THE MAOISTS OF NEPAL: Three
perspectives
by B.Raman
"Ultimately, we will have to fight with the Indian
army. 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. But we are not
afraid of the Indian Army."---Prachanda, leader of the Maoists of
Nepal, in an interview to a Maoist journalist of Latin America
---------
The Maoists of Nepal see their armed struggle, based on
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, from three perspectives---the international, the
Nepalese and the Indian.
While analysing the international situation, they admit
that the proletarian movement all over the world has suffered a set-back,
which, however, they consider as temporary, and that China, the birth
place of Maoism, has been under the control of a counter-revolutionary
group since the death of Mao. They attribute the set-back suffered
by the international proletarian movement to international revisionism,
modern revisionism, revisionism in China and Russian revisionism.
They are, at the same time, confident that the world
would see in the medium term a revival of revolutionary fervour.
According to them, the Shining Path guerillas of Peru sowed the seeds of
this revival and, though they have suffered a set-back at the hands of the
rightist opportunists, the spark of the revolutionary fire has since
spread to Nepal and India from where it would set off a new prairie fire.
To quote Prachanda, the General Secretary of the
Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist): "Objectively, there is a
dialectical relationship between the People's War in Nepal and the whole
international situation and movement. And what we think, and I
think, is that a new wave of revolution, world revolution is beginning,
because imperialism is facing a great crisis. Some people are saying
that economically and culturally imperialism is in deeper crisis than
before the Second World War. There are so many symptoms of radical
change that the people's movements are seeing around the world. And
from an economic, cultural and political basis, we see that a new wave of
world revolution is beginning. This is a fact. We have to
grasp this question because just like Mao said, there will be 50 to 100
years of great turmoil and great transformation. From a practical
point of view, the People's War in Nepal is contributing to making and
accelerating this new wave of revolution. And it is contributing to
the organization of the international communist movement on a Maoist
basis."
They attribute the success so far achieved by them in
Nepal to the correct lessons drawn by them by studying the experiences of
the Maoist movements in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Philippines,
Iran, Turkey and Peru.
Prachanda describes the influence of the international
proletariat on their movement as follows: " In the whole process of
this final preparation...there was consistent international involvement.
First and foremost, there was the RIM Committee (Revolutionary
Internationalist Movement). There was important ideological and
political exchange. From the RIM Committee, we got the experience of
the PCP (Communist Party of Peru), the two-line struggle there, and also
the experience in Turkey, the experience in Iran, and the experience in
the Philippines. We learned from the experience in Bangladesh and
from some experience in Sri Lanka. And there was a South Asian
conference that we participated in. At the same time, we were also
having direct and continuous debate with the Indian communists, mainly the
People's War (PW) and Maoist Communist Center (MCC) groups. And this
helped in one way or another. It helped us to understand the whole process
of People's War.
"Therefore, what I want to say here is that one of
the specific things about our People's War, the initiation of our People's
War, is that there was international involvement right from the
beginning. Right from the time of preparation, up to the time of
initiation, and after the initiation, there was international involvement.
Help, debate and discussion was there. It was a big benefit for
us. It was a big help for the Nepalese masses. Theoretically we are
clear, and every time we insist, that the Nepalese revolution is part of
the world revolution and the Nepalese people's army is a detachment of the
whole international proletarian army. This is clear. But
during preparation for the initiation and after the initiation we came to
understand this, not only in a theoretical sense, but came to see the
practical implications of this proletarian internationalism, what
practical role it played. We made the point to the RIM Committee
that when the People's War in Nepal faces setbacks, then it will not only
be a question for the CPN (Maoist), but will directly be a question for
the RIM as a whole.
"People's War, Maoist Communist Center and others
in the revolutionary struggle in India have been involved in this process
in one way or another. We understood right from the beginning that
we should try to involve more and more sections of revolutionary masses in
the process of our initiation. Therefore, beforehand, we made some
investigation of Bihar in India. We went to Andhra Pradesh to look at the
struggle there and we tried to understand the practical situation and
practical problems of armed struggle."
From the Nepalese perspective, they attribute their
initial concentration on Western Nepal like the Rolpa and Rukum districts
and the success achieved by them in building up revolutionary bases there
to the following reasons:
* It is a remote mountainous area with poor
communications where the control of the Karhmandu-based Government is
the weakest. It is ideal terrain for a revolutionary movement.
* The influence of the Hindu religion is also the
weakest in that area. The strong Hindu influence in other areas of
Nepal acts as an obstacle to the spread of the revolutionary fervour.
* In Western Nepal, the people mostly belong to the
Mongolian ethnic groups, which are free from the upper caste chauvinism
of the Hindu-dominant areas and the feudal influences of the Terai and
other areas. The people of Mongolian origin have generally been
more receptive to Marxist ideas than people of non-Mongolian
origin. Moreover, historically, they have made very good fighters.
At the same time, the Maoists realised that if they
focussed only on building their bases in West Nepal and did not start
operating in other parts of Nepal simultaneously, the security forces
would easily be able to encircle and crush them. Therefore, while
concentrating their initial efforts in the West, they simultaneously
launched their armed struggle in other parts in order to force the police
to disperse their strength all over the rural areas.
They see the success of their armed struggle as having
to pass through the following three stages:
* The armed struggle against the Nepalese police, which
they claim to have already defeated and de-moralised. They claim
to be confident that the Nepalese Police is no longer in a position to
counter them effectively.
* The armed struggle against the Royal Nepal Army
which, according to them, is yet to start because the Army, which is
directly under the King's control, is fighting shy of a confrontation
with the Maoists. Its role till now has been confined to helping
the police in defusing improvised explosive devices. It has not
undertaken any search and destroy or other counter-insurgency
techniques. The Maoists do not want to take the initiative in
attacking the army. Instead, they would prefer that the army comes
into the rural/interior areas to attack them so that they could confront
and defeat it.
* The armed struggle against the Indian army.
The Maoists apprehend or even foresee that when they ultimately proclaim
the establishment of a People's Republic of Nepal either in the areas
presently under their control or in the whole of Nepal, if and when they
capture Kathmandu, India might not be a silent spectator of their
success and that its Army might intervene to crush the Maoists.
They proclaim themselves as confident of being able to take on the
Indian Army, with the back-up support of the Maoists of India in general
and of Bihar in particular. At the same time, they have been
discussing how to confront the Indian army if it intervenes to crush the
Maoist revolution in Nepal.
Prachanda says:
* "We decided that we should initiate People's War
from different parts of the country. We should centralize in
mainly three areas-East, Middle, West-and the capital. Cities
should also be another point, not for armed clashes, but for propaganda
and such things. And one other area where we should concentrate
work is in India, because more than seven million Nepalese live in
India. Therefore India should be the other point where we should
make efforts to resist the ruling classes. "
* "Ultimately, we will have to fight with the
Indian army. 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. But we are not afraid of the Indian Army because, 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. And it will be a very big thing. They will have many
difficulties intervening. It will not be so easy for them.
But if they stupidly dare...they will dare, they will be
compelled. They will do that stupidity. We have to prepare
for that. And for that reason we are saying we will also need a
particular international situation. And for us this has to do
mainly with India, Indian expansionism. When there is an unstable
situation in India and a strong mass base there in support of People's
War in Nepal and there are contradictions within the Indian ruling
class-at that point we can seize, we can establish and declare that we
have base areas, that we have a government."
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For
Topical studies, Chennai. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com
)
