[Via... http://www.egroups.com/group/Communist-Internet ] . . ----- Original Message ----- From: Magnus Bernhardsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2001 8:57 PM Subject: [red_activism] Nepali Maoists: background (1/2) (I don't agree with everything in this article, but there are many interesting facts ands om good background knowledger in it. MB) http://www.himalmag.com/may2001/cover.html Day of the Maoist Six years into the Maoist People's War, the toll is 1700 Nepalis dead. The people are crying out for a settlement, and given the right combination of circumstances, that could yet happen. Despite the violence, the Maoists seem close enough to the surface-they could come above ground. -by Deepak Thapa In the days leading up to 13 February earlier this year, a certain tension was palpable in Kathmandu Valley. That day would mark the fifth anniversary of the launch of the 'People's War' by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), and there was apprehension that the insurgents would celebrate the occasion with a big bang. After sunset, police roadblocks went up on the capital's roads and there was random checking of vehicles. Rumours flew thick, and some even expected the Maoists to carry out an assault on the Valley itself, given that they were already present in the outlying districts. The political tabloids played on the fear of the inhabitants, heretofore protected from the wrath of the 'people's warriors', who had mainly concentrated their fire to the hinterland till then. As it turned out, nothing happened. But the paranoia did serve to underscore the extent to which the Maoist uprising has by now embedded itself in the national psyche. And with good reason too. The insurgency has affected almost all the 75 districts of the country (only a handful of remote mountain districts remain untouched). Five contiguous western Nepal districts are, for all practical purposes, under the control of the Maoists, with Kathmandu's role being limited to the district headquarters. Access to Maoist-held areas is strictly controlled by the insurgents themselves and prior permission from the commissars is required to enter. By December 2000, the rebels had even set up their own 'people's government' in these districts, complete with minor development works, 'people's courts' and not a little bit of social policing against alcoholism, usury and so on. The Maoists' power is felt far beyond the areas under their control. In some eastern districts, they have taken up the role of cultural policemen, going so far as to decree what is 'proper' for girls to wear. They have set off explosions in the factories of at least two Indian multinationals in the Tarai. They charge village 'levies' from households even in districts that they are not really active in. All over Nepal, Maoist cadre make 'collections' from businesses small and large, armed with receipt books. Maoist agents, known for their civility, are active even in Kathmandu as they go about making their collections in broad daylight, and There are perhaps very few establishments in the country that have not paid up.. Even the Maoists' student wing has been able to flex its muscles with considerable impact. Last December, the students called for a week-long closure of all schools in the kingdom to protest the singing of the national anthem (which they say glorifies the king, and in fact it does) and the teaching of Sanskrit (considered disadvantageous to the many ethnic groups of the country). The fiat was complied to without visible protest and school children stayed home that week. For a country that has not seen a real war for nearly two centuries, the number of those killed in the course of the fighting has been numbing. The latest government figures show that nearly 1700 people have lost their lives to political violence in the last five years, sacrificed to the police and Maoist bullets increasingly. (In comparison, the 1990 People's Movement that did away with the monarchical Panchayat system succeeded with a loss of fewer than 50 lives.) By now there have been Maoist-related deaths in 52 of the country's 75 districts. The insurgents have never been stronger in terms of strategy and fighting strength. The first indication of their fighting capability came in September 2000, when a Maoist contingent travelled for more than a week up the Bheri river gorge and launched an overnight attack on Dunai, the district headquarters of the western mountain district of Dolpa (see cover image). There they killed 14 policemen, while the civilian population cowered in terror. The death toll was to rise dramatically in April this year, when within a week Maoists guerillas stormed two police posts in west Nepal and left 70 policemen dead, some of them killed execution-style. By now, the data prepared by a human rights ngo in Kathmandu has begun to show more police deaths at the hands of Maoists than vice versa. These military 'victories' in the hills of Nepal are significant accomplishments for a motley collection of village youth who followed a handful of firebrand leaders to begin their insurrection by bumping off 'class enemies' with rudimentary weapons and talking headily about setting up aadhar ilakas ("base areas") in the remote regions. No one had imagined that the People's War would continue for so long or reach so far, and by all accounts, even the Maoists themselves, despite their claim to establish a proletarian dictatorship under a "New Democratic State", will have been surprised by their achievements so far. These are no longer romantic revolutionaries. They are battle-hardened fighters, and the only question remaining is whether their revolution will, or can, go anywhere. The origins For the general public in Nepal, the Maoists were quite an unknown entity until they burst into the scene in 1996. That is understandable in a country which has seen the communist groupings split, merge and split again so many times that only an acute observer will be able to navigate this history with ease. