Amongst the chattering classes, a scramble has ensued to wrap every manner of geopolitical nonsense around the tape, from seeing it as a pawn of Sino-Indian gamesmanship, to attributing its appearance to a flash of brilliance on the part of Nepal Army. In reality, none of this has much to do with the point: What is on the tape is what the Maoists are and how they think.
Has it been forgotten that there are other tapes which show much the same? One, published during the 2003 ceasefire negotiations, is virtually identical, except the speaker is a high-level Maoist combatant commander (after all, as best can be discerned from available evidence, Prachanda spent most of the war in India, where he was protected by New Delhi).
And have we already forgotten the various transcripts and reports from within the Maoist closed conclaves, wherein they use the same language that is on “the tape”? Even as Nepalis pine desperately for peace and a chance to move forward – perhaps even to have power and water (the Valley), food and security (the rural areas) – the Maoists plot.
They plot, because they know no other way to proceed. For them, the Cold War has never ended.
Brave ‘New World’
People’s war is a strategy for armed politics. The mistake is to think it is merely “war,” by which we normally mean action between armed forces, or “politics,” by which we mean parliamentary give-and-take. To the contrary, people’s war is very much like any electoral campaign – except violence ensures the outcome.
Maoism as a goal seeks to reorder society in a quest for social justice. There is no template as to how this reordering is to take place, except that it is to be Marxist-Leninist (communist). Theoretically a transitional dictatorship guiding socialism to achieve communal ownership of the means of production, in reality it has led only to would-be totalitarianism and attendant human carnage.
Even China, where Mao Tse-tung invented the particular politico-military approach that is people’s war, has turned its back on “Maoist” ideology, which produced a tragedy conservatively estimated to have cost 80 million lives.
Whatever the lack of a realistic goal, the means to achieve the end is manpower, mobilizing the masses in order to overwhelm the foe. Whether this mobilization occurs violently or “peacefully” is irrelevant. The aim is to mobilize the masses into a new state within the existing state, a “counter-state,” ultimately to sweep away ancien régime, the old-order.
In building the counter-state, “all politics is local.” Local grievances are used to offer political solutions. Specifics need not be spelled out, since utopia is sufficient inspiration for followers, who seek redress of immediate grievances (as well as reinforcement of hopes and aspirations).
As in any political campaign, the struggle in reality is myriad local wars, with “Maoism” serving only as the driver for leadership and committed cadres. Indoctrination of the manpower steadily gives the effort greater cohesion. The masses “vote,” helped along by violence against those who resist.
Role of violence
Maoists claim they are merely doing what the state itself has been doing all along. They assert there never has been “non-violent politics.” Rather, echoing Lenin, they label democratic politics practiced by the old-order but a façade for oppression. This oppression is carried out using the violence of the state through its armed forces and police, as well as the “structural violence” of poverty and injustice.
Thus the Maoists see themselves as engaged in a struggle for liberation, of self-defense even. Such a struggle will proceed along different but orchestrated lines of effort. Use of violence is but one line of effort.
Each type of violence – terror has been prominent in Nepal, even now that there is “peace” – is comprised of numerous discrete acts, separate in time and space, yet connected in a unity of action designed to achieve a goal. We can speak, for instance, of the campaign of terror that the Maoists use to eliminate all who oppose them in local areas, whether individuals or police. Who can forget those famous photos of the mutilated individuals in Nepal, especially teachers, their limbs hacked, their bodies hanging from poles?
Yet such terror occurs for a reason: to clear the space for political action, to eliminate competitors. This is why legal political activists are normally particular targets (and the first threatened in the present Maoist effort to counter “the tape”). Such rivals must be driven out so that the Maoist cadres have uncontested access to the masses.
Of course, such methods arouse opposition, even as certain portions of the party platform are attractive. It is for this reason that the Maoists sponsor a multitude of front organizations, such the wide variety of ethnic and community rights organizations one sees labeled “sister organizations” in Nepal to India. On the surface, they are not Maoist, but in reality fronts are controlled by the Maoists. Student, labor, and human rights organizations are normally prominent in this respect.
Such control need not be direct. Fronts can present themselves as independent, even as they are being used to enhance Maoist strength. Lenin called those who unwittingly join such fronts, thinking they are acting on their own, “useful idiots.”
