom. Ten years later this figure reached 20 percent (cf. Ramakant 1976; Raj 1978; Shrestha 1980; Prasad 1989; Shakya 1999).

Nepal had reaped benefits from its relationship with Beijing since establishing diplomatic relations in 1956. China’s leaders, in turn, used Nepal as a sounding board and as an instrument against India. Chinese Communist Party leaders often indulged tirades against India at press conferences in Kathmandu. The relative stability and absence of conflict between China and Nepal are indicative of their complementary interests: a strong, independent, and nonaligned kingdom was complementary to China’s security interests in South Asia.

The United States, too, became involved in Nepal’s growing development industry, and USAID focused initially on agriculture, couching its interventions in the rhetoric of democratic governance.³ While dozens of countries and international agencies invested in Nepal, China forged ahead alone in Tibet, projecting its vision of development on the world’s highest plateau; China’s development agencies concentrated on irrigation and reforestation, as well as building schools, roads, and government extension offices.

After the 1959 Tibetan Uprising, the government of Nepal placed restrictions on travel within twenty-five miles of its northern border, in compliance with the wishes of the Chinese, who did not want the world to see the measures it was taking to suppress the rebellion and subdue the Tibetans (Ramakant 1976). Kathmandu watched Tibet closely, and with increasing alarm, as the Chinese assumed control over Tibet’s political and economic life.⁴

Since the Dalai Lama’s exile from Tibet, Nepal’s policy has been to scrupulously avoid any measure that would give Beijing an excuse to create tension in the northern border regions. The age-old relations of pastoral communities in Nepal with Tibetans created a political dilemma and potentially explosive border situation for Kathmandu; Nepal’s defense budget doubled as China’s military might encroached upon the Himalayan kingdom all along their shared border (Ramakant 1976). The arbitrariness of political borders was sharply felt by the Dolpo-pa, whose trade relationships were based on kinship, language, culture, and ecology—not on cartographic lines drawn by nation-states.

In June 1960 an important incident occurred in Mustang District, which bore direct consequences for border relations. Chinese troops attacked a group of Nepal frontier guards, killing one and capturing sixteen soldiers. Both sides initially claimed that the incident took place inside their borders. Chinese premier Zhou Enlai informed Kathmandu that PLA troops had entered the demilitarized zone to suppress Tibetan rebels, and mistakenly fired on the Nepalese soldiers. After strong protests, the Chinese returned the Nepalese prisoners, tendered an apology, and expressed regret over the death of the soldier (Prasad 1989).

China’s diplomats did not wish to risk disturbing the harmonious environment they had cultivated in their relationships with the Nepalese. The behavior of China’s government subsequent to the Mustang incident is typical of their attitude—reasonableness-cum-force—toward Nepal during this period. The PLA withdrew from the Nepali border, but the Chinese insisted on their version of the event and a unilateral interpretation of the demilitarized zone; later they conceded that the incident had taken place on Nepalese territory (Ramakant 1976). China had far more to gain by keeping Nepal out of regional conflicts than by pushing it further toward India or the West.⁵

As it was, China and Nepal were anxious to settle the question of their boundaries and began to meet in 1960 to discuss their shared border, which stretched over 1,400 kilometers (km) and crossed the world’s highest mountains. Using the instrument of transnational accords, China and Nepal fixed their borders in the modern cartographic tradition and laid territorial claim to their peripheries.⁶ Historical records show that during these border negotiations, Nepal relinquished claim to hundreds of square kilometers of grazing grounds that pastoralists in their Himalayas relied upon.⁷

The location of the international boundary became a flashpoint for China-Nepal relations when it came time to designate jurisdiction over the world’s highest mountain. At first, China claimed that Everest was located solely within its boundaries, and that Chomolongma (“mother goddess of the universe” in Tibetan) had traditionally belonged to Tibet. This stance provoked nationalist pride and anti-Chinese feelings among Nepalis, who also claimed Sagarmatha (the “mother of the oceans” in Nepali) as their own. Both China and Nepal argued for their jurisdiction based on historical claims held over the mountain by Thyangboche monastery, on Everest’s south side, and Rongbuk monastery on the northern side. Note here the use of religious grounds by an atheististic Communist state and a Hindu monarchy to claim territory.⁸

In the aftermath of the Mustang Border Incident, the Chinese were at pains to demonstrate a willingness to negotiate with Nepal on the Mount Everest issue.⁹ China’s leaders knew that a bit of strategic diplomacy would contrast Beijing with Delhi, whose leaders had been intransigent on border disputes (cf. Shakya 1999). The Chinese yielded the contested mountain space and agreed to share Everest, which cleared the way for the signing of the Sino-Nepal Boundary Agreement in October 1961. The legislative basis for border relations was established in a set of diplomatic notes China and Nepal exchanged during the 1960s. The “Notes on Trade and Intercourse Between the Tibetan Region and Nepal,” exchanged between the chief delegates of the Joint Boundary Committee, fixed the location of seventy-nine markers along an east-west border of 1,100 km.¹⁰ Dolpo’s boundaries were sealed within Nepal in the following passage:

