Prachanda proposes launching "People's Revolt"

Concluding that the elections for the Constituent Assembly (CA) is impossible without announcing republic and adopting proportional representation based election system, Maoist chairman Prachanda has proposed to launch "people's revolt" as an alternative.
According to Kantipur daily, Prachanda made this proposal at the central committee meeting of the Maoists, which has started from Tuesday in Kathmandu .
In his political resolution, Prachanda has stated that "people's revolt" has become possible due to conclusions that the party reached in the aftermath of decade-long "people's war", 19-day-long people's movement, and one year of legitimate struggle by his party.

"The report states that CA election is impossible without announcing republic and without adopting PR electoral system. (In the absence of the election) it says the "people's revolt" has no alternative," a central member of the Maoist revealed.
Discussing Prachanda's proposal, some central members are said to have wondered how a revolt can be launched when the party is in the government. They said party leadership should be ready to sacrifice and immediately walk out of the government to announce programmes of struggle.
On the eve of the central committee meeting, there were differences among the central leaders on whether to launch such revolt before or after the CA elections. They, however, were united in their conclusion that the revolt is necessary.
Maoists have been claiming that their revolt will be of peaceful nature. "We abandoned the decade-long people's war feeling that we can achieve republic also through peaceful means. We signed in the peace agreement. But now, India and the parties have betrayed us. Having reached to this conclusion, there are preparations for revolt," another central member told Kantipur.
The Maoists have also calculated that more the transition phase prolongs, lesser role they will get to play. They have also concluded that the Congress is pushing them the most. A source added that there is a section within the party, which believes that the party should not immediately walk out of the government and announce the revolt as there will be complications in the management of combatants during the two months of monsoon period and people, too, won't come to streets then.
The central committee meeting is discussing to finalise the party's future direction to be submitted at the plenum (expanded meeting). The plenum will begin immediately after the central committee meeting ends.