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) itself was no different and given that the left centre-stage since the restoration of democracy in 1990 had been dominated by the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), the Maoist party (and its earlier reincarnations) was perceived as just one among the conglomeration of factions that spanned the political spectrum from the CPN-UML onward to the extreme left. The origins of today's Maoists go back to the late 1960s. Following King Mahendra's seizure of state power in 1960 after arresting the cabinet and dissolving the elected parliament, all political parties were banned. Within the Communist Party of Nepal, there emerged two groups: one that preferred to work together with the king and the other that demanded the restoration of parliament. That difference of opinion was later formalised with a split that reflected the Sino-Soviet rift, with the pro-king faction allied to Moscow and the other to Peking. Despite the ban, like other political parties, the communist grouping opposed to the monarchy continued functioning, but given the prohibition in place, various local units had begun to operate independently. In this situation, two of the communist leaders who had made a name as radicals within the party, Mohan Bikram Singh and Nirmal Lama (who died last year), set about creating a new party apparatus. In spite of differences with their contemporaries, including with the founder of the Communist Party of Nepal, Pushpa Lal Shrestha, they succeeded in holding what they called the communist party's Fourth Convention (Chautho Mahadhiveshan) in 1974 and named their new party the Communist Party of Nepal (Fourth Convention). Its basic divergence was that while Pushpa Lal had always maintained the need for the communists to join hands with all forces (read, the Nepali Congress) in their fight against absolute monarchy, the Fourth Convention opposed any such inclination. The Fourth Convention also demanded the election of a constituent assembly to write a constitution (as opposed to Pushpa Lal's stance which called for the restoration of parliament), and its strategy was to begin a people's movement which could at the opportune moment be converted into an armed revolt. The top leadership of today's Maoists comes from this school. Meanwhile, quite unconnected with these happenings, an actual communist uprising took place in a corner of Nepal. This was in Jhapa, the southeastern-most district of the country and right across the border from the Naxalbari region in India. The Naxalite movement was well underway in West Bengal when, in April 1972, a group of young Nepali activists began a campaign to eliminate 'class enemies' in Jhapa. This turned out to be no more than a romantic adventure and was suppressed by the king's government in no time. A total of seven 'class enemies' were killed before the leaders were jailed and the movement ended. At its founding, the Fourth Convention came out vehemently against the Jhapa Movement, declaring: "While we support the spirit and sacrifice shown in the struggle against class enemies, the terrorist tactics adopted...cannot be called Marxism-Leninism. This is a form of semi-anarchy." The Fourth Convention denounced the Jhapa uprising, yet it did represent the extreme left in Nepal, and until the mid-1980s it remained the major player among the communist factions. In 1983, Mohan Bikram broke away and formed the Communist Party of Nepal (Masal) (masal meaning torch in Nepali). (In 1984, Masal became one of the founding members of the Revolutionary International Movement/RIM, a grouping of Maoist parties worldwide. The present-day Maoists have since replaced Masal within RIM.) Two years later, Masal split further into CPN (Masal) and CPN (Mashal). These divisions led to an erosion of public support for the Fourth Convention, ironically to the benefit of the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist), the party set up by the leaders of the Jhapa Movement. It was in the Mashal party that Pushpa Kamal Dahal (the Maoist supremo who goes by the nom de guerre of Prachanda) appeared on the top rung of leadership for the first time, and later became its general secretary. The other well-known present-day Maoist leader, Baburam Bhattarai, remained with Mohan Bikram. That was the situation until the launch of the 1990 People's Movement, which was undertaken by the Nepali Congress and a grouping of seven left parties, the United Left Front (ULF), against King Birendra's Panchayat system. Although the mother party, the Fourth Convention, became part of the ULF, neither Masal nor Mashal joined it. With other small leftist groups, they instead formed an alliance called the United National People's Movement, and only joined the People's Movement once the street protests had gathered momentum. The climactic moments of 6 