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CounterPunch
October
21, 2002
The Resumption
of History
Imagining the Global Consequences
of a Maoist Victory in Nepal
by GARY LEUPP
According to a recent (Sept. 21) article by David
Blair in the London Telegraph, "The Maoist movement
now wields de facto control over most of Nepal. By following
the Mao Tse-tung model of guerrilla warfare----becoming 'fish
swimming in the ocean of the people'---- the insurgents have
won dominance of the Himalayas and of the foothills. King Gyanendra's
rule is now limited to Kathmandu, Nepal's few towns and the southern
lowlands of the Terai." But even in the capital, the rebels
flex their muscles; on September 16 they closed down Kathmandu
with a highly successful general strike. (The Maoists' actions
caused Prime Minister Bahadur Deuba to request that the monarch
postpone parliamentary elections planned for November by a year;
the enormously unpopular King Gyanendar responded by dismissing
the cabinet and assuming personal administrative control. This
has only exacerbated the political crisis.) A British military
source told Blair that the Maoists "will continue to gain
ground. Unless something dramatic happens, it's only a matter
of time before they win." So, for anybody paying attention,
the situation has become quite interesting.
Indeed, the insurgents' war, which they
term a "People's War" based on the military and political
theories of Mao Zedong, has advanced with breath-taking swiftness
since its inception in 1996. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist),
which had been a significant legal political party represented
in the Nepali Parliament, repudiated the system (a constitutional
monarchy since 1990) and went underground. The war began modestly,
with assaults on police stations and banks in the western regions
of the country. The rebels used weapons captured from police,
mostly 30-caliber, single-shot rifles, as well as the traditional
national weapon, a heavy, crescent-shaped machete called the
khukri. These days CPN(M)'s military wing, the People
Liberation Army, attacks with thousands of (mostly peasant) troops,
fortified headquarters of police and Royal Nepali Army (RNA)
soldiers, killing hundreds, capturing more sophisticated arms,
and in some cases securing control over the sites attacked. Meanwhile
the party builds a substantial base of support among the urban
intelligentsia, and there are even reports of monks temporarily
donning fatigues to join military operations. Women are the backbone
of the movement and participate fully in political and military
activities.
The Maoists enjoy a solid support base.
One need not consult sources sympathetic to them to confirm this.
The Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, which examines security
issues in South Asia, carries on its website an analysis by Anju
Susan Alex that notes, "The Maoist insurgents have a lot
of popular support in the villages as they reel under poverty
and unemployment." (Nepal ranks next to Ethiopia as one
of the planet's most impoverished nations.) The South Asia Analysis
group published in April a report that indicated, "The continuing
capability demonstrated by the Nepalese Maoists to take the Security
Forces by surprise not only in the interior areas, but even in
Kathmandu, the capital, indicates disconcertingly the level of
popular support still enjoyed by them due to the failure of the
Government to win the hearts and minds of the people and the
weak intelligence machinery." The Hindustan Times
(December 6, 2001) acknowledges that "The Maoists command
popular support in the areas" where they are active. Such
popularity seems to be based in part in their success in curbing
the worst excesses of landlords' exploitation of the peasants,
and their swift administration of justice (particularly in cases
of abuse of women).
I've never been to Nepal, and don't know
what the prospects for the guerrillas' victory might be. But
let's say the British officer's prediction materializes. Imagine
the international consequences. The radical left throughout
the world would be heartened by a victory, somewhere;
impressed to see the red flag planted, as the secretary-general
of the CPN(M), Prachanda, likes to put it, atop Mt. Everest,
the roof of the world. (I think particularly of the Maoists in
the Philippines, and their 14,000-strong New People's Army, who
are also engaged in a people's war and have control over 8,000
villages throughout the Filipino archipelago; and of the Senderistas
in Peru, who show some signs of revival.) The governments of
the world---virtually all of them---would be very highly displeased,
and mainstream intellectuals puzzled. The victory would, after
all, constitute a challenge to the Fukuyama thesis (about the
"end of history" as a clash of ideologies) and the
Huntington thesis (about the "clash of civilizations").
We'd be back to the old capitalism vs. communism discussion,
which was supposed to be behind us, all settled, and consigned
to the rubbish heap of history!
But if the Maoists' assumption of power
were to happen anytime soon, it would occur in the context of
the "war on terrorism." The way Bush administration
officials and others in the power elite use of the term, "terrorism"
can of course mean a whole lot of things. (For example, most
of them see the impending Iraq attack as part and parcel of the
Terror War, while others see it as a separate and even distracting
issue). Anyway I'd expect that the Maoist regime in Nepal would
immediately be tagged as "terrorist"; indeed, Colin
Powell, while on the first-ever visit of a U.S. secretary of
state to Nepal (last January), told the Nepalese: "You have
a Maoist insurgency that's trying to overthrow the government
and this really is the kind of thing that we are fighting
against throughout the world." U.S. Ambassador Michael
Malinowski was more specific in a February statement: "Nepal
is currently plagued with a terrorism that is shaking its very
foundation as a nation. These terrorists, under the guise of
Maoism or the so called 'people's war,' are fundamentally the
same as terrorists elsewhere" (Thus we're supposed to believe
that fundamentally, fundamentalist Islamist Bin Laden
= secular dictator Saddam Hussein = Nepalese Maoists = Yassir
Arafat and his Palestinian Authority = Colombia's FNLA = all
those other international groups and nations listed on the State
Department's idiosyncratic, ever-expanding roster.)
