The man came walking along the path. He was slightly chubby, unassuming. He wore a short- sleeved shirt, Chinos and sunglasses, and carried a small black briefcase. He seemed relaxed as he approached, as though simply out for a stroll in the park. He could have passed for an insurance clerk - or the teacher he used to be before he dropped out of normal life and went underground.
There was nothing to suggest that this was one of South Asia’s most wanted men: Comrade Krishna Bahadur Mahara, as his colleagues in the movement know him, who ranks number two in the politburo of the Maoist Communist Party of Nepal, second only to “Prachanda”, the party’s founder and the most elusive of the Maoist leaders.
My meeting with Mahara took place outside the state of Nepal; I had to promise not to disclose exactly where. We sat on the grass in a large park, a space open enough that anyone who tried to sit too close would be conspicuous. I wanted to meet him because his party is now locked in a direct and personal struggle with the king of Nepal over the future of the country.
On February 1, King Gyanendra launched a coup in which scores of elected politicians were locked up and fragile democratic institutions suspended. His excuse was the need to restore order and defeat the Maoists - the only revolutionary Communist party in the world with a chance of one day winning power. Comrade Mahara was keen to discuss the way forward for Nepal’s Maoists in the wake of the coup; exactly what it would mean for Nepal if the Maoists were to take power was now an urgent question.
Gyanendra has never been popular. He came to the throne as a result of the violent murder in June 2001 of his brother King Birendra and eight members of his immediate family, apparently at the hands of the crown prince, Dipendra. The official explanation was that Dipendra, thwarted by his family’s refusal to allow him to marry as he chose, had gone on a shooting spree under the influence of a cocktail of alcohol and drugs, then shot himself. Dipendra survived just long enough to be declared king, then died and was hastily cremated.
Gyanendra’s problem was that few people believed the official story. Inspired by little more than the habit of suspicion and calculations of cui bono, public opinion in Nepal rallied to the theory that he and his son Paras were the true authors of the crime. Nearly four years on, the now widespread belief - for which no material evidence has been produced - that Gyanendra had killed his way to the throne gave any discussion of politics in Kathmandu an undertone of menace. Now the king’s coup had provided more fuel for conspiracy theorists: the massacre of his family, they said, was part of a larger plan to return to roll back Nepal’s modest democratic gains. The king, people insisted, wanted absolute power for himself and his cronies.
Democracy in Nepal has shallow roots: the country came into being in the 18th century when Prithvi Narayan Shah, a warrior prince from the hill state of Ghorka, fought his way to the Kathmandu Valley and set up his new state. His descendants, the Shahs, are still on the throne, and it was only in 1959 that Nepal had its first elected government. A year later, the monarch King Mahendra dismissed it and imposed his own idea of democracy - the heavily controlled panchayat system, under which no political parties were allowed and real power remained with the monarchy. It lasted until 1990 when a popular uprising, fuelled by a long blockade by India, forced King Birendra to concede power and declare himself a constitutional monarch. Nepal’s political parties emerged from their twilight existence to contest the general election in May 1991. Even though the king kept control of the army, the concession of some democratic process was an important step forward. But in the 14 years since, Nepal’s politicians have shown themselves prone to corruption and petty feuding. The palace has been quick to exploit their weaknesses. Now, the politicians suspect, Gyanendra is trying to turn the clock back to panchayat days.
In October 2002, Gyanendra dissolved parliament and sacked the government. He appointed three successive prime ministers, while retaining overall control himself. His February coup merely formalised his absolute power as head of state and head of government. Since the Nepalese constitution prohibits the prosecution of the king, Nepal now has a head of government who is above the law. “Suddenly,” one human rights monitor remarked, “we are in the 14th century.” It had all been necessary, the king claimed, to restore order and defeat the “terrorists”.
Few took the Maoists seriously at first. Their war began in 1996 with a few minor actions against police posts. They established their base in Rolpa in the west of the country, remote enough from Kathmandu to be ignored. It seemed unlikely that a Maoist revolution could succeed anywhere at the end of the 20th century, let alone in profoundly religious Nepal, but only nine years later the Maoists have some 12,000 fighters armed with a motley range of weapons captured from the state security forces, or home-made pipe and socket bombs. Their inadequate arsenal notwithstanding, they have a powerful presence in most of the country and collect revolutionary “taxes” even in the capital. Such big business as Nepal has pays up for the sake of peace. The Nepalese state has been forced to retreat from any pretence of governing two-thirds of the country.
In fighting the people’s war, the Maoists have turned the ideology of the Nepalese state upside down: in a country in which only a tiny handful of young people complete secondary school and the oppression of women is institutional, they offer their followers a promise of comradeship and purpose in a force in which up to 40 per cent of the fighters are women. And in a society of rigid caste hierarchies, the Maoists articulate and exploit ethnic and social grievances. They demand an end to the monarchy and a new republic; under the theory of people’s war, they believe that by the time they achieve this the revolution will be all but assured.
Seated cross-legged on the grass, Mahara laid out the Maoist analysis in the wake of the king’s coup. What had been a triangular struggle for power between the constitutional politicians, the king and the Maoists had now become a simpler two-way contest. This new clarity, he said, would work to the Maoists’ advantage. He seemed satisfied that the Maoists’ past pronouncements on the character and intentions of the king - once thought absurdly partisan and extremist - had now been publicly vindicated. The coup, Mahara told me, was the product of Maoist success.
”The king is confined to Kathmandu,” he said, “and the international imperialists are worried about that. So this is an attempt to consolidate authority in the king. It was a triangular situation before - the king, the political parties and us. Now it is bi-polar and the real war is now between two armed forces - one belonging to the king and the other to the revolutionary struggle.”
