Nepal’s Maoists are a dead end but don’t tell them I said so because they might shoot me. This is a piece for the March issue of Socialist Resistance.

Nepal is living through the sort of Maoist insurrection that is not supposed to happen in the twenty first century. Most of its inhabitants are living in conditions that should not exist in this century either. Eighty per cent of them are peasants. The average income is £140 pounds a year. It is a society with a vicious caste system in which the majority of villages lack electricity, clean water or roads. The Maoist forces in the countryside and mountains are able to isolate the capital city and have driven government forces from much of the country.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s struggles led by the Communist Party and other left organisations forced King Birendra to introduce a new constitution. The Nepali Congress Party won the 1991 elections benefiting from the wave of struggle. Girija Prasad Koirala became prime minister. Koirala’s government was defeated in no-confidence motion and the 1994 elections led to the formation of a Communist government. This government was dissolved by the king.

The Communist Party split. In 1996 the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) launched its armed struggle by attacking six government and police outposts simultaneously in mid-western Nepal. These were the first of a number in the same area over the next few years. The death toll has been high, around 13 000 but the majority of these have been killed by the Nepalese army.

The leader of the other wing, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), Madhav Kumar Nepal, is in detention. This party also has a degree of mass support and may eventually form a coalition with the Congress Party.

‘Prachanda Path’

The party’s leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who prefers to be called Prachanda (“The Fierce One”) argues “the basic political strategy of the Party is to free the Nepalese society from feudalism and imperialism through the bourgeois democratic revolution. The military strategy of People’s War (PW) is objectively based on the goal of achieving this political strategy.”

Prachanda may be fierce but he certainly isn’t modest. The party’s ideology is called ‘Prachanda Path’. What Marxists call a popular front, an alliance with sections of the ruling class, he claims is “a new dimension of ingenuity and creativity to the communist movement with the proposed new idea of ‘Development of Democracy in the 21st Century” (A Brief Introduction to the Policies of the C.P.N. (Maoist))-Com. Prachanda).

The party seems undecided on whether or not it wants to execute or exile the king. This is not an unreasonable demand given that the counter insurgency strategy of his army is strangling democracy and killing thousands of peasants. Now the Maoists say that they are prepared to limit themselves to a bourgeois democracy and are prepared to allow the country to remain a monarchy. This is not incompatible with bourgeois democracy but it has nothing to do with Marxism.

The CPN’s principal international reference point is Sendero Luminoso in Peru. Like its Peruvian co-thinkers the CPN has had a history of murdering members of other political organisations, particularly those on the left. It is estimated that they now have between 10,000 to 15,000 fighters, and are active across the country, with many parts completely under their control. It also shares Sendero Luminoso’s reliance on the peasants as the instrument of revolutionary change and in a country in which agriculture and services are the principal ways people survive this is hardly surprising.

The country was in a state of emergency from 2001 until 2005. Prior to that it had had a dozen governments in as many years. King Gyanendra ordered the army to crush the Maoists. The army took this as permission to indulge in mass murder supported by police and paramilitaries. Nepal now has the highest number of unexplained disappearances in the world. More than 1,200 people have been taken by the army. Few soldiers have been punished for abuses.

In October 2002 Gyanendra sacked the elected government. Within hours all potential protest leaders, including the prime minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, were in detention or under house arrest. Other politicians and activists were under “Kathmandu arrest”. Phone lines were cut for a week, mobile phone connections for more than two months. The army moved into newspaper offices and television studios. There are still no news bulletins on FM radio. Nepalis now get their news from the BBC.

After the army killed more than 3,000 people in 2002, the bloodiest year of the war, both sides declared a ceasefire in January 2003.

This lasted until August when the army shot 21 suspected Maoists and their sympathisers. Earlier this year the major found responsible for the 21 murders in Doramba was cashiered and sentenced to just two years in prison. From the time of that incident the Maoists have been making their appeals to the bourgeois parties for a united front against the monarchy.

General strike

Nevertheless the party does have support in the cities. Press reports of the elections in February this year emphasised the low levels of voter turnout. This was undoubtedly because the only candidates standing were more frightened of the army that the CPN. Support for the general strike was strong but the Maoists’ use of intimidation makes it impossible to gauge if this was inspired by political sympathy or by fear.

It seems apparent that the Nepalese state is not capable of defeating the CPN. The army has not understood that winning the support of the peasantry is not done by killing and terrorising them. It has not managed to inflict any significant defeats on the Maoist fighters and is in danger of running out of ammunition due to boycotts on arms sales by Britain and India. Many of the CPN’s demands on women’s rights, abolition of the caste system, healthcare and sanitation reflect the desires of the most oppressed people in Nepal.

The Nepalese ruling class has no solutions to the problems facing its people. Last year the Confederation of Nepalese Industries (CNI) held a conference on how to raise Nepal’s growth rate. It also looked at how to achieve a monthly income of 10,000 Nepali rupees (£23) for all. It suggested sending more people to work abroad so they could send home remittances, selling 25,000 megawatts of hydro-electricity to India each year, bringing in 2m tourists a year (to a country with virtually no infrastructure) and building export-processing zones producing goods for the markets of India and Tibet. This is not a strategy for ending underdevelopment, more a prescription for more poverty and dependency.

However the CPN too is a dead end for Nepalese society. Its principal strategy is to allow a different section of Nepal’s bourgeoisie to run the pitifully underdeveloped country. Its reliance on the peasants means that it is basing itself on the most backward sections of the nation. Nepal’s tiny working class does not feature in the CPN’s programme. It is obliged to terrorise workers to get them to strike. This is the very opposite of the self-activity of the working class which Marxists see as the key to changing society. Although many of the party’s demands are progressive it is not offering a real way forward. Nepal’s future development is intimately bound up with the progress of the working class movements in India and China and on this the Maoists have nothing to say. Their website address is below.

http://www.cpnm.org/new/English/english_index.htm

21 February 2006