Source: The Nepal News, August 1, 2007

Nixon, Mao And Nepali Maoists

Ritu Raj Subedi

The White House, the centre of world capitalism, has not always been an enemy of the Maoist world. In one of the eventful eras of US politics, former US President Nixon triggered a series of shocks, known as 'Nixon shocks,' in US history. One such shock was his dramatic visit to China and recognition of Mao's regime. This took place at a time when the whole western block was hostile and refused to recognise Red China. After Nixon's visit, the world's leaders beat a path to Mao's door.Cold WarAgainst the backdrop of worsening Sino-Soviet relations, Nixon wanted to balance the Cold War by wooing Mao. On the other hand, Mao wanted to re-launch himself on the international stage by rolling a red carpet for Nixon. However, their meeting did not happen so simply. In the beginning, both the sides were very aware about their images and did not want to be seen as courting each other. But it was Mao's side that broke the ice. In November 1970, Zhou En-Lai sent a message through the Romanians, who had good relations with both China and the US, saying that Nixon would be welcome in Beijng. The White House responded very carefully. It made no reference to a presidential visit, thinking that the idea would be 'premature and potentially embarrassing.' As the issue of a visit did not gain momentum, one event that took place in the sport sector gave a new twist to the scenario. In March, China sent a table tennis team to Japan for the world championship. In an interesting development, a US player got on a Chinese bus and shook hands and talked to a Chinese player. The US player expressed his desire to come to China to participate in a sport event. Mao first turned down the US request. After many deliberations, he phoned the Foreign Ministry at midnight to invite the US team.The news caused a sensation in the world. The American and western media made fascinating reports on it on a daily basis. "Nixon," wrote a commentator, "was truly amazed at how the story jumped off the sports pages and onto the front pages."The ping-pong diplomacy of Mao captivated Nixon. In his memoir, his Security Advisor Henry Kissinger wrote, "Nixon was excited to the point of euphoria. He wanted to skip the emissary stage lest it take the glow off his own journey." By the end of May, it was settled, in secret, that Nixon would go to China.By inviting Nixon, Mao got many things. The US abandoned its old ally Taiwan and offered China a permanent Security Council seat at the UN with veto power. It was fixed during the behind-the-scene meeting between Kissinger and Zhou. The US made a huge commitment to pull all forces out of Indochina and Korea. Kissinger also agreed to give sensitive information on Russia to China. Mao even floated the idea of forging a Sino-US alliance against the Soviet Union to obtain sophisticate military technology and boost China's aircraft industry and superpower programme.At the meeting, Nixon told Mao, "The Chairman's writings moved a nation and have changed the world." But a clever Mao manipulated Nixon's visit in a way that he continued to be seen as an anti-American champion in the world. However, Nixon was not a loser. At home, the American people praised him for opening a door to China and trying to bring the Vietnam war to an end. He was paid off in his second-term presidential win by a huge margin. Until he was disgraced and forced to resign as president over his role in the 'Watergate scandal,' he remained a successful Republican President. Almost three-and-a-half-decades later, President George W. Bush of Nixon's party has refused to recognise the CPN-Maoist of Prachanda who has followed Mao's doctrine to seize power using guerrilla warfare tactics. Nixon's man is ignoring Mao's disciple. May be that the Nepali Maoists do not hold as strategic an importance as Mao who completely tamed his enemy and ruled a colossal China. On the other hand, Prachanda has won the insurgency only by half. He could not bust the powers of his enemy. By courting Mao, Nixon challenged Kremlin that resulted in the singing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT).The White House often cites Maoist violent activities as a factor to put the terrorist tag on them. Comparing the atrocities of the Nepali Maoists to Mao's excesses seen during the Cultural Revolution, the Great Purge and in crushing his long-time comrades, the former tend to be less ruthless. Going by the statements of Maoist leaders, Nepal holds strategic value for the US because of its geo-political location. Dr. Babu Ram Bhattarai, a Maoist ideologue, talking to this author, claimed that the US is keeping an eye on the rising Asian super powers - China and India - by consolidating its position in Nepal. Whatever the intention of the US in treating the Maoists as terrorists, its policy towards the Nepali Maoists might create a new diplomatic paradigm. China is now in search of a reliable force in Nepal after the monarchy, its long-time trustworthy ally who is struggling for survival. Communist China always considered the king a reliable force in keeping its territorial interests intact. It is said that Chairman Mao had suggested that the Nepali communists work with king against the backdrop of Chinese hostility to India. Silent diplomacyGrowing Chinese interest in the Nepali peace process and the visit of a top Maoist commander to China is an indication that China will no more maintain silent diplomacy here. And the America's continued hard posture towards the Maoists will only give birth to another ally against it in the region.

Source: The Rising Nepal, August 1, 2007

Nepal's Failed Unification?

