Aditya Adhikari is a journalist who has written widely on Nepali politics. Based in Kathmandu, he wrote a regular column for the Kathmandu Post between 2008 and 2012.
TWO REGIMES
The international media flocked to Nepal to cover the royal massacre in 2001 and discovered a raging insurgency. From then on, a steady flow of journalists came to explore what they perceived to be an exotic, anachronistic rebellion. By late 2004, reports in both the domestic and foreign press often stated that around 70 per cent of Nepal’s countryside was under insurgent control. This was perfectly adequate shorthand: the Maoists were present and possessed influence in almost every part of the country. But the degree of their control varied considerably across districts. Their power was not absolute even in their strongholds, namely the hills and mountains of the mid- and far-western regions. Even within districts that were almost entirely controlled by the rebels, the state maintained a presence in the capitals. The Maoists did wield power in other areas, such as the hills in the eastern region, but their ability to exercise control over the population was more limited, given the frequent incursions of state security forces into those areas.
Nonetheless, the Maoists had successfully established a formidable parallel regime, and both sides strove to make territories under their sway impermeable to their enemy. The army barricaded sensitive installations and imposed curfews at dusk. In Musikot, the headquarters of Rukum, for instance government offices and schools were surrounded with barbed wire and mines.1 Visitors from Maoist-controlled villages were treated with suspicion and often harshly interrogated. Officials in Bajura district’s capital taunted villagers who came to collect government-provided rations: “You join Maoist marches and then presume we will give you rice?”2 Travelling beyond the district capitals was also difficult, as people had to pass through multiple checkpoints where they had to explain the reasons for their travel. A trader in Baglung complained that his business had almost collapsed: “We need to get special permission from the local administration to supply dry food, batteries and other goods [to the villages.]”3
Meanwhile, Maoists posted sentries in their base areas to guard against incursions by the army. Outsiders who wished to enter these areas required prior permission from the rebels. Local residents, on the other hand, were discouraged from leaving their villages as they could leak sensitive information to the state security forces. And if too many people left the villages, who were the Maoists to indoctrinate or depend on for their needs? Villagers were hence required to obtain travel documents from the rebels if they wished to travel to the cities. If they wished to travel to India or the Gulf states for employment, they had to acquire a travel document and pay a tax. In some cases, travel was forbidden altogether. These measures were not always effective. Large numbers of people evaded the rebels and fled Nepal’s villages during the years of the conflict, to seek work and shelter in the cities or in India. On occasion, therefore, the Maoists took more drastic measures to deter movement. In Kalikot district, for instance, they destroyed a bridge over the Karnali River, thus cutting off fifteen VDCs from the outside world.4
AMONG THE BELIEVERS
Some joined the Maoists out of compulsion or desperation, as when security forces killed their family members and they had nowhere else to turn for protection. Some were coerced into joining the party; while some of them came to believe in the rebels’ worldview, others fled at the first opportunity.5 Then, among the thousands of young people who joined the party during the war, there were also those who saw the movement as an escape from their circumscribed social lives and opportunities. The Maoists offered them an avenue for personal advancement and a medium for expressing their rage against society.
Devi Prasad Dhakal of Sindhupalchok exemplified the latter category. Born into straitened circumstances, he was sent to Kathmandu to work as a domestic servant at the age of seven. It was only two years later, when he went back to his village, that he began primary school. Later education posed its own challenges. The secondary school in which he enrolled was over an hour’s walk from his house. He was always late for school, as he could leave home only after collecting fodder for the cattle and worshipping the family gods. This bred in him resentment towards his father and a hatred of religious rituals. He took to stealing grain from home and selling it for pocket money. In the absence of a supportive, encouraging environment, he failed his SLC examination. This foreclosed opportunities for going elsewhere, and he remained in his village, helping his brothers till their small plot of land.6
But Dhakal wanted more from life than his peasant ancestors. He grew increasingly bitter towards his family and their ways and thirsty for adventure and independence. In late 1998, he ran away to Pokhara, the second-largest city in Nepal’s hill region. After a period of sleeping on the streets, he found a job as a busboy and dishwasher at a restaurant in the city’s bustling tourist area. There he came under the influence of a college student who secretly supported the Maoists. Dhakal was a willing protégé; he felt he had finally found a way to enlarge his narrow existence. Politics had always attracted him. As a schoolboy he had heard that the communists stood up for the poor, and this had led him to become involved in the UML’s student wing despite his family’s disapproval. More recently, he had experienced the brutality of power first-hand. During one of his first nights in Pokhara, when he was sleeping on the street with some child beggars, a group of policemen had accosted them, beaten them up and taken all their money. Later, the son of a prominent Nepali Congress politician had shown up with a group of friends at the restaurant where Devi Prasad worked. They were rude and noisy, and Dhakal muttered that the politician’s son looked like an animal fit for a zoo. Someone in the group overheard him, and they called the police. Dhakal was again beaten and locked up for the night. He thus became a convert to the idea of violence against authority.
