Red Star over South Asia

In the more impoverished parts of South Asia – from the western hills of Nepal to the badlands of Bihar, in the forests of Andhra Pradesh or the marginalised hinterlands of the Brahmaputra valley – Maoism is no idle intellectual pursuit. Body counts from its practice are too near to home for comfort, and the deeper issues it raises too close to everyday living to ignore. Nepal, for instance, has seen more lives lost in the year-and-a-half-long Maoist "people´s war" than were doomed in the entire 1990 "people´s movement" which ushered in parliamentary democracy. The village populace is terrorised in the pincer of Maoist violence and police retribution. Yet this sudden rise in the terror thermometer had, till recently, merely resulted in an embarrassed silence in Kathmandu´s corridors. Only when the present left-right coalition government proposed enacting a draconian "anti-terrorism" bill, which would affect urban liberals and politicos more than the Maoists, did the issue merit public debate.

South Asia´s modernist elite are by now so distanced from the countryside that no emotional chord is struck when rural folk die needlessly and cruelly. Deaths in Bosnia are more immediate to Delhi drawing rooms than killings on the Bihar Plateau. Because downtown Kathmandu has as yet to see a serious bomb blast, the terror in the hills of the central-west districts does not even constitute distant thunder.