Rishikesh Ram Bhandari

As different Nepal and Liberia are, there exist important commonalities in regime hegemonies, state structure and social exclusivity that are crucial in understanding Nepal's current transition. Both of these relatively new states are struggling to establish their identities and cast away historical legacies that have restricted multidimensional national expression. Comparing histories from the very outset to the current day, we find some compelling parallels.ParallelsIn order to extinguish the problems of slavery by repatriation to Africa, the United States established the American Colonisation Society (ACS). The freed slaves, called Americo Liberians, started a colony, defeating numerous little kingdoms and ultimately gaining independence from the United States in 1847. On the other side of the hemisphere, a few decades earlier, Prithvinarayan Shah waged his unification campaign to create a modern Nepal. His dream took shape once he captured the three kingdoms in the Kathmandu Valley. After independence, the ACS had to consolidate a deeply divided nation. Naming itself from the Latin liberare, Liberia was confined only to capital Monrovia, which was occupied by the Americo Liberians. The indigenous Liberians had not been absorbed into the national mainstream and did not identify with this imposed 'Liberia'. The Americo Liberians made use of existing tribal chieftaincies to extend their domain. As a result, the chieftains got a fused role, both as the customary lawgiver as the local clan chief and an administrative role of the new government in Monrovia.After Prithvinarayan Shah and the subsequent Shah Kings conquered the baise and chaubise rajyas, the subjugated kingdoms' rulers were still kept in place, only to be governed from Kathmandu. Thus, the rajas became administrative functionaries of the Shah Kings, and it is through the conduit of such minor kings that the capital was able to extend its control. In this way, the minor kings maintained equilibrium between the Shah King and the subjects.When ACS created its colony, it did not do so by taking over one nation, but numerous little ethnic entities. Similarly, Prithvinarayan Shah did not usurp only one national consciousness. There was no overarching identity space that Prithvinarayan Shah had filled with his cavalry. Because of this, it was hard, ideologically, for the kingdoms to unite in expulsing the aggressors. Furthermore, as the deposed kings were still in considerable power as they were given administrative functions under the new Nepal, they lacked enough incentive to revolt and were absorbed into the ruling class. As a result, a distinct two-layered rule was created - the ruling class and the ruled. This crafted state structure allowed Prithvinarayan Shah to wield force to maintain a politically unified (yet) divided nation.In both countries, the state existed as a vacuous shell, and the diverse ethnicities never became incorporated into the mainstream. It was necessary for the ruler to exercise absolute hegemony to keep the state intact. Liberians did this by making the True Whig Party the sole party and extending membership only to Americo Liberians, hence on social lines. Indigenous Liberians were even yet to be called citizens of the state. The Shahs and the Ranas employed the same strategy by keeping the monarchy and ultimately the oligarchy intact by limiting power within the thakuri kshetriyas. The feudal land structure reinforced the Rajas' hegemony down to the village and also became a tool to further suppress the marginalised. Prithvinarayan Shah's much touted chaar jaat chhattis barna ko fulbaari (garden of four castes and thirty six sub-castes) is reduced to mere propaganda (rhetorical ploy) when we see how social cohesion was based not on an egalitarian playing field for all castes but a distinct hierarchy that subjugated identities of every ethnicity outside the maharaja's aristocracy. The scramble for Africa internally buttressed the TWP as it had to ward off imperialistic forces. Americo Liberians even used indigenous Liberians as bonded labourers to encourage investment for plantations, later on drawing the attention of the League of Nations. On the other hand, the East India Company had been sending off aggressive signals which Prithvinarayan Shah tried to counter by hastening his unification campaign to forge a strong nation. Ultimately, the Ranas used the extractive framework to gain support from the East India Company by exporting people as mercenaries for the British army. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and the two world wars are prime examples. The Gurkhas were allegedly welcomed into the British troops for their bravery and valiant behaviour, but we must realise that this was a form of slave trade grounded on foreign policy objectives, repression and economic destitution, and is a form of resource plunder.After more than 150 years of hegemonic rule, an indigenous Liberian, Samuel Doe toppled the Americo Liberians' regime promising a new Liberia. However, as the state ACS-TWP crafted state structure had been so embedded that he found it easier to operate in the system rather that to bring change. The same situation resulted in Nepal when the political parties gained power. The democracy they brought in was not inclusive and participatory. It was only with the sheer force of the April movement that the ethnic minorities started to really clamp down about their rights and identities. Since King Gyanendra had been symbolically vanquished, the ethnic minorities who had been subjugated to maintain the garden of Prithvinarayan Shah started to display the deep divisions that were never dealt with since the unification process started two centuries ago. Once a hegemonic structure is toppled, the repressed identities come to surface. The ethnic issues that are being raised are a result of the improper unification process based on imposing a coercive and extractive feudal structure. LessonsLiberia is well into post conflict reconstruction and reconciliation. Nepal needs to learn an important lesson about ethnicity from Liberia. There are important lessons that Nepal can learn from Liberia. Labelling ethnic tensions as mere political propaganda of the regressive royalists shall only serve to elude us about the suppressed ethnic tension. We need to realise that ethnic tensions could not have been played up if cleavages had not existed in the first place. Therefore, all effort must be taken to create a new and inclusive participatory democracy.

Source: The Rising Nepal, August 1, 2007

A War in the Heart of India

Ramachandra Guha

In the history of independent India, the most bloody conflicts have taken place in the most beautiful locations. Consider Kashmir, whose enchantments have been celebrated by countless poets down the ages, as well as by rulers from the Mughal Emperor Jahangir to the first prime minister of free India, Jawaharlal Nehru. Or Nagaland and Manipur, whose mist-filled hills and valleys have been rocked again and again by the sound of gunfire.