Dhakal was initially tasked with distributing pamphlets, putting up posters at night and taking food and other items to rebels in jail. Gradually his responsibilities increased, and on 31 July 2000, he quit his restaurant job and went underground as a full-time Maoist activist.
*
Thus Devi Prasad Dhakal became one among many who left their families and homes to join a secretive, hierarchical and tightly knit group whose members were constantly on the move. They had to flee from villages when they heard that state security forces were approaching. Those assigned to the Maoist military had to trek through difficult terrain in the hills and mountains, often under cover of darkness, to reach the site of planned attacks. Those assigned political duties had to travel from village to village taking the party’s ideology to the population. They had to walk long distances to deliver messages for their leaders, meet their counterparts from across the country and establish party committees in new areas.
The hardships were severe. They often had to go hungry and sleep in the open. Then there was the ever-present fear of injury, torture or death at the hands of the security forces. Many who joined the rebels in an initial surge of enthusiasm soon fled back home, despite the possibility of reprisals.7 But for many others, it was the first time they had become part of a collectivity with a fixed goal, and this offered a kind of fulfilment and liberation. The party satisfied their desire for power and tamed their discontent and restlessness, and it was easy to find camaraderie and companionship among fellow rebels who often came from similar backgrounds.
They were taught to see themselves as exemplars of a new janabadi culture in the making, a culture that would encompass the entire nation when the party took power and established a Maoist New Democracy (Naya Janabad). Janabad is the term for democracy commonly used by Nepal’s communists, and as such emphasizes socio-economic rather than political equality. (In contrast, the words prajatantra, and later, loktantra, have been used to describe political systems that prioritize the values of liberal democracy.) The adjective janabadi is usually translated as “democratic” although “proletarian” better conveys its meaning.
The Maoists defined their janabadi culture in opposition to the dominant culture of the countryside, which they viewed as being caste-ridden and superstitious. Their activists were encouraged to deliberately transgress traditional norms. They often ate beef, for example, breaking the powerful Hindu taboo. The janabadi culture also opposed the “bourgeois” culture of Nepal’s urban middle class, where individualism reigned and Hindi films and images of Western consumerism shaped desires. Maoist activists were taught to embrace fierce collectivism and reject inwardness. As the Maoist leader Jayapuri Gharti wrote in a letter to a junior activist, “You have been fulfilling your role but I feel that is not enough... You seem rather introverted. You should open up and participate more actively in debates and discussions. You should break out of the world’s social formalities and expand your relationships.”8
These activists mostly came from rural backgrounds, and during the war they travelled extensively through villages across the country. Meanwhile the state security forces maintained a strong presence in urban areas, whose large populations were mostly unsympathetic to the Maoist cause. Whenever rebels from rural areas visited the cities, they would find themselves lost and isolated. An activist assigned to Kathmandu wrote to a fellow comrade in another region during a particularly trying moment: “I hope you have been informed about the situation in the valley. The army has captured all of our responsible comrades. Only a few of us remain. We are not in touch with any of the responsible senior comrades. What should we do? What shouldn’t we do? We are in great confusion.”9 This was after the collapse of the second cease-fire when the army had virtually decimated the Maoist organization in the city.
In such moments of strain and hardship, the young Maoist activists would have found ideological succour in what their leaders had taught them and the books they had read. To instil janabadi values in their cadres, the leadership encouraged them to read the revolutionary fiction that had inspired them in their own youth. The Nepali translation of the slim Chinese novel Bright Red Star was especially popular among the younger Maoist activists.10 Those who found themselves alienated in the city might have identified with Tung-Tzu, the protagonist of Bright Red Star.
The story begins in the 1930s. Tung-Tzu’s father goes to join the Chinese revolutionaries, and then a local landowner kills his mother. He spends part of his childhood among communist guerrillas (who are depicted as universally trustworthy, brave and willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause of their country’s liberation). But for reasons of safety, he is later sent to work at a rice shop in the city. Tung-Tzu has to conceal his identity, loses touch with the party comrades, and is treated harshly by his employer.
