MAOIST CONUNDRUM

As Nepal struggles with its escalating insurgency, outsiders watch with mixed emotionsBY

JOHN NARAYAN PARAJULI

In February 1996, when the seeds of the Maoist movement were sown in Nepal, no one except, perhaps, its founders thought that it would consume the nation and threaten the existence of the state in less than a decade. The casual attitude towards the rebels was partly driven by the widespread belief that radical communism had become an anachronism, nearly extinct except for a few dark corners of the world like Cuba and North Korea. Certainly it couldn’t take hold in Nepal, a self-proclaimed zone of peace and a kingdom to boot.

The Maoist movement received scant attention at first, both at home and abroad. Nine years on, it has become a headline grabber around the world and daily front-page fare in the Nepali press. Many who read of the insurrection sigh with sadness or shiver with fear. Others see it as good news, a revival of radical communism and a way to make long-overdue revolutionary changes in a system that has ignored the welfare of its citizens. Although no one condones the Maoists’ use of violence, they do sympathize with the sentiments that sparked the revolution.

The response in many countries to Nepal’s insurgency is ambivalent, though the sympathy is pretty much on the wane due to the rebels’ violent ways. People who keep an eye on Nepali affairs are on shifting perceptual ground. Except for those with a need, usually political, for a thoroughly partisan view, outside observers are both critical and supportive of the government and Maoist cause in equal measure.The Indian academia is becoming pessimistic about Nepal. It sees a need for an honest broker to end the internal war. The fear is that Nepal is slowly failing and that a failing Nepal poses a serious threat for India’s turbulent northeast and other regions affected by revolutionary movements of their own.Many Americans feel sorry when they hear stories about the violence in Nepal, says Chitra Tiwari, a Washington-based, left-leaning analyst. “While they do not support the Maoists’ revolution, many of them are sympathetic towards causes like poverty, backwardness and government negligence to the needs of the people in the interior parts of the country.” Ambivalence is a common reaction.During its initial days, few outsiders knew much about the insurrection. Many of those who were aware of it were leftists who held a romanticized view of the Maoists. People who shared the ideology of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the RIM—the umbrella organization of revolutionaries around the globe—saw the revolution in Nepal as a flagship project to be promoted. For many years, though, the rest of the world was unaware of the growing insurrection.