The boundary line runs generally southeastwards along the watershed between the tributaries flowing into the Manasarowar Lake and the tributaries of the Machuan River on the one hand and the tributaries of the Humla Karnali River, the Mugu Karnali River, and the Panjang Khola [Panzang River].¹¹

These diplomatic notes incorporated important provisions elaborating the 1961 Boundary Agreement. These notes became law, codifying trade and pasture rights, and governing the future relations of populations living along the Nepal-Tibet border (cf. Bhasin 1970; Ramakant 1976). China’s government press touted the agreements: “Despite the imperialist attempts to use the boundary questions to sow dissension and fish in troubled waters, China and Nepal have smoothly solved these questions left over by history” (Renmin Ribao 1960).

Militarization of the border continued and administration of the Tibet Autonomous Region proceeded apace in creating checkposts at strategic points along the Himalayas. Chinese patrols began regulating traffic under a passport-cum-visa system. The Chinese premier justified the border posts, saying, “There are non-Nepalese and non-Indian adventurers who would like to take a peep at Tibet although there is nothing to see” (Ramakant 1976:112). After signing agreements with Nepal, and in light of the embarrassing Mustang Border Incident, the Chinese did not want to antagonize their southern neighbor. Entangled as China was in the Korean War, the complications of ruling Tibet, and its conflicts with India over their borders, China could not afford to take up an offensive in Nepal. Furthermore, they wanted to appear generous in the wake of the controversy stirred over Everest. While Nepal did not expect any Chinese military incursion across the border, Kathmandu still feared China’s doings along its northern border—especially Chinese interference with its culturally Tibetan populations, such as the people of Dolpo, who had little contact with the mainstreaming forces of Nepalese nationalism.

In December 1960, King Mahendra resumed absolute control of Nepal in a swift and bloodless coup. This move was motivated in part by his belief that Nepal lacked sufficient political sophistication to remain a unified, nonaligned, and independent nation-state in the face of continuing, ominous external developments (cf. Bishop 1990). Indeed, in light of events such as the Tibetan Uprising and the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962, these claims gained credence and quelled political dissent.

In 1962, Mahendra promulgated a new constitution, banned political parties, vested sovereignty in the monarchy, and made his position as king the source of legislative, executive, and judicial power (Hutt 1994). His Majesty’s Government of Nepal replaced the parliamentary democracy with a partyless panchayat system of government and placed the king at its apex.¹² Government teams were sent to the northern border regions in the early 1960s to survey Nepal’s borders, expel Indian personnel from relict military checkpoints, and move Tibetan refugees to camps for their eventual transfer to settlements around the globe. These teams were the vanguard of a transition from local political autonomy within distinct ethnic enclaves—to a centralized state. Before 1960, the administration of His Majesty’s Government had largely been ignored by villagers in Dolpo, and external relations were mediated through the Thakali subba and agents of the king of Lo. By contrast, border populations like Mustang’s and Dolpo’s were more directly affected by the presence of the Khampa during the 1960s, who were taking their toll on local natural resources and taxing local forbearance.

The creation of the Panchayat in the 1960s forced some important changes in Dolpo’s communities, especially in the standardization and bureaucratization of administration in rural areas. The first local elections for Nepal’s newly formed Parliament and village-level political offices were held in Dolpa District in 1964. In practice, though, the Panchayat was a compromise that allowed room for Dolpo’s traditional village assemblies, and local political lineages retained power. Describing the political reaction in Tarap Valley at this time, Corneille Jest (1975) observed that the ancient village assembly (midzom) simply changed its name. The men elected in the first years of the Panchayat had all held positions of responsibility in the old village assemblies: Dolpo’s traditional system of governance was reconstituted within the Nepali state’s administration.¹³ The state used the panchayat system to collect revenues it needed to meet the burgeoning responsibilities of maintaining an administrative and armed presence in all 75 districts. Nepal conducted a nationwide census and sent surveyors to delineate public land and private property. This facilitated the creation of a tax system and helped the government lay claim to its territories and its citizens.¹⁴

Borders play an important role in nation-state formation: they are markers of sovereignty, where states are the irreducible and inviolable players (cf. Smith 1996). Claiming territories is part of nation-state building, and borders are symbolic of this historical process—for example, the places where enemies were defeated or expansion ended (cf. Donnan and Wilson 1994; Scott 1999). After the violent suppression of the Tibetan Uprising, China aimed to refurbish its image in the eyes of Asian countries and quickly concluded border agreements with almost all its neighboring states, including Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, Mongolia, Pakistan, and Nepal. These agreements ensured the security of China’s frontiers with a chain of weak, nonmilitarized buffers, like Nepal; they also isolated India and the Soviet Union as the only states that had refused to settle boundary disputes with China.

