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by the FIRE Collective
Today, seemingly a world away, the population of a small, oppressed nation is engaged in an ongoing revolution that is straining and maneuvering for a decisive victory. Rather than pursuing a rigid path in a sterile and dogmatic way, these revolutionaries have employed a diversity of tactics -- from a people's war to political negotiation to mass protests -- aimed at freeing the country's people. Their thinking is fresh, and they've wedded creative innovation with a movement committed to socialism and worldwide liberation from capitalism and imperialism.
They deserve our active political work. We need to help break through the mainstream media whiteout -- so more people here in the U.S. can see the ways this revolution is radically changing society, and so we can stop the U.S. government from intervening in Nepal while falsely branding revolutionaries there as terrorists.
Nepal: Toppling Kings and Castes
Nepal is a small country bordered on three sides by India and by China on its fourth frontier. The country is predominantly rural. Exploited peasants of many ethnicities and cultures represent 90 percent of the total population.
Nepal's monarchy emerged in 1768 to unify the country as a kingdom. This autocratic and theocratic royal family and military force ruled the largely feudal society until revolution arose to oppose it. Through compromises the monarchy made in the face of first the British colonialists, and later the Indian state, the country functioned as a semi-feudal, semi-colonial system in which most Nepalis suffered the worst indignities and crushing poverty. The country was an absolute monarchy until 1990, and even then, the poverty and oppression of the feudal system and the monarchy remained through the slightly varied form of a parliament subordinate to both the king and Indian expansionist interests.
On February 13, 1996, guided by its leader Prachanda, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) launched a planned countrywide military insurrection. The Maobadi, as they are called in Nepal, started their revolution with thousands of initial actions, liberating Rolpa and Rukum, two extremely impoverished neighboring districts in Nepal that are home to the Kham Magar nationality. Nepal’s ruling class, royals and the police responded with repression against peasant populations.
As the revolution continued to advance through this repression, deep divisions within the monarchy and between political parties emerged. King Birendra did not send the royal army against the Maobadi, and resisted those in his own family who (with Indian backing) demanded intervention. And then he (and most of the royal family) died in a palace massacre in 2001 that brought his brother, Gyanendrah, to the throne. The king sent in the Royal Nepal Army (RNA), terrorizing the people in ways that had not been seen.
Over ten years, the people's war won many victories, liberating 80 percent of the country's land, developing new forms of people's power, people's courts, new forms of cooperation like the people's communes, and much more. They formed new autonomous people's governments in the countryside with deep roots among the poor farmers. In response, the monarchy, police and military burned peasant villages, committed mass rape, censored the press, dissolved the toothless parliament, and, at times, disconnected mobile phones and the Internet -- and carried out numerous other repressive measures.
Through an intense struggle over how to confront this situation, the Maobadi decided they had a unique possible opening to unite with broad new forces entering the struggle. They helped turn the revolt against this particularly hated king into a revolutionary challenge to the ideas and institutions of the monarchy itself. The Maobadi called for a ceasefire, and they went into the cities to organize the people there who had previously been kept away from their revolution. They negotiated temporary alliances with parliamentary forces who had opposed the revolution, but who had since come under attack by the monarchy.
And shortly after, in April 2006, people hit the streets demanding an end to the monarchy, even while the king issued orders for protesters to be shot on sight. That movement shook the entire country, and forced Gyanendrah to restore the parliament he had previously dissolved and step down from power. Nepal became the world's youngest republic. The monarchy was toppled by a combination of the ten-year people's war and a loose and diverse alliance of progressive people in the urban areas.
The Maobadi launched a process (since 2006) where the struggle has focused on what the new Nepal would be -- a parliamentary republic integrated in a corrupt Indian-style parliamentary system subordinate to the world capitalist system, or a people's democratic republic on the socialist road with an electoral system. This struggle has been waged through sharp political offensives and contestation, but without armed struggle, while the whole process has rested on the existence of a People's Liberation Army, representing a fundamental challenge to the military and the reactionary plans for the future. The effort has also forwarded the very radical concept of a Constituent Assembly -- a historic gathering of elected representatives to envision and create a New Nepal, to fight through which future would replace the monarchist past -- as a special and temporary and potentially revolutionary institution for debating and choosing between bourgeois democracy and people's democracy.
Elections to this Constituent Assembly were held, and the Maobadi took part in these as a tactical step, winning a plurality in the elections. People celebrated in the streets.
The elections and the Constituent Assembly were part of solving the ongoing Nepali crisis by pushing forward the revolutionary process under new conditions. However, the army remains, and forms the basis for the current state (and for the current government in Kathmandu). Although the monarchy is now abolished, the army refuses to bow to civilian control. The current (inevitable and foreseeable) stalemate has not been mainly "a failure" of that process, but the way people would learn, through living experience, who stood for what. The Royal Nepal Army (now renamed the Nepal Army) has contested fundamental change in feudal relations and it has continued to repress the people. And Barack Obama and the U.S. have supported the army's defiance of legitimate civilian control, encouraged a military/royalist coup, labeled the Maobadi "terrorists," sent trainers for commando units and the officer corps, and most likely conducted other intrigues that have not yet been exposed, despite the fact it is clear the Maobadi are leading a major struggle against injustice with the support of millions of people, and are not terrorists at all.
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