The CPN(M) is not, in fact, on that roster
of international terrorist organizations as of this writing.
Theoretically, to warrant that status the Maoists would have
to attack an American citizen or American-owned property. (Actually,
it appears that they scrupulously avoid attacking foreigners.)
But this, or any ensuing U.S. administration, would surely treat
Maoist Nepal as a "rogue" and terrorist state. Washington
would probably try to link it to various more familiar villains.
(On May 11 The Independent cited "Western intelligence
agencies" as suspecting that the Maoists in Nepal have been
receiving sophisticated weaponry from al-Qaeda, and the August
13 issue of the Christian Science Monitor claimed that
Indian Maoists aligned with the CPN(M) may be willing to harbor
al-Qaeda operatives. Such reports smell powerfully like disinformation
to me.)
The U.S. government would surely attempt
to undermine the new regime. However, military intervention would
be unlikely if the U.S. were overextended, with forces in Afghanistan,
Iraq, the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, etc. India, which has
become increasingly intimate with Washington, would however be
sorely tempted to invade; it faces Maoist insurgencies of its
own, in Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and
elsewhere, which have ties to the Nepali movement. But should
their giant neighbor invade, the fiercely independent Nepalese
would likely unite more firmly around the new leadership in Kathmandu.
One would expect widespread opposition within India itself to
an invasion of a neighboring state.
China would frown on any expansion of
Indian influence in the Himalayas. The regime would have to balance
its opposition to Indian expansionism with its concern over the
reemergence of Maoism, which it has itself, of course, long abandoned
in practice if not in words. (As many, if not most, Chinese
will tell you, the present Beijing government is itself no more
Marxist, or Leninist, or Maoist at this point that the governments
of Morocco, Liechtenstein, or Mexico; capitalism has obviously
been thoroughly restored, although the regime alludes to it,
with a straight face, as "socialism with Chinese characteristics.")
The official media in China refers to Nepal's Maoists as "terrorists,"
and denies that they actually follow the path of Mao, which they
themselves, through a process insulting to the intellect, attempt
to conflate with the path of Adam Smith. But the real Mao, the
communist who said "It's right to rebel!" continues
to enjoy a following in the PRC, where the ranks of the dispossessed
and unemployed number in the tens if not hundreds of millions.
One would expect Beijing's leadership
to look askance at a regime, in a neighboring country, reminiscent
of China's during Mao's time; it would worry about the disaffected
of China getting ideas about the potential for regime change
at home, and a return to a vision of egalitarian socialism. But
it would probably also want to maintain a proper diplomatic and
trade relationship, and maybe even serve as a counterweight to
Indian (and U.S.) pressure on the new revolutionary state. It
just might be able to live with a Maoist bastion south of Tibet.
In short, geopolitical circumstances could possibly allow, in
the Himalayas, the renewal of the experiment begun on lower elevations
of the globe in 1917.
* *
*
Nepal is the world's only Hindu kingdom,
but there is much Buddhist influence as well. The historical
Buddha was born on what is now the Nepal-India border. (Both
countries claim that Lumimbi, site of the Buddha's birth, was
within their present territory. This is an issue of importance
to historians, archeologists, and even more so to the tourist
industry catering to Japanese Buddhist pilgrims.) Two and a half
millennia ago, the Buddhist movement, destined to transform the
world, emerged in this region. Buddhism was at its inception
not really a religion (as westerners tend to conceptualize
religion), rejecting belief in a Supreme Being, immortal souls,
and an afterlife. (Some Indian Marxist scholars have suggested
that Buddhism was initially a kind of philosophical materialism,
with a progressive social content.) The fundamental problem,
for the Buddhist, was and is that of suffering. (Recall
how, many centuries later, Marx identified religion as "the
expression of real suffering and at the same time the protest
against real suffering.") Buddhism offered no pie-in-the-sky
solutions to human suffering, but a way of life that steered
between sensual indulgence and asceticism.
While focusing on the individual's path
to enlightenment, Buddhism did not ignore social reality. The
early order of monks and nuns applied itself to charitable work,
such as the establishment of hospitals and shelters for the homeless.
In an extraordinary break with the social order, Siddhartha Gautama
(a.k.a Buddha) rejected the caste system, declared that those
of any background could be enlightened, and insisted on delivering
his sermons in the local dialects wherever he traveled. He was
in that sense a revolutionary. And a world-conqueror: the Buddha
directed his followers to spread the word throughout the world,
and thus Buddhism gradually spread from the Himalayan foothills
to Sri Lanka, to northeastern Iran, to China and Japan, to southeast
Asia.
The Maoists' vision, like that of the
Buddhist missionaries of old, is a global one. "We insist,"
Prachanda told an American interviewer in 2000, "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." BBC correspondent Daniel Lak, visiting Rolpa,
in western Nepal, last month, sat talking with one Comrade Bijaya,
district committee member and political instructor, who overlooking
the rice-paddies stated matter-of-factly, "We will win,
not just in Nepal, but around the world" (World Tribune,
Sept 24). That requires a stretch of the imagination, maybe,
but world history is filled with twists and turns and surprises.
Sometimes, in humankind's endless quest to overcome suffering,
wildly ambitious enterprises actually succeed.
Gary Leupp
is an an associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University
and coordinator, Asian Studies Program.
He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
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