After its crushing defeats inside Tibet, the resistance movement regrouped, determined to keep fighting the Chinese. After the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict, the Nepalese government was pressured by Delhi to allow Tibetan guerrillas to operate from inside Mustang District, and thereby reduce the rebels’ presence in India. Mustang District forms a thumb-shaped piece of land that juts into the belly of Tibet, its northern border only a short distance from China’s strategic east-west highway. Mustang became the headquarters and base of operations for the Khampa: here the last acts of the armed Tibetan resistance were played out.

The Chinese saw the independence movement inside and outside Tibet as linked to their border issues with Nepal and India. To them, all events pointed to the development of an anti-Chinese movement in the Himalayas. Not only were the Americans actively supporting the Tibetans, but the Indians, too, were involved. China’s leaders blamed these “outsiders” for agitating discontent.¹⁵

The Tibetan government-in-exile had had links with the U.S. government since the early 1950s. But in the early 1960s, the United States’ role in Tibetan affairs would escalate. The CIA helped create a paramilitary force of almost 4,000 men who waged a guerrilla war against the Chinese for more than a decade; the CIA called this operation “Shadow Circus” (cf. Shadow Circus 1998; Knaus 1999). Between 1961 and 1974, the guerrilla army launched a series of small-scale incursions into Tibet from its bases in Mustang and maintained contact with officials from the Tibetan government-in-exile and CIA operatives based in India.

Mustang’s strategic location allowed the CIA to use the Khampa as an intelligence-gathering group—pawns in Cold War chess—though the Tibetans saw themselves as warriors against the Chinese (cf. Knaus 1999; Shakya 1999). American policymakers never harbored the illusion of an ultimate Khampa victory over the Chinese. Instead, they hoped the guerrillas would badger the PLA’s operations in Tibet and distract the Chinese. The Khampa demonstrated their usefulness early on when they routed a convoy of army trucks and captured secret documents that provided valuable intelligence.¹⁶

But Washington began to reconsider its role in supporting the Khampa. Kathmandu dispatched several commissions to investigate the situation in its northern border regions. Nepalese officials duly informed the Chinese that they were satisfied with the situation and that the Tibetans then living inside Nepal were bona fide refugees. This despite the fact that up to 4,000 armed Tibetans were moving with impunity up and down the Kali Gandaki Valley, from the villages of the Thakali to Lo Monthang; understandably, China continually raised the question of foreign covert activities with Nepal (cf. Shakya 1999). The Chinese began to isolate the recalcitrant rebels and persuaded Nepal to seal off their supply and escape routes from the south.

By 1963 the U.S. government initiated a broader political program of support for Tibetans-in-exile.¹⁷ Whereas its previous focus had been on supporting the resistance movement, the United States shifted its priorities toward the creation of a viable Tibetan government-in-exile, and to provide economic support to Tibetan refugees who were being settled in Nepal, India, and other countries. Though the Nepali government held nominal control over its northern districts, the Khampa had in fact monopolized trade in these regions and held sway over village life throughout this period. In addition to the major base of operations in Mustang, the Khampa operated war camps in other regions. A Swiss soldier-engineer was sent to Dolpo’s Panzang Valley in the early 1960s to build an airstrip. “He had a nice radio and a good revolver,” recalled his host in Tinkyu village.¹⁸ This Swiss spent a winter fashioning a primitive tarmac. Supposedly planned as a supply depot for the Khampa, the rough airstrip was never used. The trace outlines of his work, written in the rocks, can still be seen as you enter the village from the south.

For the most part, the Nepalese turned a blind eye to Tibetan activities in Mustang during the 1960s and publicly claimed no knowledge of Khampa on their territory. The government had its reasons to ignore the Khampa situation in its borderlands: it hoped that the Tibetan rebels would preoccupy the Chinese with their own security concerns and keep them out of the demilitarized zone. Moreover,

The Nepali government was happy to pretend the Khampa didn’t exist if it curried favor with the Indians, who were heavily investing in Nepal during this period. Nepal tried to skillfully engage in a dance with India and China, seeking as it was a steady border, national identity, and aid packages from both countries. (Shakya 1999:362)

The Nepalese were also wary of Communist infiltration into the kingdom and the possible complications that this presence could create in Nepal’s social fabric, especially for the institution of the monarchy (cf. Ramakant 1976). As a Hindu kingdom, the Nepali state had latent antipathy for Marxism’s class struggles and antireligious rhetoric.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Khampa proved an important wedge between the northern border districts of Nepal and the central government. The presence of Khampa soldiers was growing more complicated and costly in political, economic, and social terms.¹⁹ Nepal came under increasing pressure from China to curb the activities of the Tibetan rebels in Mustang. Nepal had few alternatives but to cooperate in the determined Chinese effort to claim Tibet as its own and exterminate the Tibetan guerrillas. Moreover, the U.S. government cut off its aid to the Tibetan rebels as the Nixon administration moved toward rapprochement with China.