April 1990, when police firing on the Kathmandu streets culminated in the capitulation of the old regime, is believed to have been the handiwork of this latter group - its having incited the demonstrators to try and storm the Narayanhiti Royal Palace. Following the restoration of democracy, the hardline left parties pressed for an election to a constituent assembly as a means of delivering a genuine people's constitution rather than have a document handed down by the "establishment". (The formation of a constituent assembly was in fact promised by King Birendra's grandfather, Tribhuvan, as part of the so-called Delhi Agreement of 1951 which led to the downfall of the 104-year-old Rana oligarchy. The Nepali Congress party itself had agitated initially for elections for a constituent assembly and only later accepted the general election as offered by King Mahendra in 1959.) Instead of a constituent assembly, however, some selected representatives from the Nepali Congress, the left, the royal palace and some independents were given the task of drafting a new constitution, which was promulgated in November 1990. That same month, four parties, including the Fourth Convention, Masal and Mashal, merged to form the Communist Party of Nepal (Unity Centre), with Prachanda as general secretary. The first general election was approaching at the time and there was pressure from within for the party to take part in it. Accordingly, the United People's Front (UPF) was floated as the political wing of the Unity Centre, and in the first parliament, the UPF emerged as the third largest group (with nine seats) after the Nepali Congress (110 seats) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) (69). (The latter, which remains today the all-powerful opposition party in Parliament, was a coming together of the Marxist-Leninists, which had become the largest leftist organisation by 1990, the remnants of Pushpa Lal's party and others of the left.) The Unity Centre held its first conference a year later in which the proposal for a "protracted armed struggle on the route to a new democratic revolution"was discussed and accepted. It was also decided that the Unity Centre would go underground although, in practice, it remained semi-underground. By the time the 1994 mid-term elections had come around, Unity Centre had divided between a Unity Centre headed by Nirmal Lama and another under the same name led by Prachanda. The UPF also fell apart, reflecting that split, with the group that supported Prachanda being led by Baburam Bhattarai. Both factions of the UPF approached the Election Commission for recognition. The one which supported Nirmal Lama was given recognition. Baburam Bhattarai then called for a boycott of the elections, an action that at the time was perceived more as a face-saving measure. In March 1995, Prachanda's Unity Centre held its 'Third Plenum', during which they foreswore elections (it is believed at the insistence of RIM) and decided to take up arms. It was during that meeting that the Unity Centre was renamed the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). In September the same year, the party's central committee adopted a "Plan for the historical initiation of the people's war" which stated that the "protracted people's war [will be] based on strategy of encircling the city from the countryside according to the specificities of our country. The Party once again reiterates its eternal commitment to the theory of people's war developed by Mao as the universal and invincible Marxist theory of war." (As far as the RIM is concerned, before 1996, the Maoists of Nepal needed - for the sake of their standing within the country - to claim membership in RIM, howsoever marginal that organisation may have been to world politics. The document cited above talks about the CPN (Maoist)'s "serious responsibility to contribute towards the further development of Revolutionary Internationalist Movement/RIM, of which our party is a participating member..." However, Nepal's Maoists have become the vanguard flag-bearers of the revolutionary movement worldwide, and it seems that it is the RIM which needs association with the Nepali Maoists to provide its very raison d'�tre.) This, then, was how thing lay when on 4 February 1996, Baburam Bhattarai presented the Nepali Congress-led coalition government of Sher Bahadur Deuba with a list of 40 demands related to "nationalism, democracy and livelihood". These included abrogation of both the 1950 and the Mahakali treaties with India (one on "peace and friendship" and the other on the sharing of the water on the western frontier river); introducing work permits for foreign (i.e. Indian) workers in Nepal; curtailing all privileges of the royal family; drafting of a new constitution through a constituent assembly; nationalising the property of "comprador and bureaucratic capitalists"; declaring Nepal a secular nation; and also details such as providing villages with roads, drinking water and electricity; and complete guarantee of freedom of speech and publication. Incidentally, these demands were not much different from the points outlined in the 1991 election manifesto of the above-ground united UPF. Bhattarai's covering letter contained an ultimatum that unless the government initiated positive steps towards fulfilling those demands by 17 February 1996, "we will be forced to embark on an armed struggle against the existing state." Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba was on a state visit to India when the Maoists struck in six districts on 13 February, four days before the deadline had even expired. (Even today, the mainstream left seeks to lay the blame for the Maoist problem squarely on the door of the Nepali Congress, since the fighting began when the latter was running the government. But, as the Congress spokesman and a minister at that time, Narahari Acharya, points out, Baburam Bhattarai's 40 demands contained just two points more than a similar list presented on 31 December 1994 to Prime Minister Man Mohan Adhikari, who was heading the minority government of the CPN-UML. Acharya's argument is also that, demands or no demands, the Maoists would have begun the uprising since that was the kind of violent political agenda they had opted for.) The Congress factor Although realignments in party positions provided the Maoists with a theoretical premise for beginning the People's War, the political situation on the ground too proved conducive for just such a move. This had mainly to do with the historical antagonism between the Nepali Congress and the left. Latter-day partners in the fight against absolute monarchy, the relationship turned acrimonious as the campaigning began for the first general elections in 1991. When the Nepali Congress won an outright majority in the Pratinidhi Sabha (parliament) and Girija Prasad Koirala became prime minister (his first of four tenures in the last 11 years), this distrust took an ugly turn as left activists in outlying districts began to face harassment at the hands of the local administration at the instigation of local Congress politicos. Although such incidents occurred in many parts of Nepal, it was more pronounced in the area where the Maoists today hold sway-the western hills. This is a region characterised by extreme poverty and with an economy that has for long been sustained by remittances of males who have migrated to India for work, a fact recognised by the Nepal Human Development Report 1998, which lists all the hill and mountain districts of western Nepal as scraping the bottom of the socio-economic barrel. In addition, the society is semi-feudal in nature with the kind of exploitation that goes hand in hand with it. But unlike a certain fatalistic attitude that pervades the region even further west, there was a crucial difference in the adjoining districts of Rolpa and Rukum. These two districts had been a stronghold for revolutionary communist activists since the late 1950s and throughout the autocratic Panchayat years. As far back as 1980, during the national plebiscite when people were asked to choose between a 'reformed' Panchayat and a multiparty system, the army had to be put on alert in Rolpa since the Fourth Convention had called for a boycott of the vote. The large village of Thawang, which had voted overwhelmingly communist in the first parliamentary elections of 1959 at a time when the Nepali Congress had managed a landslide throughout the country, not only boycotted the referendum but also replaced the portraits of the king and queen that were mandatory in government offices with those of Marx and Lenin. By the time of the 1991 (second) parliamentary election, their presence in Rolpa had become so strong that the United People's Front won both the seats from the district. In neighbouring Rukum, the UPF was there right behind the Nepali Congress. The Congress-UPF rivalry soon developed into a no-holds-barred fight, and each side gave as good as it got. The leftists began 'taking action' against those they considered exploiters, usurers and cheats. The victims generally tended to be from the Nepali Congress for the sole reason that the local influential who had originally been with the Panchayat system had mostly entered the ruling party. The Congress people had the advantage of their party ruling at the Centre and many did not hesitate to use the state machinery against their opponents. Perhaps it was a personal failing of the prime minister, Girija Prasad Koirala, with his much-attributed antipathy for communists, that he did little to control such acts of harassment and even terror. The police arrested UPF supporters on trumped-up charges and, in some cases, tortured them. As the 1992 Human Rights Yearbook published by the human rights organisation, INSEC, recorded, in Rolpa, "political workers, employees and teachers have been the victims of arrest and torture because of political revenge... There are many incidents that political parties with support from the ruling power had taken political revenge in this district." A section from the 1993 Yearbook of the same organisation states: "In Libang [the headquarters] of Rolpa district regarded as a stronghold of United People's Front an armed force of 80 men including six inspectors and District Police Officers...launched a suppression campaign... Women were misbehaved, chickens and goats were slaughtered and eaten, and citizens were widely charged with false allegations." There was retaliation from the other side also, as this entry notes: "District Development Committee member Shahi Ram Dangi, a NC [Nepali Congress] supporter, was beaten by three persons... Both of his arms were broken." The abuse of state power continued, meanwhile. Not to be cowed down, and in line with their stated aim of armed struggle, in 1995, the Maoists (and the UPF) began what has been called the Sija Campaign (after Sisne