To this melancholy list of lovely places wracked by civil war must now be added Bastar, a hilly, densely forested part of central India largely inhabited by tribal people. In British times Bastar was an autonomous princely state, overseen with a gentle hand by its ruler, the representative on earth--so his subjects believed--of the goddess Durga. After independence, it came to form part of the state of Madhya Pradesh and, when that state was bifurcated in 1998, of Chattisgarh (a name that means "thirty-six forts," presumably a reference to structures once maintained by medieval rulers).

The forts that dot Chattisgarh now take the form of police camps run by the modern, and professedly democratic, Republic of India. For the state is at the epicenter of a war being waged between the government and Maoist guerrillas. And within Chattisgarh, the battle rages most fiercely in Bastar. The conflict in Bastar and its neighborhood get little play in the Indian press, which is both urban-centered and self-congratulatory, flying, as it were, from Delhi to Bangalore and back again--from the center of power and patronage to the center of India's booming software industry. To get to Bangalore from Delhi one must pass over Bastar, literally, for obscured from the airplane in the sky are the bloody battles taking place on the ground. Other sections of the Indian Establishment likewise ignore or underrate the Maoist challenge, although an exception must be made for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who recently identified it as the "biggest internal security threat" facing the nation.

In recent years the Maoists have mounted a series of bold attacks on symbols of the Indian state. In November 2005 they stormed the district town of Jehanabad in Bihar, firebombing offices and freeing several hundred prisoners from the jail. Then, this past March, they attacked a police camp in Chattisgarh, killing fifty-five policemen and making off with a huge cache of weapons. At other times, they have bombed and set fire to railway stations and transmission towers.

The Indian Maoists are referred to by friend and foe alike as Naxalites, after the village of Naxalbari in north Bengal, where their movement began in 1967. Through the 1970s and '80s, the Naxalites were episodically active in the Indian countryside. They were strongest in the states of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, where they organized low-caste sharecroppers and laborers to demand better terms from their upper-caste landlords. Naxalite activities were open, as when conducted through labor unions, or illegal, as when they assassinated a particularly recalcitrant landlord or made a daring seizure of arms from a police camp.

Until the 1990s the Naxalites were a marginal presence in Indian politics. But in that decade they began working more closely with the tribal communities of the Indian heartland. About 80 million Indians are officially recognized as "tribal"; of these, some 15 million live in the northeast, in regions untouched by Hindu influence. It is among the 65 million tribals of the heartland that the Maoists have found a most receptive audience.

Who, exactly, are the Indian tribals? There is a long-running dispute on this question. Some, like the great French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, merely saw them as "Hindus lost in the forest"; others, like the British ethnographer Verrier Elwin, insisted that they could not be so easily assimilated into the mainstream of the Indic civilization. While the arguments about their cultural distinctiveness (or lack thereof) continue, there is--or at any rate should be--a consensus on their economic and political status in independent India.

On the economic side, the tribals are the most deeply disadvantaged segment of Indian society. As few as 23 percent of them are literate; as many as 50 percent live under the poverty line. The state fails to provide them with adequate education, healthcare or sanitation; more actively, it works to dispossess them of their land and resources. For the tribals have the ill luck to live amid India's most verdant forests, alongside India's freest-flowing rivers and atop India's most valuable minerals. As these resources have gained in market value, the tribals have had to make way for commercial forestry, large and small dams, and mines. According to sociologist Walter Fernandes, 40 percent of those displaced by development projects are tribals, although they constitute less than 8 percent of the population. Put another way, a tribal is five times as likely as a nontribal to have his property seized by the state.

On the political side, the tribals are very poorly represented in the democratic process. In fact, compared with India's other subaltern groups, such as the Dalits (former Untouchables) and the Muslims, they are well nigh invisible. Dalits have their own, sometimes very successful, political parties; the Muslims have always constituted a crucial vote bank for the dominant Congress Party. In consequence, in every Indian Cabinet since independence, Dalits and Muslims have been assigned powerful portfolios such as Home, Education, External Affairs and Law. On the other hand, tribals are typically allotted inconsequential ministries such as Sports or Youth Affairs. Again, three Muslims and one Dalit have been chosen President of India, but no tribal. Three Muslims and one Dalit have served as Chief Justice of India, but no tribal.

This twin marginalization, economic and political, has opened a space for the Maoists to work in. Their most impressive gains have been in tribal districts, where they have shrewdly stoked discontent with the state to win people to their side. They have organized tribals to demand better wages from the forest department, killed or beaten up policemen alleged to have intimidated tribals and run law courts and irrigation schemes of their own.

