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352 A Nepalese Story 353 Chapter 21 A PEOPLE S WAR Given Nepal s proximity to China it was natural that communism would find a political voice in the lead up to the Rana dynasty s final years The Communist Party of Nepal CPN was founded in Calcutta in 1949 but on pressure from the Indian government banned by Nepal three years later In 1954 the party s first congress was held clandestinely in Patan one of the Kathmandu Valley s ancient capitals resulting in the declared objective of replacing the monarchy with a republican constitution The plan was to achieve this by holding elections for a Constituent Assembly which in turn would work out the constitutional details Their pipe dream ended a year later when King Tribhuvan passed away His son Mahendra of stronger mettle than his father had no intention of compromising his position at the top of the Nepalese government for the sake of a handful of communists or anybody else He nevertheless removed the ban on the Communist Party in 1956 as a precautionary measure before wooing both the Soviet Union and China for aid When Mahendra indulged in his brief experiment with parliamentary democracy in 1959 the CPN campaigned like any other political party gaining 7 of the popular vote and four out of the 109 seats Small fry compared with the landslide performance of the Nepali Congress Party but nonetheless a decent showing for a party with little history and poor representation outside the capital A year later however Mahendra tired of his democratic experiment and promptly banned all political parties the CPN included During the next decades of Panchayat rule the ban on political activity fostered a simmering discontent that swelled the ranks of activists right across the political spectrum The CPN was no exception However Nepalese communists were in a quandary They were struggling to accommodate the philosophical split between Khrushchev and Mao that occurred soon after Stalin s death The followers of the Marxist Leninist programme inspired by Khrushchev and his disavowal of Stalin sought to achieve a Nepalese republic by working legally within a democratic framework The Maoists on the other hand were committed to violent Prachanda leader of the Maoist insurgency 2002 Prachanda the nom de guerre of Pushpa Kamal Dahal 1954 raises the red salute at a training camp for his guerrilla commanders and party leaders in Rukum As the only photographer Prachanda trusted Dinesh Shrestha shadowed the Maoist leader throughout the conflict and kept his photos secret to ensure no one knew what Prachanda looked like At one point Dinesh Shrestha was captured by government forces and imprisoned with some of his photographic record confiscated and probably lost Courtesy of Dinesh Shrestha

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A Nepalese Story 356 confrontation aping the Great Leader s exhortation for continuous class struggle particularly as they saw evidenced by the Cultural Revolution The former moderate group called themselves the Communist Party of Nepal Marxist Leninist CPN M L for short The Maoists when they finally united under one banner a process that took almost twenty years became known as CPN Maoist To start with these developments moved forward clandestinely But in 1980 following increasing pressure among the general populace the more amenable King Birendra his father Mahendra having died in 1972 agreed to democratize in part the Panchayat system of government As a result political parties were allowed to function openly again Ten years later in 1991 Birendra was pressured into abandoning the Panchayat system altogether and subsequently called a general election In the meantime the CPN M L had combined with another Communist party the two renaming themselves CPN United Marxist Leninist or UML for short the evolution of Nepal s communist parties is complex to say the least In this first general election the UML won 69 out of 205 seats a fair showing a poll at this time showed that 30 of the party still believed that the King was an incarnation of Vishnu Three years later in a second general election the UML won 88 seats enough for them to be asked to form a coalition government For the non Maoist faction everything seemed to be moving in the right direction Nepal s parliamentary democracy appeared stable and the UML had grown to be a major player None of this assuaged the Maoists however On the contrary In September 1995 the leaders of CPN Maoist approved a plan for a full blown armed insurrection against the state and four months later they launched their first attack on a police station in the Rolpa district in the Rapti zone The leaders of CPN Maoist were from the western hill country mostly high caste Brahmins but from impoverished families Pushpa Kamal Dahal later known by his nom de guerre Prachanda meaning fierce was the acknowledged leader Charismatic a gifted orator pragmatic by nature he remained under cover during most of the ten year insurgency He had been elevated to his position by the older Mohan Baidya known as Kiran who had entered underground communist politics much earlier but recognized Prachanda s superior leadership Then there was Baburam Bhattarai the