The rice shop owner is an avaricious, unscrupulous man who sells rice mixed with stones. Even when the whole city is starving, he hoards grain, hoping to sell it at a more lucrative time. Tung-Tzu witnesses how the shopkeeper bribes the police, and soon learns that the shopkeeper is also on good terms with the landowner who killed his mother and was complicit with Japanese imperialists. I began to understand clearly, Tung-Tzu says, “that the oppressive local landowner, the profiteering shopkeeper of the city, the police captain, the forces of the White Army and the Japanese imperialists all belonged to the same group.”
These words must have resonated with the Nepali Maoist activist who had landed in the city. Like Tung-Tzu, he would have seen all the hostile aspects of society as branches of a single oppressive power. He would have likened himself to the young Chinese revolutionary in the novel, and gained a stronger faith in the Maoist cause. Seeing how Tung-Tzu eventually return to the guerrillas, avenges his mother’s murder, and participates in the Communist capture of Beijing, he might have thought, as his superiors insisted, that a Maoist victory was historically inevitable.
An article by the activist Khil Bahadur Bhandari echoes Tung-Tzu’s feelings about the city/country divide. While spending two nights in the town of Hetauda amid fears of being captured by the army, he wrote:
People in the city live an extremely confined life. “They are status-quoist and opportunists. They lack empathy; they don’t care whether other people live or die. They are only concerned with their own happiness... But people in the villages are not status-quoists and opportunists. One person’s suffering draws on everyone’s empathy. A new ideology and new power have taken the villages by storm, and they are far ahead of the cities in the [political] movement.
GOPAL KIRATI
Gopal Kirati was one of the Janajati leaders whom the Maoists won over to their side after persistent efforts. He was born into the Khambu community in 1955, in the mountain district of Solukhumbu in eastern Nepal. His memoir offers a familiar leftist narrative of rural oppression and victimhood during the Panchayat regime. Kirati recalls how his family suffered under the pradhan pancha (local chief) in his village. He was in his early teens when his father died, and his mother had to sell their family land, livestock, jewellery and their prized radio set to pay off their loans to the pradhan pancha. Kirati quit school after seventh grade and worked as a porter for six years, carrying loads for tourists trekking through Nepal’s mountains. Despite the hardships, Kirati enjoyed travelling and observing the various peoples and cultures across the country.
Like many others who would later join the Maoists, Gopal Kirati was initiated into the communist movement by a relative. Hari Narayan Thulung, his brother-in-law, was a schoolteacher affiliated with one of the communist factions. In 1983, when the twenty-eight-year-old Kirati was considering joining the British Army, Thulung tried to dissuade him by giving him a copy of Seema, a play by the popular leftist poet-musician Rayan. The play depicted the sufferings of Nepalis recruited into the British army. It had a shattering effect on Kirati. He recalled that after reading the play, he said to his brother-in-law: “We are indeed a wretched lot. I must do something with my life. What should I do if I don’t join a foreign army?” Hari Narayan replied, “We have to launch a revolution in the name of the country and the people.”11
However, in succeeding years, Kirati’s attraction to communism was superseded by his growing empathy for the ethnic struggle. While staying in Kathmandu during his travels, he became involved with various organizations working to preserve and promote Kirati culture. Kirati made friends with fellow Janajatis who worked as labourers in the tourist and carpet industries. He helped organize celebrations during important Kirati festivals such as Yokwa, Chasok and Sakewa. He told his friends Kirati folk tales that he had heard from his mother as a child, the same stories he used to tell his childhood friends back in the village. “Looking back,” Gopal wrote years later, “I feel that it was through telling stories that I started to become a leader.”12
Gopal Kirati participated in the 1990 movement for democracy, but refused to support any of the major parties. Along with some friends, he published and distributed pamphlets which, while supporting the cause of democracy, prioritized ethnic claims. “There should be democracy, not Brahminism (Bahunbad hoina, prajatantra hunuparchha),” was their message. “Ethnic rights should be guaranteed, the state should be made secular.” On 6 April Kirati took part in demonstrations in Durbar Marg, the street in front of the royal palace. He was badly beaten by the police and had to get eight stitches on his head. He was still in hospital when he heard the news that the king had agreed to dismantle the Panchayat system and restore multi-party democracy. The news caused widespread jubilation, but Kirati was unmoved. By now he firmly believed that violent struggle alone could bring about a real social transformation: “I believed that a new political system could only be established through the sacrifice of thousands of martyrs.”13
Like many other ethnic activists, Kirati started his own organization, the Khambuwan National Front (KNF), soon after the establishment of parliamentary democracy. The KNF aimed to forge a more militant ethos than other ethnic organizations. “The 1990 constitution enabled the oppressed nationalities to rise up,” wrote Kirati, “but it did not give them their rights.”14 As the constitution did not allow formation of parties along ethnic lines, the particular grievances of ethnic groups remained unaddressed. This, according to Kirati, was what led him to choose the path of armed struggle.