The growing presence of Maoists in tribal India is also explained by geography. In these remote upland areas, the officials of the Indian state are unwilling to work hard, and are often unwilling to work at all. Doctors do not attend hospital; schoolteachers stay away from school; magistrates spend their time lobbying for a transfer back to the plains. On the other side, the Maoists are prepared to walk miles to hold a village meeting, and to pitch camp in the forest and live off its bounty. It is from the jungle that they emerge to preach to the tribals, and it is to the jungle that they return when a police party approaches.

Last summer I traveled with a group of colleagues through Bastar to study the impact of a new, state-sponsored initiative to combat Maoism. Known as Salwa Judum (a term that translates, ironically, as "peace campaign"), the scheme had armed hundreds of local villagers and given some the elevated title of Special Police Officer (SPO). While the state claimed Salwa Judum to be a success, other reports suggested that its activists were a law unto themselves, burning villages deemed insufficiently sympathetic to them and abusing their women.

The first thing I found I knew already from travelogues: that the landscape of Bastar is gorgeous. The winding roads we drove and walked on went up and down. Hills loomed in the distance. The vegetation was very lush: wild mango, jackfruit, sal and teak, among other indigenous species. The forest was broken up with patches of grassland. Even in late May the terrain was very green. The bird life was as rich and as native as the vegetation--warblers and wagtails on the ground, the brainfever bird and the Indian cuckoo calling overhead.

The scenery was hauntingly beautiful and utterly desolate. Evidence of the former lay before our eyes; evidence of the latter, in the testimonies of those we met and interviewed. As a means of saving Bastar from the Maoists, the Salwa Judum and the state administration have uprooted more than 40,000 villagers and placed them in camps along the road, recalling the failed "strategic hamlets" used by the US military in South Vietnam more than forty years ago. While some tribals came voluntarily, many others came out of fear of the administration and the goons commissioned to work with it. Whether refugee or displacee, they live in primitive conditions--in tents made of plastic sheets strung up on bamboo poles, open on three sides to the elements. Some permanent houses have been built, but these are inappropriate to the climate and context, being small and dark, with asbestos roofs. Worse, the residents of the camps have been given no means of livelihood. Once independent farmers, hunters and gatherers, they now had to make do with the pickings that came from coolie labor. In the camps we visited, the men wore sad, simple lungis and banyans; the women, crumpled and torn saris; the children, sometimes nothing at all.

Moving away from the camps into the villages off the road, we found evidence of depredations by vigilante groups. In one hamlet we photographed ten homes burned by a Salwa Judum mob. This village lay close to a hill where Maoists were said to sleep by day; the villagers were alleged to sometimes give them refuge at night. Among these tribals the feelings against the Salwa Judum ran very high. Before a clump of mahua trees with golden orioles calling in the background, a tribal woman demonstrated the humiliations she was subjected to. The men were equally bitter--wishing to live quietly in their homes, but forced to report to a nearby camp and spend the nights there.

On the other side, the Maoists had made a particular target of the freshly recruited SPOs. In one especially gruesome incident, the guerrillas kidnapped fifty villagers, some of them Salwa Judum members. They later set thirty-seven free, but killed the thirteen identified as SPOs. Maoists also attacked village headmen and village council representatives, whom they consider part of the bourgeois political system.

The armed officials of the state, we found, patrol only in the daytime and mostly along the roads. Bunkered in their stations, they are mainly interested in protecting themselves. Meanwhile, Salwa Judum has been given a free hand. A local journalist summed up the attitude of the police as follows: "Let the villagers fight it out among themselves while we stay safe."

According to the Asian Centre for Human Rights, close to 400 people were killed in the civil war in Bastar last year. Of these, about fifty were security personnel; about a hundred, Naxalites or alleged Naxalites; the rest, civilians caught in the cross-fire.

Bastar forms part of a contiguous forest belt that spills over from Chattisgarh into Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. In the Ramayana epic this region is known as Dandakaranya, a name the Maoists have integrated into their lexicon. They have a Special Zonal Committee for Dandakaranya, under which operate several divisional committees. These in turn have range committees reporting to them. The lowest level of organization is at the village, where committees known as sangams are formed.