more public face of CPN Maoist an intellectual steeped in Marxist theory with a PhD from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi his thesis was entitled The Nature of Underdevelopment and Regional Structure of Nepal a Marxist Analysis These three men had witnessed and lived to no small degree the depredations of the Nepalese peasantry and were deeply committed Rolpa was a natural choice for the Maoists initial foray A heavily forested area only 10 of the land was cultivatable and the typically small plots of land hardly provided for much more than a subsistence living Many seasonally migrated to India to earn extra income Ethnically the population was Magar and an isolated subgroup of Magars at that In the early 1990s access to Rolpa was tiresome two days drive from Kathmandu to the district capital Libang and then a day or two s trek to neighbouring hamlets The area was neglected even by hill country standards a factor that had attracted so much attention from US aid programmes Consequently Rolpa became a draw for aspiring Maoists in their attempts to woo the locals for a class struggle In April 1992 during district elections Rolpa received a visit from Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala the youngest of the Koirala brothers and the same who had helped stage the jute strike in Biratnagar all those years ago He was now the bearer of the Nepali Congress Party mantle and had been asked to form a government when the previous UML coalition collapsed Koirala arrived in Libang for a rally but was heckled to a standstill by a crowd of several hundred Maoist sympathisers As he retreated brawls broke out between rival groups By degrees Rolpa had become the place to be for aspiring combatants eager for training in guerrilla warfare and indoctrination in Maoist thought But their growing numbers and creed of violence created tension in the community at large In October 1995 during a religious festival in a Rolpa village the Maoist cadre staged a provocative revolutionary song and dance session Violence immediately erupted resulting in injuries to more than one hundred and fifty people most of them belonging to the Nepali Congress Party Reprisals were swift The government dispatched more than two thousand policemen to restore order and according to general reports they ransacked houses and engaged in indiscriminate beatings torture and rape Violence on the part of the authorities at this scale was unheard of and shocking Thousands of Magars from Rolpa and Rukum a district to the north fled from the area many joining the Maoist cause once they dared return home DECLARATION OF INTENT By 1996 the movement had gained critical mass At a gathering of more than 10 000 sympathisers in Libang Prachanda announced that the time had come to launch a class struggle Concurrently in Kathmandu Baburam Bhattarai was making it official On February 4 he presented a letter to the prime minister s office outlining forty Maoist demands that in summary aimed to transform Nepal into a republic confiscate land from feudal landlords end privileges for the monarchy and settle a score of other issues The ultimatum ended We would like to inform you that if the government gives no positive indications towards this by February 17 we will be forced to adopt the path of armed struggle against the existing state power Viewing the Maoists as a petty annoyance in the western hills the government didn t even bother responding The People s War was about to begin Early attacks on police stations were aimed at stealing weapons and equipment and not taking life Prachanda believed this would spread a message that they were seeking change and not violence for its own sake And they certainly needed weapons For the first attack thirty six Maoists could boast just one rather rusty but functioning rifle acquired from Tibetan Khampa rebels whom we met in Controlling the Margins In subsequent attacks the Maoists also targeted landlord loan records burning them to win round indebted peasants to the cause But inevitably violence escalated on both sides And as the rebels became better armed the attacks got larger and bolder By 2000 the Maoists were beginning to roam the countryside without hindrance causing the authorities to retreat Soon only eight of the original thirty nine police stations in Rolpa remained manned and a similar situation existed in the Rukum district The 357 government was beginning to lose control outside the capital and not just in the western hills The insurgency was also making gains in the east In September 2000 a particularly violent attack took place at Dunai a district capital in the remote north western Dolpo region and the first such district capital to be targeted Almost 600 Maoist guerrillas departed their base in the Rukum district and over several days trekked over the 4 523 metre high Jang La northwards to where Dunai was situated They were spotted by the authorities and a forty eight strong police contingent was promptly flown into Dunai as reinforcement using a nearby airstrip Nevertheless the Maoists prevailed In a ferocious attack lasting six hours they killed fourteen policemen and took control of the police station local government offices and jail They also forced the