The Maoists’ declaration of People’s War in 1996 emboldened Gopal Kirati. He issued a public statement indicating “qualified support” for the Maoists. On 22 July 1997, the KNF carried out bomb attacks in three locations in Bhojpur and Solukhumbu districts. In each location the target of the attack was a Sanskrit school – a potent symbol of upper caste culture and tradition. Kirati had launched his struggle for ethnic autonomy.
Kirati’s statement came at a time when few people openly supported the Maoists. It attracted the attention of Maoist leaders, even though his organization was relatively obscure. Thinking that an alliance with Kirati could gain them support in the east, the Maoists sent Suresh Ale Magar to meet him. Later, Baburam Bhattarai invited him to Gorakhpur, a town in North India.15 In April 1998, following negotiations, the two publicly declared that they had formed an alliance.
But the alliance fell apart after seven months. Kirati denounced the Maoists and resumed his armed struggle independently. The Maoists managed to placate him, only to antagonize him again. This became the pattern of their relationship. As both sides were caught in the perils of war against the state and had few allies, each would periodically reach out to the other. Before long, quarrels would erupt and Kirati would announce that he had parted ways with the Maoists.16
The friction arose partly because the Maoists sought not only to cultivate Kirati but also to educate him. In a May 1998 piece about the Khambuwan National Front, Bhattarai praised Kirati’s writing for expressing rage against ethnic oppression and commitment to armed struggle. The KNF’s desire to ally with the Maoists was commendable, he said, but Kirati seemed guided more by passion than reason. “Revolutionaries need both intellect and emotion,” Bhattarai wrote. “Although emotions dominate in the early phase, intellect must eventually take precedence over emotions.”17
In Bhattarai’s view, the KNF’s singular focus on ethnicity was misguided. Kirati had not understood that ethnic groups had evolved with the development of productive forces, he wrote. There are no inherent differences between the various ethnic groups. Rather, the characteristics of each ethnic group were determined by their position in the changing relations of production. Because the KNF had not grasped this properly, its members perceived the upper castes of the hills as their sole enemy and main obstacle to their liberation. Their demand for autonomy hearkened back to the tribalism of a bygone era, when the country was divided into many tiny principalities. But a return to the days of self-contained and self-governing ethnic units was no longer possible or desirable. The KNF’s struggle should be directed not merely against the upper castes, but rather against the ‘feudal thought and behaviour’ within all caste and ethnic groups.18 KNF members should develop class consciousness and ally with the poor and oppressed from all groups.
Although he was not in principle opposed to these Maoist beliefs, Gopal Kirati was deeply suspicious of them. Through the 1970s and l980s, communist leaders who would later form the UML had preached the doctrine of the primacy of class in the eastern hills. Kirati supporters were told that their traditions were retrogressive, and urged to break from them. But after the UML transformed into a parliamentary party, its predominantly upper-caste leaders had abandoned their Kirati cadre. “The UML reduced Marxism, which emphasizes the need to fight against all kinds of injustice including ethnic oppression, to the trite slogan of class liberation,” wrote Kirati. “Today it has degenerated into a party of Brahminical counter-revolutionaries.”19 Kirati believed that by emphasizing class and undermining the importance of ethnicity, the upper-caste communist leaders had deliberately tried to perpetuate their dominance over the marginalized ethnic groups.
As part of their effort to discipline and educate Gopal Kirati, the Maoists tried to merge the Khambuwan National Front into their own organization. In October 2001, following negotiations, the KNF was officially merged with the Maoist-affiliated Limbuwan Liberation Front to form the Kirat National Front. Kirati proposed that he should lead a separate armed force, but the Maoist leaders rejected the idea. They believed that Khambuwan cadre were undisciplined and needlessly violent in their dealings with the population, and had to be tamed. They also insisted that a centralized military structure was necessary for the success of the armed struggle. They demanded that KNF cadre be merged into the People’s Liberation Army. Kirati and his supporters, chafing at what they perceived to be Maoist high-handedness, once again severed ties with the Maoists. On some occasions, the cadres of the two organizations beat up and even killed one another.