and Jaljala, the two main mountains of Rolpa and Rukum) to propagate the Maoist ideology. In the words of one of those who took part in it, as told to the Revolutionary Worker, the weekly newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party of USA, it consisted of a central training programme after which the cadre went back to practise what they had learnt. The purpose was "to arouse the masses and heighten political consciousness. These teams of leaders worked with the masses building roads and bridges, and farming..." The Maoists continued to clash with the Nepali Congress workers, but also with the CPN-UML cadres. (Although the CPN-UML and the UPF had worked out seat adjustments for the 1991 elections, the strong showing by the UPF in the western hills seems have alarmed the CPN-UML into viewing the UPF as a potential competitor for left-minded party workers as well as voters.) Meanwhile, the response of the Nepali Congress government was a police operation codenamed Romeo (R for Rolpa) to "win the heart and minds" of the people. The home minister at that time was Khum Bahadur Khadka, elected from Dang District, neighbouring Rolpa to the south. Rolpa, Rukum and Dang all fall under Rapti Zone (zone being the larger administrative boundary than a district), and it is believed that Khadka perceived the spread of the extreme left in his home zone as something of a personal slight, hence the ruthlessness with which Operation Romeo was conducted. In a December 1995 interview with The Independent weekly, Baburam Bhattarai said that "around 1500 policemen, including a specially trained commando force sent from Kathmandu, have been deployed to let loose a reign of terror against the poor peasants... there has been indiscriminate ransacking and looting of properties of common people by the ruling party hoodlums under the protection of the police force. More than 10,000 rural youth, out of a population of 200,000 for the whole district, have been forced to flee their homes and take shelter in remote jungles." The INSEC Human Rights Yearbook 1995 reports: "The government initiated...suppres-sive operations to a degree of state terror. Especially, the workers of United People's Front were brutally suppressed. Under the direct leadership of ruling party workers of the locality, police searched, tortured and arrested, without arrest warrants, in 11 villages of the district. Nearly 6000 locals had left the villages due to the police operation. One hundred and thirty-two people were arrested without serving any warrants. Among the arrested included elderly people above 75 years of age. All the detained were subjected to torture." While all this was going on, the Nepali civil society, represented by the Kathmandu intelligentsia, the human rights activists, the mainstream media, among others, seemed more or less unaware of the extent of state repression. Had they been more alert and warned the government off, there was a possibility that the insurgency would never have acquired the intensity it did over the years. (And this was not to be last time the opinion-makers in Kathmandu Valley would fail their hill brethren.) In retrospect, with the elite classes in the capital looking the other way, the police operation succeeded in thoroughly alienating the local population of Rolpa. As one activist put it to the Revolutionary Worker, "Like Mao said, they picked up a rock to drop it on their own feet." So, while on the one hand the political wing of the Maoists, the UPF, had had the door to electoral politics closed on its face through de-recognition by the Election Commission and they had adopted armed struggle as their programme, there was outright suppression going on at the hands of the state in these far-flung districts. Shyam Shrestha, a former member of the Unity Centre and now an editor of a leftist monthly, calls these the "push and pull factors" that led to the Maoist uprising. The militant project In Lenin's view, the 'objective conditions' for a revolution consist of "the impossibility for the ruling classes to live and rule in the old way, the so-called crisis 'from above', and, on the other, the unrest of the oppressed classes which do not want to live in the old way, the crisis 'from below'; extreme aggravation of the poverty and suffering of the oppressed classes; and a considerable increase in the activity of the people." Lenin's prescription for a classic uprising may not be obtaining in Nepal, a land of diverse geography and demography. That could explain why, apart from the short-lived Jhapa uprising, all of Nepal's communist parties had continued to defer revolution to a future time, and chosen 'mass struggle' as the way forward. So, what was it that led the Maoist leadership to decide that the time was ripe for an uprising and where did they garner their confidence for the project? And what of the Marxist 'subjective conditions' that "the revolutionary class must be ready and able to undertake revolutionary mass action which is sufficiently strong to overturn the old government"? Could the Maoists have interpreted the 1990 upheaval and the following years of uncertain politicking as having given way to a revolutionary situation in the kingdom? The freedom that came with parliamentary democracy saw a babel of voices demanding a stake in the making and running of the state. Most notable among these were the ethnic groups. Constituting nearly 35 percent of the population, the ethnic communities have had a historic sense of marginalisation from the national centre of power, a grievance that goes right back to the century-long Rana era. In the changed circumstances after 1990, it was natural for ethnic assertion to come to the fore. As far back as 1992, British scholar Andrew Nickson had warned: "The future prospects of Maoism in Nepal will...depend largely on the extent to which the newly elected Nepali Congress government addresses the historic neglect and discrimination of the small rural communities which still make up the overwhelming bulk of the population of the country...