We got a sharp insight into the Maoist mind in an extended interview with a Maoist senior leader. He met our team, by arrangement, in a small wayside cafe along the road that runs from the state capital, Raipur, to Jagdalpur, once the seat of the Maharaja of Bastar. There he told us of his party's strategies for Bastar, and for the country as a whole. Working under the pseudonym "Sanjeev," this revolutionary was slim, clean-shaven and soberly dressed in dark trousers and a bush shirt of neutral colors. Now 35, he had been in the movement for two decades, dropping out of college in Hyderabad to join it. He works in Abujmarh, a part of Bastar so isolated that it remains unsurveyed (apparently the only part of India that holds this distinction), and where no official dares venture for fear of being killed.

Speaking in quiet, controlled tones, Sanjeev showed himself to be deeply committed as well as highly sophisticated. The Naxalite village committees, he said, worked to protect people's rights in jal, jangal and zameen--water, forest and land. At the same time, they made targeted attacks on state officials, especially the police. Raids on police stations were intended to stop police from harassing ordinary folk. They were also necessary to augment the weaponry of the guerrilla army. Through popular mobilization and the intimidation of state officials, the Maoists hoped to expand their authority over Dandakaranya. Once the region was made a "liberated zone," it would be used as a launch pad for the capture of state power in India as a whole.

Sanjeev's belief in the efficacy of armed struggle was complete. When asked about two landmine blasts that had killed many innocent people--in one case members of a marriage party--he said that these had been mistakes, with the guerrillas believing that the police had hired private vehicles to escape detection. The Maoists, he said, would issue an apology and compensate the victims' families. However, when asked about other, scarcely less brutal killings, he said they were "deliberate incidents."

We asked Sanjeev what he thought of the Maoists in neighboring Nepal, who had laid down their arms and joined other parties in the framing of a republican Constitution. He was emphatic that in India they did not countenance this option. Here, they remained committed to the destruction of the state by means of armed struggle.

How many Maoists are there in India? Estimates vary widely. There are perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 full-time guerrillas, each armed with an AK-47, most of them conversant with the use of grenades, many with landmines, a few with rocket launchers. They maintain links with guerrilla movements in other parts of South Asia, exchanging information and technology with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and, at least before their recent conversion, the Nepali Maoists.

The Indian Maoists got a huge shot in the arm with the merger, in 2004, of two major factions. One, the People's War Group, was active in Andhra Pradesh; the other, the Maoist Co-ordination Committee, in Bihar. Both dissolved themselves into the new Communist Party of India (Maoist). Since the merger the party has spread rapidly, with former PWG cadres moving north into the tribal heartland from Andhra, and erstwhile MCC cadres coming south from Bihar.

The general secretary of the united party calls himself "Ganapathi," almost certainly a pseudonym. Statements carrying his name occasionally circulate on the Internet--one, issued in February, reported the successful completion of a party congress "held deep in the forests of one of the several Guerrilla Zones in the country." The congress "reaffirmed the general line of the new democratic revolution with agrarian revolution as its axis and protracted people's war as the path of the Indian revolution." The meeting "was completed amongst great euphoria with a Call to the world people: Rise up as a tide to smash imperialism and its running dogs! Advance the Revolutionary war throughout the world!!"

Ganapathi is the elephant-headed son of Shiva, a god widely revered in South India. The general secretary is most likely from Andhra Pradesh. What we know of the other leaders suggests that they come from a lower-middle-class background. Like Sanjeev, they usually have a smattering of education and were radicalized in college. Like other Communist movements, the Naxalite leadership is overwhelmingly male. No tribals are represented in the upper levels of the party hierarchy. How influential is the Maoist movement in India? Once more, the estimates vary widely. The Home Ministry claims that one-third of all districts in India, or about 150 in all, are recognized as "Naxalite affected." But this, as the Home Minister himself recently admitted, is a considerable exaggeration. State governments have a vested interest in declaring districts Naxalite-affected, for it allows them to claim a subsidy from the center. Thus, an armed robbery or two is sometimes enough for a district to be featured on the list.