Eventually, however, Kirati was won over. On 15 July 2003, his organization permanently merged with the Maoists. It had become clear that he would not be able to wage armed struggle independently. His organization remained small and negligible, while the Maoists had become immensely powerful. They commanded substantial influence even in the eastern hills. Moreover, by now Kirati was convinced that the Maoists were genuinely committed to ethnic demands, even though their top leaders were predominantly upper-caste. On several occasions Maoist chairman Prachanda met Kirati privately to convince him of the Maoists’ positive intentions. Kirati was given membership in the Maoist central committee and the United Revolutionary People’s Council (URPC), the Maoists’ parallel government.
The degree to which Kirati had internalized the Maoist point of view was manifest in a speech he made in Khotang district in January 2004. The occasion was a mass meeting where the Maoists declared the establishment of the Kirat Autonomous Region People’s Government and appointed him as its head. In the past, said Gopal Kirati, the struggle of the Kirati people had been of a purely ethnic nature. But as Kiratis had now achieved leadership of the parallel government under Maoist leadership, they should not seek to dominate the members of the other castes and ethnicities who lived in the region. Otherwise they would be no different from the feudal rulers. Rather, class should now take precedence over ethnic claims. The Maoists would work to ensure that the jana sarkars represented all the caste and ethnic groups in the region. Those who did not accept this policy would be guilty of ethnic chauvinism.20
1 Kishore Nepal, Under the Shadow of Violence, Kathmandu: Centre for Professional Journalism Studies, 2005, p. 96.
2 Ibid., 109.
3 Ibid., p. 36.
4 Sushil Sharma, Napurine Ghauharu (Wounds that Cannot be Healed), Surkhet: Manavadhikar Janautthan Kendra Nepal, 2008 (2065 v.s.), p. 45.
5 See Human Rights Watch, “Children in the Ranks: The Maoists’ Use of Child Soldiers in Nepal”, vol. 19, no. 2(C), February 2007.
6 “Rabindra”, Devi Prasad Dhakal, Ujyalo: Gajuri Byarek Breksammako Atmabrittanta (Light: My Story up to the Gajuri Barrack Break), Kathmandu: Jhilko Prakashan, 2011 (2068 v.s.).
7 During a visit to Jumla district during 2005, the journalist Sushil Sharma met a group of schoolchildren who had been attracted by Maoist propaganda and joined the party. Unable to bear the hardships, they had soon returned home. But the local Maoists threatened the school authorities with consequences if they allowed the children to re-enroll, and urged them to rejoin the party. Sharma, Napurine Ghauharu, pp. 56–63.
8 Mohit Shrestha, Jyudo Sapana (Living Dreams), Kathmandu: Akhil Nepal Janasanskritik Mahasangh, Kendriya Samiti, 2009 (2065 v.s.), p. 120.
9 Lekhnath Neupane, Chitthima Janayuddha (The People’s War in Letters), Kathmandu: Vivek Sirjanshil Prakashan, 2008 (2065 v.s.), p. 55.
10 Li Xintian, Chamkilo Rato Tara (Bright Red Star) [1974], translated by Sitaram Tamang, Kathmandu: Pragati Pustak Sadan, 2003 (2060 v.s.). In her study on youth participation in the Maoist rebellion, Ina V. Zharkevich notes how the majority of her informants mentioned this novel as their favourite book. She further writes that newcomers to the Maoist military camps in Kathmandu were each given a copy of the novel, which, along with an English–Nepali dictionary and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, was considered essential reading for PLA fighters. Ina Zharkevich, “A New Way of Being Young in Nepal: The Idea of Maoist Youth and Dreams of a New Man,” Studies in Nepali History of Society 14, No. 1 (2009), p. 86.
11 Mao, ‘On Protracted War’.
12 Mao, ‘On Protracted War’.
13 Ibid.
14 Dhaneshwar Pokhrel, Beni Morchako Smriti: Shabdachitra (Memories of the Beni Front), Kathmandu: Akhil Nepal Lekhak Sangh, 2010 (2067 v.s.), p. 3.
15 Interview with senior Maoist leader, January 2013.
16 For details see Dambar Krishna Shrestha ‘Ethnic Autonomy in the East’, in People in the People’s War’, Kathmandu: Himal Books, 2004, p. 17–40.
17 Bhattarai, ‘Khambu Sangharshako Rooprekhabare Kehi Tippani (Some Comments on the Form of the Khambu Struggle)’, pp. 202–6 in Nepali Krantika Aadharharu, p. 202.
18 Ibid., p. 205.
19 Kirati, Sarvahara Netritvako Saval, p. 128.
20 Ibid., p. 170.