[which] would mean a radical shake-up of the public administration system in order to make it both more representative of the ethnic diversity of the country and more responsive to the needs of peasant communities." The state's reaction to the incipient ethnic movement was ingenuous at best. Apart from pro forma gestures such as allowing the broadcast of news over the national radio in regional languages and the establishment of the National Committee for the Development of Nationalities, it did nothing to recognise concerns relating to language rights, under-representation at the policy-making level, introduction of affirmative action, the "Hindu" nature of the state (as opposed to a secular one), and so on. Resentment continued to build up (and continues to simmer). In fact, in the first few years after 1990, there was, perhaps exaggerated, apprehension thamong the ruling classes that the greatest challenge to the viability of the Nepali nation-state came from a possible ethnic conflagration a la the erstwhile Yugoslavia. Having decided to abandon the electoral path, and having had to revert to developing a 'ground level' power base, the Maoists were quick to identify their ethnic discontent and try to ride it to their purpose, taking advantage of the supposed correlation between ethnicity and poverty. They thus added ethnic demands as a flavour to their ideological programme of class struggle. In the leaflets distributed on the first days of the People's War, they declared: "To maintain the hegemony of one religion (i.e. Hinduism), language (i.e. Nepali), and nationality (i.e. Khas), this state has for centuries exercised discrimination, exploitation and oppression against other religions, languages and nationalities and has conspired to fragment the forces of national unity that is vital for proper development and security of the country." This was also no doubt a tactically motivated insert, since the Maoist strongholds of Rolpa and Rukum contain a significant population of Magars, who form the largest ethnic group in the country. Interestingly, the Maoist leadership consists overwhelmingly of Bahuns (Nepal's hill Brahmins), the very group that ethnic activists hold responsible for their historical marginalisation. Whatever the motivation, the Maoist strategy seemed to have served its purpose in this region, for a large section of Magars of the central hills embraced the CPN (Maoist) enthusiastically. Meanwhile, after initially flirting with the Maoists, the leaders of many ethnic groups have begun to argue that Nepali Maoism may not be the answer to the challenge of communal discrimination, for the state power will likely remain with the Bahuns no matter how the contest ends. In this reading, the Magars of the western hills, who have died in disproportionate numbers in the People's War, are no more than cannon fodder. The fact that the Maoists have not been able to take advantage of the caste-ethnic divisions on a country-wide scale may actually point to the true class character of the struggle they champion. It is after all a 'class war' with ideological underpinnings and its roots can be traced to the general sense of discontent in the aftermath of the 1990 movement. As the parliamentary exercise proceeded, nothing significant happened in terms of improving the social and economic conditions of the people. Governance remained in shambles as political parties concentrated on trying to reach for and stay in power. The gap between the poor and the rich grew wider even as conspicuous consumption of a kind never before witnessed soared in the capital city. Writes Baburam Bhattarai in his 1998 monograph, Politico-Economic Rationale of People's War in Nepal: "Nepal has slid to the status of the second poorest country in the world in terms of physical and cultural developments; 71 percent of its population fall below absolute poverty level; 46.5 percent of national income is in the hands of 10 percent of the richest people..." For all its flaws, the pre-1990 system had introduced certain developmental advances which, in the following decade, sparked significant social departures. For example, the network of highways championed by the Panchayat leadership made it easier for village youth to venture out to see the lights of Kathmandu, and literacy allowed them the access to the tools to understand, compare and contrast their lives with those of people elsewhere. For many young Nepalis, politicised by literacy and the ability to read the newspapers and yet frustrated by poor and incredibly unresponsive education, the age-old route down the mountains to menial labour in the plains was no longer a path that could be trod unthinkingly. This labour migration to the plains was, after all, the historical safety valve which kept the lid on political upheaval over the decades. But now the