local bank to open its vaults and walked off with the equivalent of fifty million Nepali rupees in cash gold and silver The following morning they withdrew carrying their wounded colleagues and dispersed into the countryside The Dunai event sent shockwaves through the government and not just because of the severity of the incident An easy walk up the river from Dunai and a short hop across a sturdy suspension bridge lay a Royal Nepalese Army RNA base with over one hundred fully armed soldiers Yet the army had stayed put All kinds of stories and excuses materialized for their inaction but the truth of the matter lay in an ongoing feud between the government and its police force on the one hand and the King and his loyal army on the other In the chaos of Kathmandu politics it suited both parties to blame the other for failing to suppress the growing Maoist rebellion By denying help from the army the King could round on his incompetent prime minister and government police force for failing to defend Dunai The following year Nepal hit the world s headlines with an event as shocking as it was unexpected and it was nothing to do with the insurgency In June 2001 Crown Prince Dipendra intruded on his family having dinner and in an intoxicated and drug fuelled state shot dead almost everyone present including his father and mother He then turned a gun on himself dying four days later The only member of the royal family not killed was the King s brother Gyanendra and this was because he was absent that evening from the

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360 A Nepalese Story capital Conspiracy theories ran riot many believed that the whole episode had been stage managed by Gyanendra Lacking any clear evidence however there was only one course of action As the oldest surviving royal Gyanendra duly assumed the throne and was crowned While Birendra had been loved by his people Gyanendra and his rather dissolute family were heartily disliked Also disquieting Gyanendra clearly intended to take a more hands on approach vis vis the Maoists And hands on meant ridding himself of the Nepali Congress Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala and getting himself a pliant alternative whom he could more easily control With the army more than ready to do his bidding Gyanendra now had the power to act against the Maoists exactly as he saw fit In addition moral support came from abroad the western powers all backed a strong arm approach Colin Powell US Secretary of State visited Kathmandu in January 2002 offering military equipment worth US 22 million The fighting soon intensified and fatalities increased dramatically In previous years the annual number of deaths counting both sides of the insurgency hovered around the four hundred mark but in 2002 the year of Gyanendra s ascendancy the number rose to more than 4 500 This didn t deter the Maoists in the slightest Now they were proudly referring to their war machine as the People s Liberation Army PLA And they were well on their way to controlling the majority of the Nepalese countryside or at least denying the government any semblance of control END GAME A women s brigade of Maoist rebels 2001 A brigade of women march in the hills of western Nepal carrying old muskets The Maoists recruited the dispossessed from the poorest areas of Nepal the indebted the untouchables and women Sourcing arms was a major challenge The insurgents used whatever they could lay their hands on later acquiring weapons captured during engagements with the government forces Their weaponry would remain a perennial weakness Seamus Murphy Panos As the insurgency ground on it became clear that neither side was going to prevail The Maoists could not convince the upper castes to join the fight nor could they summon the firepower to overcome the government by force Likewise the Royal Nepalese Army would never be able to cope with the fluidity of a guerrilla campaign In a sense the two sides were fighting different wars In true imitation of Mao Zedong s philosophy of class struggle the objective of the Maoists was not simply to beat the enemy but to use the war as a means to convert and recruit the peasantry to their cause The Royal Nepalese Army s objectives on the other hand were classical take out the 361 enemy and control the nation s territory The sparring partners used different tactics for different objectives and consequently neither side found a way to prise an advantage over the other One way out of this impasse espoused by Baburam Bhattarai was to isolate the King by striking a deal with the parliamentarians Throughout 2002 the Maoist leadership pursued this strategy meeting secretly with key Nepali party chiefs in India near the border In March 2003 with the tacit approval of the King behind the scenes a temporary peace was negotiated The Maoists halted their campaign and to the astonishment of the Kathmandu elite Bhattarai and a small negotiating team emerged from years of hiding to continue discussions in the capital With his beard and glasses Bhattarai apparently satisfied everyone s picture of a communist revolutionary Negotiations dragged on until August Then without warning and in contravention of the temporary peace the Royal Nepal Army