All that changed after the royal massacre in 2001. The event was front-page news around the world, and attention focused on Nepal soon spread to the Maoist problem and the escalating conflict. As the world learned more about the situation and the rebellion turned bloodier, the level of violence shocked many scholars who had once held an idealized view of the movement.“Most of the Americans I have met are critical of both the Maoists and the military, and they also disapprove of the U.S. government’s military aid to Nepal,” says Biswo Nath Poudel, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Analyst Chitra Tiwari says that most Americans don’t know where Nepal is, let alone care about what is going on in Nepal. But he adds that those who know are against the United States supplying military hardware to the “royalist government” in Kathmandu. “Tucked into the upper stories of the Himalayas, Nepal hardly seems ground zero for the Bush administration’s next crusade against ‘terrorism,’ but an aggressive American ambassador, a strategic locale and a flood of U.S. weaponry threaten to turn the tiny country of 25 million into a counterinsurgency bloodbath,” writes Conn Hallinan, a lecturer in journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, an American think-tank. Concerns like Hallinan’s are slowly finding a place in the U.S. policy toward Nepal.Recently the American Congress tied human rights strings to military aid to Nepal. Late last year, the Congress passed a bill that requires the Nepali government to fulfill human rights obligations in order to receive military aid. It’s the responsibility of the United States government to monitor whether the provisions of the new law are implemented, states a draft of a letter prepared by an American academic who is leading a campaign to petition the Congress against providing unchecked military aid to Nepal. Perceptual ambivalence guides both official and unofficial policy towards Nepal. Americans fear that if they don’t support the government, Nepal could end up as another failed state. In today’s interdependent world threatened by terrorism, that is perceived to be more dangerous than even a hostile but stable neighbor. That’s the take of not just the Americans but also the Europeans as well. The Economist’s (Dec. 4) editorial summed up the predicament: “Like a severely disturbed individual, a failed state is a danger not just to itself but to those around it and beyond.”Many foreigners link the rise of Nepal’s Maoists to the fall of the absolute monarchy in the spring of 1990 and the subsequent introduction of parliamentary democracy. They think that democracy failed to live up to the expectations of many Nepalis, especially the youngsters. As in other countries, the fall of authoritarianism led quickly to widespread corruption on all levels, social and political instability, bickering politicians and abuse of power. All of that fed frustrations among large segments of the population. Outsiders draw parallels between Peru and Nepal. They see poverty and backwardness as key to the emergence of strong revolutionary movements in both countries. Both have experienced sharp and growing divisions between the city and the countryside. Researcher and scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Stephen L. Mikesell believes that “appealing geo-cultural analogies” can be drawn between Peru and Nepal: Both countries straddle major mountain ranges in their respective continents; in both countries isolated valleys and high ridges have preserved a wide variety of cultural traditions. Neither country has a recent history of a foreign military conquest and occupation, in contrast to mid-20th century China where Mao ran a successful “peoples war.” Both Peru and Nepal have large rural indigenous populations subordinated to small ruling elites who use race, caste and regionalism to rule. Even the restoration of democracy in Nepal deluded many. “After the introduction of democracy and a more open economy, wages remained virtually stagnant and GDP growth averaged an abysmal 2.3 percent annually until 1996,” writes Bertil Lintner, a Bangkok-based Swedish journalist who has written extensively on Nepal. The National Planning Commission, though, puts the figure at 4.8 for the 1992-2000 period. “This means that the population growth rate of 2.4 percent has eaten up all the economic growth,” says Lintner. Seventy-one percent of the country’s wealth is in the hands of the top 12 percent households, and only 3.7 percent of the national income reaches the poorest 20 percent of the country’s families, says Lintner, attributing the figures to Nepal South Asia Centre, a Kathmandu-based think-tank. Other foreign scholars also see Nepal’s huge social disparity and backwardness as one of the reasons why the country became a fertile breeding ground for a Maoist movement. But many scholars, though they find an element of truth in the premise, don’t agree. “If social and economic marginalization alone were responsible for the emergence of the communist revolt, the hill districts in the Karnali, Seti and Mahakali zones would be far more likely candidates,” writes Saubhagya Shah, a research scholar, in the book “Himalayan ‘People’s War’: Nepal’s Maoist rebellion.” He says the emergence of the Maoists is “not only because of their [the people in Maoist-affected areas] grinding poverty and chronic food shortage but also because of the nature of the terrain and their remoteness from state centers.” Despite the dispute about local factors, all observers agree that international connections have contributed to the Maoist rebellion. The Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the RIM, has promoted Nepal as a flagship project for their utopian red empire.
A radical viewThe RIM sees the Maoist movement in Nepal as one of the most significant developments in the last few years, not only for the movement but for the worldwide revolutionary struggle as well. The outbreak of the “people’s war” in Nepal in 1996 has given a much-needed impetus to the RIM’s cause worldwide. Its members feel that the tremendous outpouring of revolutionary energy unleashed by the “courageous initiation of the people’s war by the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist has been a source of great encouragement for the comrades” in all the parties and organizations of the movement. The RIM has often been blamed for derailing the peace process in Nepal and encouraging the Maoists to keep fighting. They believe that settlement of an issue through war is the highest form of revolution and one of the central tasks that all revolutionaries who follow Mao’s teaching must adhere to. According to RIM literature, if seizure of power by armed force was possible in China, it is possible—even desirable—in other countries as well. Mao said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” His followers still believe that, more than half a century later. International Maoists argue that if the movement in Nepal fails, the entire RIM movement will suffer a setback.