pressures were being bottled up. The sense of neglect of the young, without the lived experience of the Panchayat-era ennui, became all the more acute when the parliamentary democracy achieved in 1990 failed to 'deliver'. French social scientist, Anne de Sales, who has studied the Magars of the central hills, writes that the villages are today full of individuals "who have had experience of realities other than those of the daily life of the village". She adds, "Whether their personal journeys have been in search of a better education or, more commonly, in search of work, whether they have gone to the flatlands of the Tarai, to the capital, or abroad, they have come into contact with a modernity which, even if it is not viewed as 100 percent positive, marks a Rubicon. The perception of rural areas like theirs as dead ends and going nowhere, forgotten by the rest of the world, discourages the young people, who are more inclined than in previous times to join a militant project for a society where they would have a more respected place and a better life." de Sales was writing about the Magar youth of Rolpa, but she could as easily have been referring to the young anywhere in Nepal's hills. This disparity would not have been significant had it not been for the fact that after 1990 politics had become more participatory and political discourse more open and a larger number of people more politically conscious. And a politically aware youth population steeped in poverty and seeing no rescue from the direction of the mainstream party politicians was more likely to be swayed by Maoist rhetoric. Rhetoric which claimed, in classic ideological language, that "This state that does not manufacture even a needle in the name of self-reliant and national economy, has handed over the whole economy of the country to a dozen families of foreign compradors and bureaucratic capitalists." Kilo Sierra 2 Looking back at the last five years which have coincided with the People's War of the CPN (Maoist), and pondering over the state of the above-ground politics that the underground rebels were fighting, it becomes obvious why the latter increased their reach in quantum jumps. The 1994 elections had thrown up a hung parliament that gave the country one minority government and as many as five coalition ones. Everything, including the Maoist uprising, took a back seat as the parties in parliament tried out every previously-inconceivable ideological permutations in their joust for power. When the attacks first began in the remote hills, there was a certain nonchalance apparent among the politicians in Kathmandu. Even as they denounced the violent methods of the Maoists and, for public consumption, some repeated ad nauseum calls for a "political settlement" to the problem, the fact is that the politicians of all hues preferred to view Nepali Maoism as a simple law-and-order problem that could be tackled by the police. Bhim Bahadur Tamang was law and justice minister at the time and he told a newspaper that since the Maoists were not waging an ideological battle, they would have to be put down by force. The home minister, Khum Bahadur Khadka, was being equally forthright when he said: "We are doing our best to bring them under control." If it was a problem to be 'controlled', it certainly was not done to perfection, as events that have played out since indicate. If it was to be expected that the mainstream communists would view the Maoists kindly, that did not happen. In 1997, the mainstream communists formed a coalition government with the Rastriya Prajatantra Party, representing the discredited political force from the Panchayat era. It went one better than the Nepali Congress and tried to introduce a 'black law' that would have given the police wide-ranging powers against 'terrorists' (the law was also trying to address a police complaint that the Maoists they caught were being released all-too-easilyby the courts). Following widespread protests from the intelligentsia and human rights groups, and also from international organisations, the effort was aborted. Later, in 1998, the CPN (Marxist-Leninist) (a splinter from the CPN-UML) joined the Nepali Congress government as a junior partner barely two months after the infamous police action known as 'Kilo Sierra 2' operation had been launched. Following in the violent footsteps of Operation Romeo, Kilo Sierra 2 was at once the result of several colluding factors: an undisciplined police force that had all-too-quickly been politicised beyond recognition; a political class of ruling and opposition parties that saw the Maoists as an aberration best liquidated; a national educated class that refused to demand performance from the politicians even while fashionably opposing the proposed 'black law'. (It is not entirely clear, but Kilo Sierra 2, i.e., KS2, is said to be an anagram of the radio code S2K, or Search to Kill.) Operation Kilo Sierra 2 was undertaken by the Nepal Police in 18 districts of the country for over a year. Although the men in blue denied throughout the existence of such an operation, from mid-1998 onwards the killing of Maoists and their supporters escalated to reach the highest point ever in the last five years of the People's War. If Operation Romeo had concentrated its fire on a particular area in the western hills, Kilo Sierra 2 was spread out across the 'Maoist-affected' regions of the country. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