The Khampa forces in Mustang splintered over the course of the 1960s and coalesced into competing factions, one led by Baba Yeshi, the other by Gyatso Wangdu. They hung on until 1974, when the Dalai Lama sent an audiotape to Mustang in which he called upon the guerrillas to lay down their arms and resist nonviolently, to follow the dictates of Buddhism. Torn between their devotion to His Holiness and the defense of their homeland, handfuls of soldiers committed suicide, while others resigned the struggle. Many Khampa were settled into refugee camps; others remained in their adopted villages and dispersed in the mountains of Nepal. Baba Yeshi and others brokered a surrender with the government, but forces under Wangdu fled Mustang, and the Royal Nepal Army gave chase. Wangdu was assassinated through an act of treachery, robbing the armed Tibetan resistance of its last captain, and the final knell of the Khampa rebellion sounded.

The Tibetan soldiers left a mixed legacy, especially in Mustang: on the one hand, they had often terrorized local populations, stolen antiques, and abused local forest and pasture resources; on the other, some of the Khampa had assimilated into communities, married locals, and contributed to the material and cultural wealth of their adopted homes.²⁰ The king of Lo, Angdu Tenzin Trandul, had made great sacrifices on behalf of the guerrillas, even giving them precious statues from his private chapel. Locals felt ambivalence and fear toward the Khampa, their ethnic cousins and coreligionists. Though vestiges of the Khampa presence linger in Dolpo, most of the physical and cultural effects were concentrated in Mustang District, where thousands of Khampa had set up war camps.

The 1960s and 1970s saw the establishment of new institutional and political centers in Dolpa District. Regional and national boundaries were demarcated, representatives elected, district chiefs appointed by the central government, and agents of the state began to collect taxes directly. In 1975, King Birendra updated his father’s panchayat system by creating smaller local units called “Village Development Committees” (VDCs). The VDCs were vested with authority to collect taxes and hold democratic elections.²¹ Dolpo was subsequently divided into four VDCs—Do Tarap, Saldang, Tinje, and Chharka—which approximated the traditional boundaries of the four valleys (Tarap, Nangkhong, Panzang, and Tsharka, respectively).

With the advent of the Panchayat and VDC systems in rural Nepal, district headquarters exercised greater power over local economies, especially through the distribution of government commodities and services.²² Throughout the nation-state building period, the loci of power in Nepal, especially with regards to taxation and administration, shifted significantly. No less so for Dolpo’s villagers, as the small bazaar town of Dunai—once but a waystation for traders enroute to bigger markets—became the headquarters of the newly demarcated Dolpa District. After the Panchayat era, Dunai became the Nepalese government’s symbolic and physical outpost. But like other district headquarters in Nepal’s hinterlands, Dunai was dwarfed by the waves of mountains that still kept remote communities like Dolpo’s distant from the government.²³

The valleys of Dolpo remained relatively impenetrable, its population dispersed and migratory—hardly a promising site for state appropriation (cf. Scott 1998). But these centralizing moves by the government were not designed solely to exact revenues from its subjects. They were also an effort by the Nepalese to reassert authority over their northern border regions, where the continuing presence of Khampa rebels belied His Majesty’s sovereignty over these territories.

Nepal was obligated by the circumstances—not the least of which was a rebel guerrilla army based inside its territory—to close its own boundaries and discourage trans-border trade during the 1970s. In 1970 the government of Nepal placed a complete ban on the movement of foreigners near the border in Taplejung, Manang, Mustang, and Dolpa Districts. Dolpo was relegated again to its traditional backwater in the body politic of the Nepali state. The present-day designation of “restricted areas” along Nepal’s northern borders is a relict of this period, when armed guerrillas ranged the Himalayas.

For communities living on the Nepal-Tibet border, the era of de facto political autonomy, of fluid borders and barter trade networks, passed in the period after 1951. The dependent variables of Dolpo’s pastoral system—access to seasonal pastures, differential value in commodities exchange, monopoly over transport, economic partnerships based on fictive family—were all subject to the transforming forces of nation-state building in China and Nepal. With their herds declining and winter range conditions deteriorating, pastoralists in Dolpo faced a day of reckoning. The presence of the Khampa, a steady stream of refugees with their livestock, and the closing of trans-border rangeland resources forced radical transformations in Dolpo’s trade patterns and pastoral migrations, as we shall see in chapter 6.