ambushed a Maoist meeting east of Kathmandu marched nineteen participants to an isolated spot shot them dead and dumped their bodies over a cliff Violations on both sides had come to be expected but this was a step too far The Maoists abandoned the talks and took to the hills to resume the fight The next big attack the most significant the Maoists had mustered up to that point took place a year later This time they targeted the army barracks in Beni the district capital of Myagdi fifty kilometres west of Pokhara It would be the first time they had attempted to take on an entire battalion of the Royal Nepalese Army Three thousand armed Maoists faced four hundred Nepalese military personnel and a one hundred strong police detachment The Maoists having trekked from Rolpa attacked in waves seemingly oblivious to a mounting casualty rate But twelve hours of fighting produced no outright winner and the barracks remained intact Against eighty Maoists killed and 400 wounded the army and police lost just thirty lives The Maoists though chalked this up as another propaganda coup As far as they were concerned they had proved once again that the Royal Nepalese Army even with its vastly superior armament was simply incapable of extinguishing the insurgency The pressures of the campaign however were taking a toll on the Maoist leadership While Bhattarai continued to push for a political alliance with the

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A Nepalese Story 364 parliamentarians Prachanda in spite of the Maoists anti monarchy platform favoured working with the King No doubt he figured that once he got into power he could easily neutralize the monarchy King Gyanendra had actually hinted that if the Maoists let him stay on he would hand Prachanda the reins of government The two leaders differing approaches could be dismissed as a mere tactical disagreement More serious were their growing personal differences Bhattarai ever the student of communism strongly condemned the cult of personality drawing on the obvious examples of Stalin and Mao Zedong And he now objected to Prachanda s increasingly elevated position in the movement not to mention his colleague s fondness for drink and the like In short he felt the entire Maoist movement was developing its own class structure exactly the sort of thing they were fighting against It was simply a matter of time before their relationship would reach breaking point Throughout the campaign the Maoist leadership had used India as a safe haven and their presence had been largely tolerated by the Indian Government But in early 2004 with increased communist activity on the subcontinent and following yet another rapprochement with the Nepalese Government the Indians started to clamp down Maoist leaders began to be arrested and in one incident in Delhi Prachanda himself narrowly avoided being detained As the leadership retreated to Nepalese soil suspicion fell on Bhattarai and his clique a close associate of Bhattarai was accused of secretly conniving with the Indians Bhattarai fought back protesting the charges But in January 2005 matters came to a head during a politburo meeting at Libang the district capital of Rolpa Prachanda levelled a charge sheet against Bhattarai comprising a medley of supposed crimes and it was approved by ten votes to four with two abstentions Bhattarai and his associates were summarily detained in a house in Rolpa and denied communication with the outside world At exactly this moment in Kathmandu 250 kilometres away as though choreographed by Lord Vishnu himself King Gyanendra finally snapped Losing what little remained of his patience he fired his prime minister and government and placed everyone under house arrest Simultaneously he cut off all communication with the outside world telephone lines and the internet and dispatched army personnel to control the media The nation was in lockdown The news stunned the politburo meeting Now Prachanda was really cornered A secret deal with the King was now obviously impossible Secondly he remained out of favour with the Indian Government so no help could be expected there not even a safe haven And thirdly he had just detained his closest associate the one man with good ties with the parliamentarians That left only one desperate course of action corral the cadre and choose another target The military base at Khara in Rukum district north of Rolpa seemed as good a choice as any With no other options open this new assault simply had to be the Maoists knockout blow But Prachanda and his commanders chose badly They had attacked this base unsuccessfully three years earlier and in the meantime the army had strengthened its defences Despite fielding the largest operation yet the Maoists were routed The base was situated on a hill and as the combatants stormed the barracks they were picked off by superior firepower Helicopters merely finished the job More than 250 combatants were killed In the words of military analyst and Nepal expert Sam Cowan 78 The attackers fought long and bravely against determined RNA resistance but carnage is probably the most appropriate word to describe what took place as wave after wave of attackers were mowed down by machine gun fire amidst the maze of barbed