My guess is that about forty districts, spread across ten states and containing perhaps 80 million Indians, live in a liminal zone where the Indian state exercises uncertain control by day and no control by night. Some of these districts are in the northeast, where the nighttime rulers are the Naga, Assamese and Manipuri rebels. The other districts are in the peninsula, where Naxalites have dug deep roots among low castes and tribals grievously shortchanged by the democratic system.

How, finally, might the Maoist insurgency be ended or at least contained? On the Maoist side this might take the shape of a compact with bourgeois democracy, by participating in and perhaps even winning elections. On the government side it might take the shape of a sensitively conceived and sincerely implemented plan to make tribals true partners in the development process: by assuring them the title on lands they cultivate, allowing them the right to manage forests sustainably, giving them a solid stake in industrial or mining projects that come up where they live and that often cost them their homes.

In truth, the one is as unlikely as the other. One cannot easily see the Maoists giving up on their commitment to armed struggle. Nor, given the way the Indian state actually functions, can one see it so radically reform itself as to put the interests of a vulnerable minority, the tribals, ahead of those with more money and power.

In the long run, perhaps, the Maoists might indeed make their peace with the Republic of India, and the Republic come to treat its tribal citizens with dignity and honor. Whether this denouement will happen in my lifetime, I am not sure. In the forest regions of central and eastern India, years of struggle and strife lie ahead. Here in the jungles and hills they once called their own, the tribals find themselves harassed on one side by the state and on the other by the insurgents. Speaking in Hindi, a tribal in Bastar told me, "Hummé dono taraf sé dabav hain, aur hum beech mé pis gayé hain." It sounds far tamer in English--"Pressed and pierced from both sides, here we are, squeezed in the middle."

Source: The Nation, July 16, 2007

Terai rebels meet in Bihar to plan strategy: report

Kathmandu : An armed group of former Nepal Maoists, who are waging a battle in the Terai plains for statehood, are meeting in India's neighbouring state of Bihar to plan their future strategy, a report said. The Janatantrik Terai Mukti Morcha, led by former top Maoist leader from the plains, Jay Krishna Goit, has started a meeting of its central committee in an undisclosed venue in Bihar from Friday, a Nepali daily said Sunday.

The Goit faction, that broke away from the Maoists, accusing the communist rebels of having exploited the Terai belt to come to power, has begun intensifying its movement in the plains for a separate state for Madhesis, people from the plains, mostly of Indian origin. Since its revolt against the Maoists, the Morcha has been split into three splinters. Besides Goit, the other two groups are headed by his former aides, Jwala Singh and Bisphot Singh, both of whom are waging separate battles in the Terai, demanding a separate Madhes state.

The Naya Patrika daily said the government has sent a letter to Goit Saturday, asking him to open parleys. Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala's deputy, Peace and Reconstruction Minister Ram Chandra Poudel, who is heading the three-member ministerial team entrusted with negotiating with the different dissenting factions, sent the official letter to the chief administrative officer of a frontier district to convey the message to Goit, the daily said.

Following in the footsteps of his former comrades, the Maoists, who during their decade-old armed revolt had demanded UN mediation to open talks with the government, the Goit group last week made a similar demand. Goit reportedly sent a letter to the UN Mission in Nepal, that is facilitating Nepal's peace process and monitoring the arms and combatants of the Maoists, asking for help to start talks with the government.

However, with the government having had publicly ruled out UN mediation for talks with the Goit group, the UN agency told the Goit group that it would not be able to act without the government's consent, the daily said. But in his letter Saturday, the minister has agreed for UN mediation, the report said. The daily, considered close to the Maoists, also said the Goit faction would wind up its meeting Sunday, after which they are likely to send their answer to the government.

Most of the armed groups in the Terai, including the three different Morcha factions, take advantage of the open border between India and Nepal and frequently cross over to India for safety and secrecy, just as the Maoists did in the past. There is growing suspicion in Nepal that Indian authorities are in touch with the Terai rebels and are helping the Madhes movement. During the Maoist insurgency, India had faced the same accusations but always denied them, saying it regarded the rebels as terrorists. However, after King Gyanendra seized power in 2005, various Indian agencies, including leaders of its political parties, were involved in bringing the Maoists and the opposition parties together, with meetings between the top brass of both held in India.

Source: IANS, July 29, 2007