DO YOU BELONG HERE, ABIMAEL?
Tourist brochures proclaim Nepal as a peaceful haven where there is communal harmony and (in subscript) none of the violence that racks different parts of the Subcontinent. But those who know better understand that such an idyll exists only in the mind. Peaceful societies often have bottled-up pressures waiting for release—ask Sri Lanka and Cambodia, two countries which, at one time, had an image somewhat akin to Nepal´s.
On 12 February, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) launched a "people´s war" with the goal of "overthrowing reactionary state power and establishing a new people´s state". In what was clearly a planned operation, cadres from one of the three factions of the CPN adhering to the Chinese Cultural Revolution ideology of the Revolutionary International Movement (RIM), started a terror campaign in the hills of west Nepal.
The opening salvo of the "people´s war" was fired four months back with action against political opponenets and some perceived feudals. This was subdued easily enough by the police in an operation code-named "Romeo". In February, the Maosists came back with a vengeance. There were a series of simultaneous attacks on police stations in the western districts of Rolpa and Rukum and in Sindhuli, southeast of Kathmandu. Masked activists chanting Maoist slogans moved about mountain villages, killing village heads, beating up of "class enemies", looting, and, in one instance, blowing up the house of a former minister.
The police retaliated with fury. Six peasant activists were killed in one encounter alone, which is a heart-stopping number in a country where political killings are relatively rare. This, by the way, is the same country where even accidental individual deaths have been exploited by the parties to bring down governments. Kathmandu´s blase attitude towards these deaths showed that the mainstream political parties want this problem "dealt with".
That this was a mountain-based movement of peasantry immediately drew comparison with the (once again resurgent) Sendero Luminoso movement of the Peruvian highlands, led by Abimael Guzman or Comrade Gonzalo, now in government custody. However, Maoist movements closer to home, in Bihar, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and southern Sri Lanka would be as instructive.
What do people do when a minimal level of inapplicable education has been achieved, and the state machinery and economic structure is incapable of delivering either good governance or productive opportunity? They, especially the young, turn to he who makes the most radical speeches. Announcing the "people´s war", "Prachanda", the shadowy leader of the ncp (Maoist), stated, "As there is no other way to resolve the present crisis of the country, the people have launched an armed struggle and propaganda war against the state-sponsored terrorism, feudal bureaucrats and comprador capitalists."
In the ensuing month, pockets have reverberated with violence quite different from the variety that was seen when the People´s Movement released the energies of the Nepali middle class in 1990. What the country is witnessing is not the genteel skirmishing of intellectuals and police, nor the easy targetting of kingship as the evil force of autocracy. Instead, the Maoist warriors are led by leaders who deride the timid demands for human rights and democracy. They consider the 1990 Constitution a sham, and regard the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist), which ran the government for nine months last year, as revisionist. The Maoists say they are prepared for extended class war.
Party politics in Nepal´s young democracy has quickly made cynics out of the public, and this disillusionment must have had a role in strengthening the Maoists´ appeal. The politicians in Parliament—socialists, communists, as well as the so-called royalists—have failed as "representatives". All parties have had a go at government, but none has made an effort to chart a self-reliant path to socio-economic development for the country, or, more to the point, set about to release the central government´s rigid hold over civil society. As the latest manoeuvres to bring down the government of Sher Bahadur Deuba proved, ideology and principle have been abandoned by most of the national players.
So much for the politicians, who come from all over the country. Kathmandu´s economic elite, meanwhile, is further removed from the rural hinterland than ever before. The distance between the impoverished village and the conspicuously consuming Valley is more starkly visible today than five years ago.
Still, for all the growing disparities the country is seeing, Rukum and Rolpa might epitomise less than the archetypal class warfare. The two districts make up part of the heartland of the Magar, the largest and among the most economically backward of Nepal´s hill ethnic groups. Is there an inter-twining of class and caste/ethnic elements in the "people´s war"?
Similar conditions of poverty exist in pockets all over Nepal, so why was the Maoist flare-up concentrated here? The explanation might lie in, one, that the senior-most Maoist leader Mohan Bikram Singh is from these parts and he has built an effective organisation, and, two, that the Rapti zone which subsumes Rukum and Rolpa is also the base of the country´s present Home Minister Khum Bahadur Khadka. Seen in this light, the class war also begins to take on the character of a turf war.
The radicals seem to have acted in large part to settle political scores against people who are considered local exploiters. The revolt seems to involve young people who have no real understanding of the theory of people´s war or the issues involved, but are full of anger due to the illusions given by the media and inadequate schooling, and have been easily swayed by slogans.
The Maoists´ accusations against "reactionary forces" sound timeworn and their tactics are of no proven efficacy. Theirs is nothing more than a mindless call to arms by a group that does not have the patience to carry out the much harder task of advocacy and activism. Instead of terrorising the populace, the proper goal would have been to use objectives and methods with which to excite that same populace. The flickering exhilaration of picking up the gun or khukuri is hardly a substitute for the long march to bring about social and economic advancement in the hills of Nepal. Besides, violence tends to legitimise violence and before long while the militants are dead or in jail, the peasantry is left to suffer under an oppressive police system.
The Maoist leaders will, of course, have read up on uprisings in other countries and continents, and will know that the solution favoured by governments everywhere has been to retaliate with overwhelming force—whether it is Alberto Fujimori crushing Mr Guzman´s Shining Path, Indira Gandhi the Naxalites, or Ranasinghe Premadasa the JVP. Egged on by the national elite and international votaries of stability´, it is unlikely that a Kathmandu government will be any different.
The upshot of all this is that the Maoists´ call is bound to rebound on the very poor farmers, who find that they are unable to defend themselves against police repression and politically dominant local groups, newly legitimised by the Maoists´ own violence. Irresponsibly, the Maoists have unleashed a war which will find favour in few places, given the prevailing international moods and the ever-present geopolitical situation of a small country. The losers then are not the shadowy Maoist leaders, nor the Kathmandu kingpins, but the terrorised peasantry of Nepal´s hinterland.
And how do responsible leaders like former Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala react to the Maoist agitation? Following hallowed South Asian tradition, they blame the "foreign hand"!