wire and strong fortifications Indeed with the odds so heavily stacked against them it is extraordinary that the PLA was able to sustain the attack for more than 18 hours most forces in a similar position would have cut and run Faced with a military impasse Prachanda was now really stuck The only way out was to do the unthinkable rehabilitate Bhattarai and seek a deal with the parliamentarians Conveniently this volte face placated the Indians They had become wary of Gyanendra since his highhanded coup and were willing to tolerate again the 78 Sam Cowan The Lost Battles of Khara and Pili Himal Southasian 2008 Preparing the endgame 2005 Prachanda and Bhattarai two figures seated centre meeting with UML leaders in Rolpa in 2005 to prepare the groundwork for the 12 Point Memorandum of Understanding signed in New Delhi later that year This provided the basis for the Nepali parliamentarians accepting the Maoists as partners and prepared the way for a Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2006 Courtesy of Dinesh Shrestha 365

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366 A Nepalese Story exiled Maoist leadership Less than a month after the Khara debacle the Indian capital found itself awash with senior Nepali political figures of all parties including the perennially available Nepalese Congress Party chief Girija Prasad Koirala Prachanda and Bhattarai worked the crowd with all their charm and logic and somehow agreement was reached On November 22 2005 with India s blessing the Nepalese politicos sat down with the Maoists and signed a 12 Point Memorandum of Understanding spelling out their joint vision for Nepal s future governance Although the contents were leaked by the Maoists a formal acknowledgement that the parliamentarians were now hand in glove with the Maoists was only made public in Kathmandu by Koirala three months later The first of the twelve points in the Memorandum of Understanding includes this rambling and somewhat ambiguous phraseology 79 Therefore an understanding has been reached to establish full democracy by bringing the autocratic monarchy to an end through creating a storm of nationwide democratic movement of all the forces against autocratic monarchy by focusing their assault against the autocratic monarchy from their respective positions Last days for a kingdom Former King Gyanendra Shah speaking at a press conference on June 11 2008 before leaving the Narayanhiti Palace fourteen days after Nepal was declared a republic by the newly elected Constituent Assembly which the Maoists had won control over Courtesy of The Himalayan Times The Maoists interpreted this as an excuse to continue their military campaign The parliamentarians approach however was more peaceful They proposed a nationwide strike hoping that it would turn into a civil disobedience movement powerful enough to topple the king The strike was called for April 6 2006 and was originally intended to last three days but it proved contagious and showed no sign of stopping Because the Maoists were still a banned entity they could not be seen to be participating although some undoubtedly did The storm of protest steadily grew until on April 21 Gyanendra capitulated Girija Prasad Koirala was requested to reinstate the apparatus of parliamentary government and assume the post of prime minister A ceasefire was promptly called for and in November Koirala and Prachanda signed a Comprehensive Peace Agreement The Maoists were accepted as a legal entity and many of their demands for transforming the state of Nepal were accepted by Koirala s ruling clique Prachanda previously an enigmatic and elusive personality whose very existence some even doubted created much fascination when he 367 finally arrived triumphant in the capital But what the Maoists wanted most of all was a general election to choose a Constituent Assembly so the task of refashioning a new constitution could at last proceed After a series of delays the election took place in April 2008 The Maoists were not expected to do well The opposing parties were banking on the fact that the general populace had suffered enough at their hands during the brutal campaign and would be disinclined to vote for them But the Maoists knew the country like no one else and they campaigned hard To the chagrin of their two major rivals the Nepali Congress Party and the UML the Maoists won 220 of the available 575 electable seats beating both of them by over 100 seats 80 Prachanda was asked to form a coalition government and appointed Bhattarai as his finance minister At the first sitting of the Constituent Assembly a vote to abolish the monarchy was approved almost unanimously Gyanendra left his palace and Prachanda became prime minister Not since Mao Zedong s triumph in 1949 had a Maoist movement achieved its objectives so emphatically The human cost was probably 18 000 lives or more 79 80 United Nations Peacemaker archive https peacemaker un org nepal 12pointunderstanding2005 The Constituent Assembly of Nepal consisted of 601 members 26 were appointed by the President of Nepal 240 were elected using a first past the post system in single seat constituencies and 335 were elected using proportional representation

Pages from "A Nepalese Story"