Will the Maoists spoil Nepal’s victory party?
The Maoists control 80% of the countryside, have set up provisional governments in those areas, and are well-armed. The King’s capitulation would not have been possible without their support.
Rejecting the King’s announcement, the leader of the Maoists, who uses the nom-de-guerre Prachanda (the terrible one), said that the political parties had committed an “historic blunder” by ending the protests. He also announced that the Maoists would immediately blockade Kathmandu and other major towns until a special assembly, with the power to draft a new constitution for Nepal, was formed.
[tags]Nepal[/tags]
This is a revolution we have here in Nepal — and it’s the height of cretinism and crass opportunism that the old parliamentary parties have made this incredibly-shortsighted rotten compromise with a monarchy-dictatorship which should have been tossed into the Dumpster of History yesterday, instead of being given new life as some undead zombie regime.
Fact is, there is absolutely NO alternative to a Constituent Assembly and a republican government in Nepal. And for this reason, the maoists are sitting pretty — no matter any short-term political setbacks — and certainly no matter how much and how loudly the [petit-]bourgeois chatterati ‘disapprove’ of it in the outside world.
If you do a search on the Green Left Weekly site you’ll find a lot of background info on Nepal:
http://www.greenleft.org.au/
And Tariq Ali’s recent comment here
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0425-24.htm
is considerate of the situaton and gains.
If you check out the interview here
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1994/169/169p22.htm
and the review of the tactical debate here:
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1998/307/307p21.htm
you’ll see that the situation there isn’t ‘sudden’ or so clear cut.
I grant you that there is a lot of pressure to accept a compromise so it remains to be seen what will actually transpire –as it isn’t as simple as ‘Maoists’ versus “old parliamentary parties”. That is far too crude. The situation is much more fluid than that and the people of Nepal have a strong history of dedicated struggle as readings from GLW confirm.
But the main point is that we aren’t there so we can only watch and learn and do our best to support with soldiarity.
But the liberal democrats — which seem to have a shallow support base — may be the major problem in this context outside the regime itself with their talk of peoples power having done enough and the possibility of international intervention if the war continues. See this weblog for examples of this style of thinking:
http://www.blog.com.np/
This was the wing (social layer)that stymied the People Power ‘revolution’ 20 years ago in the Phillippines. But there the ‘Maoists” of the NPA were totally sectarian towards the city based upsurge. As a consequence of this the Phillippines CP entered a period of splits and infighting such that its power base has now collapsed as new left forces have arisen out of the wreckage(fortunately).
Sison et al who led the CPP suffered from one of the many fatal flaws in Maoism, I think, despite his assertion that they had transcended them.(I have actually spent time touring with Sison and ex members of the NPA here in Australia)
So there is a major tactical challenge here that has to be negotiated somehow in way of uniting the city based movement with that in the countryside.
And in this regard the history of India has been marked by some very potent Maoists currents especially that of the Naxalites which now as the CPI(ML) are doing great things in that country.
So ‘neo-Maoism’ can be a lot of things.
dave riley