Photos by Eric Ribellarsi

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As I watched on May 28^th, thousands of people surrounded the Constituent Assembly building to burn effigies of Prime Minister M.K. Nepal, a man who has repeatedly blocked the restructuring of Nepal’s society that was agreed upon in the 2006 Peace Accords. A young man standing right near me would lift the burning effigy high into to air on a pole so that all could see, and people would respond with loud, determined cheers. It is hard to convey just how hated this man is, even by many in his own party who have threatened to split. These events characterized the sentiments of a people determined to win against a foreign dominated government.

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Originally posted at jedbrandt.net

“You must come to Kathmandu with shroud cloth wrapped around your heads and flour in your bags. It will be our last battle. If we succeed, we survive, else it will be the end of our party."

— General Secretary Badal of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)

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APRIL 21 — There are moments when Kathmandu does not feel like a city on the edge of revolution. People go about all the normal business of life. Venders sell vegetables, nail-clippers and bootleg Bollywood from the dirt, cramping the already crowded streets. Uniformed kids tumble out of schools with neat ties in the hot weather. Municipal police loiter at the intersections while traffic ignores them, their armed counter-parts patrol in platoons through the city with wood-stocked rifles and dust-masks as they have for years. New slogans are painted over the old, almost all in Maoist red. Daily blackouts and dry-season water shortages are the normal daily of Nepal’s primitive infrastructure, not the sign of crisis. Revolutions don’t happen outside of life, like an asteroid from space – but from right up the middle, out of the people themselves.

Passing through Kathmandu’s Trichandra college campus after meeting with students in a nearby media program, I walked into the aftermath of bloody attack. Thugs allied with the Congress party student group had cut up leaders of a rival student group with khukuri knives leaving one in critical condition. Hundreds of technical students were clustered in the street when I arrived by chance. The conflict most often described through the positioning of political leaders is breaking out everywhere.

Indefinite bandhs are paralyzing large parts of the country after the arrest of Young Communist League (YCL) cadre in the isolated far west and Maoist student leaders in Pokhora, the central gateway to the Annapurna mountain range. The southern Terai is in chaos, with several power centers competing and basic security has broken down with banditry, extortion and kidnapping are now endemic. Government ministers cannot appear anywhere without Maoist pickets waving black flags and throwing rocks.

With no central authority, all sides are claiming the ground they stand on and preparing their base. It’s messy, confused and coming to a sharp point as the May 28 deadline for a new constitution draws near with no consensus in sight. The weak government holding court in the Constituent Assembly can’t command a majority, not even of their own parties. Seventy assembly representatives of the status quo UML party signed a letter calling on their own leader to step down from the prime minister’s chair to make way for a Maoist national-unity government. He refuses, repeating demands that the Maoists dissolve their popular organizations and return lands seized by the people who farm them.

The Maoists have more pressing concerns than the legalism of the parliamentary parties. If they can’t restructure the state, by constitutional means or otherwise, the enthusiasm that brought their revolutionary movement this far may turn to disillusionment. With no progress in the assembly, and the leaders of the status quo parties now say there will be no resolution on time. The Maoists have rejected any extension as a stalling tactic and are turning to the people. With now-or-never urgency, they are mobilizing all their forces for a decisive showdown in Kathmandu.

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Compiled by Eric Ribellarsi and Toni Kim

” Women being not only oppressed among all the oppressed groups, but also the last group to be liberated are the most reliable, stable, and basic force which needs to be tapped not only in winning the revolution but also in waging continuous revolution.”

” Being left behind in history by no fault of their own, they need to be given space to make mistakes and to learn from them.” -Parvati

In 2006, the Nepali Maoist leader Hisila Yami (Comrade Parvati) published a new work, People’s War and Women’s Liberation in Nepal. This work discusses the experience of the Nepalese revolution and the new approach to women’s liberation that this revolution has developed. Sadly, very few in the West have had access to this work.

We would like to make available a few excerpts from this work which underscore the creativity and new approach being developed by Parvati and the Nepali comrades, as well as some the problems and questions that they are still grappling with in order to move forward in the revolutionary process.

This work has several theses which we have found helpful and interesting, including:

• The oppression of women rose with class society itself, and can only go out of existence with the abolition of class society. The oppression of women is a fundamental contradiction, as fundamental as the class struggle itself.
• Parvati believes that women’s struggle for liberation is fundamental to continuing the revolutionary struggle under socialism. Whereas, in China, emphasis was placed on the existence of equality between men and women with slogans like “women hold up half the sky” and “times have changed, men and women are the same,” Parvati places emphasis on the view that these goals can only be achieved in a communist future. She believes that the women’s struggle is central to carrying forward revolutionary struggle under socialism.
• Much time has been spent in her work to deal with the problems of the lack women’s leadership in revolutionary struggles. She argues that given thousands of years of class society and the way that women have been locked out of theory–not by any fault of their own–it is no surprise that many female comrades have not yet been able to develop as much theoretically. She argues that male comrades need to consciously create a space in the revolutionary struggle for female comrades to be able to step in and do theoretical work.
• Parvati believes that the legacy of Stalin and viewing things as singularities or monoliths (instead of viewing things as unities of opposites) continues to stand in the way of developing women’s leadership in the revolutionary struggle. She argues that many comrades have a tendency to prevent women from becoming leaders for fear that they will make mistakes. Certainly mistakes will be made, but this is part of the contradictory process of developing communist leadership, and not something we should be afraid of.
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Eric from The FIRE Collective (Fight Imperialism, Rethink, Experiment) gives a talk about the importance of the current revolution in the small country of Nepal.