Even as this goes on inside the country, the Maoists work outside. States tend to focus upon the tangible links. Much more important is the information campaign of the insurgents, designed to present their movement as almost benign. Various European states and INGOs in Nepal have been prominent in buying this line (a subject about which the Sri Lankans have lately had much to say).
All lines of effort, whether violent or “peaceful,” advance simultaneously. For a Maoist movement, the goal is always power. They must have power, because the end is to transform society. Maoists are not seeking integration into Nepali society. They seek societal surrender and agreement to its own enslavement.
Quite vocally, Maoists and their fellow-travelers reject the legitimacy of state structures and rules. That is why they are adamant in denouncing all organs of society which create a balance of powers, whether the courts or the office of the president or civil society bodies which they can not control. Once all centers of power are in their hands, they can proceed in totalitarian fashion – but with a public smile.
Have they worked out the details of what this new society will look like? Of course not. That is the beauty of being the political challenger. Today’s realities can be opposed with tomorrow’s promises.
This is what politicians always do, even those who run “on my record.” The danger of left-wing ideologues, such as the Maoists, is that their worldview dramatically constrains their view of possibilities.
They tend to think of fantasies, such as “self-reliance” and “independence,” as ends that can be achieved if only “will” is harnessed. It was just such fantasies, implemented through violence, which gave us the astonishing crimes of the past century – crimes, it must be noted, the Maoists deny occurred.
State of the state
In Nepal, the Maoists first used the monarchy as their foil, as a surrogate for the ills of the old-order. If the “feudal monarchy” is swept away, they endlessly repeated, all would be right with Nepal. In this, they certainly were assisted by the tragic circumstances which placed the then-incumbent, Gyanendra, on the throne. Similarly, they were assisted by his mistakes in maneuvering through the maze of Nepali politics.
New Delhi watched this with concern, especially since the Maoist leadership was based on its soil. The weak position of the coalition government in New Delhi, combined with its normal “Great Game” psychology and the eagerness of certain Indian personalities, especially on the left, to expand their own role and spheres of involvement, led to a policy shift that supported SPAM (the Seven Party Alliance and the Maoists).
It was disappointing and tragic that the SPA and the palace could not have a meeting of minds. Parliamentary democracy should have been the ultimate bulwark against the Maoist challenge. Yet the very nature of Nepali parliamentary democracy, with its corruption and ineptitude, led to its marginalization. The increasingly bitter split between SPA and the king became all but inevitable in such circumstances, but personalities also played a central role, as they do in all that occurs in Nepal.
Regardless, India proceeded in virtually the same fashion as had proved so disastrous in Sri Lanka. As on display, its actions have led to the same result – with the supreme irony being that, just as Sri Lanka has finally clawed its way out of the abyss, the same foreign actors who pimp for the Maoists did so previously for LTTE.
This has its own implications for India’s security and for its struggle against the growing strength of the Indian Maoists. What Nepal itself is facing is the “state within a state” as seen in Palestine with Hamas and Lebanon with Hezbollah. Whether events play themselves out as we are seeing even now in the Middle East depends quite upon what the Nepali political class makes of the opportunity it has been handed by Prachanda’s vanity (why else make a tape of a crime?).
Hamas and Hezbollah have behaved as the Nepali Maoists seem determined to behave, to participate in “the system” only to use it for their own ends. Those “ends,” obviously, have now made life even worse for populations from Palestine to Lebanon to Nepal.
What Nepal as a state never understood was that it faced an armed political campaign. This means – a lesson for India – that democracy, no matter how messy, accompanied by good governance and transparency, should be at the heart of any response to the Maoists, with the state’s armed capacity providing the shield.
That the Maoists know this is why they are proceeding now with threats and street thugs. Their effort to cloak their strategy as a battle about “civil supremacy over the military” is but the latest in what is a very deep bag of tricks. Absent NA, what is left to keep the Maoists from deploying their thugs at will and simply sweeping away all objections to their depredations?
Lenin put it simply: never confuse the subjective, what you want, with the objective, reality on the ground. Time for Nepalis to learn from the master of deception.
(Writer is a political risk consultant based in Honolulu, Hawaii, who has authored a number of benchmark works on Maoist insurgency, including his recent Maoist People’s War in Post-Vietnam Asia.)
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