“It seems that RIM regards the Maoist movement in Nepal as the most important current armed revolutionary movement in the world,” says Tatsuro Fujikura, an anthropologist from the University of Chicago, who follows Nepali affairs. “They are staking a lot of hope on it.”Nepali Maoists have openly talked about their RIM connections and its influence on their movement. In an interview with a journalist from Latin America in early 2001, Maoist supremo Prachanda revealed that there was international involvement in the whole process of preparing and initiating the insurrection: “First and foremost, there was the RIM Committee. There was important political and ideological exchange.” The Maoists say that, theoretically, they have no illusions about Nepal’s place in the global revolution as a whole. They describe the Nepali people’s army as a detachment of the whole international proletarian army. The Maoists of Nepal see their armed struggle based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism; from three perspectives, the international, the Nepali and the Indian, writes B. Raman, director of the Tropical Studies Centre in Chennai, who keeps a close eye on Nepal.Nepal’s Maoists have talked openly about rising up against Indian ruling elites.“Ultimately, we will have to fight the Indian army,” said Prachanda in the interview with the Latin American journalist. “That is the situation. Therefore, we have to take into account the Indian army. When the Indian army comes in with thousands and thousands of soldiers, it will be a very big thing. In one way it will be a very good thing. They will give us lots of guns and lots of people will fight them. This will be a national war.” Prachanda also sees the large Nepali diaspora in India as the torchbearers of revolution there.Statements such as these make Indian officials nervous. Some intellectuals in New Delhi are already talking about the need to reorient Indian policy towards Nepal and, perhaps, even to include the Maoists within their policy framework.
The Indian outlookIntellectuals in New Delhi feel that Indian policy towards Nepal has become obsolete and wrongheaded. They say that the country will have to break away from the legacy of supporting the monarchy as the symbol of order and stability in Nepal. Nepal watchers like S. D. Muni, whose views have often been unwritten policy guidelines for mandarins in South Block, feel that the monarchy has become a part of the problem and that it cannot be part of the solution to the present crisis. Scholars like Muni believe that Indian policy urgently needs to relate to grassroots and popular forces, including the Maoists. “India should therefore work with Nepal towards redefining its political order so as to help the rebels shed their arms and violent methods for a respectable and democratic place in the mainstream of Nepali national politics,” he wrote in the Sahara Times in September last year, before Prime Minister Deuba’s visit to New Delhi. Muni doesn’t believe that the Maoist insurgency is behind the depressing developments in Nepal. He sees Nepal’s problems as a product of more than 50 years of political distortions culminated by a parliamentary political system that failed utterly to keep its promises of social justice and economic wellbeing.Many in India now seem to believe that the monarchy has contributed to the failures of democratic governance and that it has kept the parties and leaders divided and promoted infighting. The Indian government is now also deeply worried about the Maoists’ strong anti-India rhetoric.“There is a growing feeling that the Nepali Maoists are taking an anti-India line,” says Jug Suraiya, an editor of The Times of India. “The link between Nepal’s Maoists and Indian Maoists is also causing concern.” Even though many Indians see the Maoists as a minor irritant that disrupts tourism and trade, the mood is rapidly changing in New Delhi.A Maoist victory in Nepal will embolden Indian revolutionaries. Already radical communist parties on both sides of the border are collaborating to form a red zone across the border. Such collaboration is unlikely to sit well with other regional states, even the Chinese. China views Nepal’s revolutionaries—they refuse to refer to them as Maoists—as a threat to regional security.
Chinese perceptionsThe Chinese share the ambivalent feelings about the Maoists with the United States, India and the Europeans. Despite being the children of Mao’s revolution, the Chinese are worried by the flourishing Maoist movement in Nepal, which they think is bad for both Nepal and for the region, says Trailokya Aryal, a student of international relations at Peking University in Beijing. However, adds Aryal, they see a movement that was initiated by oppressed and downtrodden people, and they empathize with the roots of the movement. At the governmental level, the Chinese see the Maoist movement as an indirect security threat to their own territorial integrity. China fears that if the movement spills across Nepal’s southern border, it could provoke Indian intervention. That would be unacceptable to China, which still sees India as its rival and a security threat. The world’s view of Nepal is converging, and a few points are clear: At the intellectual level, the world loathes the ongoing violent struggle between the government and the Maoists. Although they have sympathy for the problems that spurred the rebellion, they do not condone the Maoists’ brutal methods. They also sympathize with the government’s efforts to combat the violence and its duty to protect its citizens, but they are disgusted by the flagrant violations of human rights and the loss of civil liberties. As the Economist notes in its editorial, the government needs to be told by its friends that its brutal methods are increasing support for the Maoists rather than defeating them. Nepalis living abroad increasingly feel that both the Maoists and the government have distorted views about their chances of defeating each other.The conflict has opened up a broad range of issues for discussions, touching on deep economic and social disparities as well as the constitutional crisis. All the issues need to be addressed to end the war. The conclusive view outside Nepal is that the demands and the concerns of the Maoists for social inclusion are legitimate but that the Maoists’ means of achieving them are brutal and unacceptable. Many think without the Maoist movement, the issues of social marginalization would never have come to the fore. But most observers say outsiders are neither entirely critical nor supportive of either side. Perceptual ambivalence abounds. They believe that those at the helm, King Gyanendra and the Maoist supremo Prachanda, are less than willing to give up their brinkmanship. To those watching, their firm belief in guns is protracting the problem.