7.2 Social Inclusion and Affirmative Action

The concept: social inclusion — the removal of barriers (political, economic, social, cultural) that keep groups from full participation; its driving insight, built into Nepali constitutional discourse since 2007, is that exclusion here is intersectional and structural: caste/ethnicity, gender, region, class and disability compound (a Dalit woman in the tarai faces a triple wall — the syllabus's Crenshaw reference names this analytic). Nepal's exclusion map (the sociological base): hill upper-caste dominance of state, professions and media; Dalit deprivation on every indicator (land, education, representation — and untouchability itself, 7.6); Janajati and Madhesi marginalisation in the bureaucracy and officer corps; the gender gap (though closing fastest in education and politics). Affirmative action (the legal response): 1. Constitutional inclusion architecture: the right to social justice; special provisions for women, Dalits, Adivasi Janajatis, Madhesis, minorities, persons with disability; proportional- inclusion duties on the state. 2. Electoral quotas: the proportional-representation list requires at least one-third women per party (the 2015 Constitution's PR design); local elections guarantee women's ward seats and require a woman candidate for one of the top two local executive posts (Local Level Election Act 2073) — producing the historic result of roughly two-fifths women among local representatives (2017, over 14,000) and women leading municipalities as mayors and deputy mayors. 3. Civil-service and education quotas: inclusion provisions reserve a large share (close…