(A senior British diplomat had put it in similar terms two weeks earlier. “The king,” he said, “is telling us we must choose between him and the Maoists. He is convinced that faced with that choice we will have to back him. Personally, I’m not so sure.”)
”Now it is clear to the other political parties that the monarchy is the enemy of democracy,” Mahara continued. “There is no advantage for them in supporting the king since the king will not allow them to hold power.”
His hope, he said, was that the constitutional politicians would see the wisdom of backing the Maoists’ demand for a new constitution to rid Nepal of its monarchy and the entrenched ruling class. The constitution they envisaged, Mahara insisted, would set up a republic with a multiparty democracy.
It did not sound like a revolutionary platform. Mao himself, in the early days of the People’s Republic of China, had offered a tactical alliance with other political parties but his alliances were short-lived. For non-Maoist politicians and the anxious bystanders, the unanswerable question was: would Prachanda’s Maoists keep their promises?
Mahara told me that the Nepalese Maoists had learned the lessons of history - that dogma does not offer a lasting political future. Prachanda recently spoke of a 21st-century democracy in which the new state “will be under the observation, control and hegemony of the general masses”. There would be “free competition among political parties”, he said, as long as they “oppose feudalism and imperialism and work for the service of the masses”.
Mahara’s version of the plan was less jargon-ridden: “If we are to forge an alliance with the other parties,” he said, “we have to be flexible. We envisage a two-step revolution - first a multiparty democratic republic. If it was a genuine democracy, then we would work for the peaceful transformation of the state.” It did not sound like classic Maoism, though it did imply that the Maoists in power might move to ensure they never lost it. Mahara smiled.
”We follow the Prachanda path,” he said, naming the theory elaborated by the movement’s chairman and military commander. “It is learned from the experience of Russia, China and others,” said Mahara. “We haven’t given up Marx, Lenin and Mao but we don’t want to take it as dogma. We want a 21st-century democracy in which the people supervise the state so that people with money cannot control the elections. We want transparency and equal opportunities for all parties.”
He spoke with the apparent sincerity of a social democrat arguing the virtues of universal suffrage. But we both knew that the effort to ensure equal opportunity for all parties could easily slip into a justification of the need to exercise absolute power in the name of the people. What would prevent those who opposed them from being labelled “class enemies”, as Mao’s opponents had been? Mahara, though, was arguing the necessity for alliances. The most important objective now, he said, was to persuade the other political parties to side with them.
Would any of the political parties trust the Maoists enough to enter an alliance with them? It was true that everything the king had done seemed likely to drive the political parties into the arms of the Maoists, but there were obstacles, too. There was hostility and suspicion from the parties to the right of the Maoists; and, despite their shared hostility to the monarchy, there was little trust among parties of the left either. I had met activists from leftwing parties in Kathmandu who had complained of harassment and violence against them by the Maoists, and refugees from Maoist-controlled districts who had fled the party’s village atrocities, or who feared their children would be forcibly recruited into the Maoist army. Trust would not come easily.
At the same time, the rhetoric of the movement had softened. It was, said Mahara, unrealistic to suppose that a small state such as Nepal could survive if it had too many powerful enemies. For the Maoists, that meant neighbouring India and China, neither of which would be keen to see the triumph of millenarian revolutionary ideology. Perhaps as they draw closer to power, the Maoists have begun to think of strategic survival. First, though, they have to win the war.
At present the Maoists control the countryside and the army defends the cities. It is, in effect, a military stalemate and few military analysts believe that this is a war that will be settled on the battlefield. That, nevertheless, is the idea on which the king has gambled his throne and, some would say, the future of his country. Now there are signs that the army is developing tactics that could make the situation dramatically worse.
The state of Nepal is already fragile. It contains 10 major ethnic groups and many minor ones. A dozen different languages and 30 dialects are spoken and for 200 years these diverse people were governed for the benefit of a tiny ruling elite who enforced a rigid Hindu social hierarchy. The Maoist challenge to the state has brought to the surface profound differences among the people. Even if the Maoists were defeated, the weakness and unpopularity of the monarchy means those divisions would be keenly exposed.
Nowhere do these tensions show more clearly than in the Terai, that broad flat plain, once thickly forested, that leads to Nepal’s southern border with India. The motley collection of ethnic groups here have long resented the dominance of mountain peoples, and the Maoists have tried to exploit that resentment.
The king’s coup, with its draconian limits on the press and the free movement of human rights monitors, had cut the capital off from the wider country. Despite this, rumours had been circulating in Kathmandu of an outbreak of violence in the Terai district of Kapilvastu. Then, on February 21, the government-controlled TV channel aired a lengthy report of a visit to Kapilvastu by three government ministers. They had gone, the government said, to lend official support to a spontaneous uprising by local people against Maoist oppression.
Accounts of exactly what had happened in Kapilvastu were sketchy and contradictory. The government version was that local people had taken up arms against the Maoists. There had been isolated examples of civilian mutiny against Maoist control, but it was also well known that the army had long wanted to organise civilian militia to fight the Maoists. Human rights monitors suspected that the army was seizing its opportunity under the cover of the king’s news blackout. Unofficial reports filtering back to the capital suggested that an organised mob had attacked villages and burned hundreds of houses, killing an unknown number of people.
I flew down to the Terai, landing one evening as darkness fell. The Maoists had ordained a transport stoppage and the roads were all but empty. Unmanned roadblocks built of rocks and burnt-out vehicles testified to the dangers of defying the strike. The district of Kapilvastu lies on the Mahendra highway, close to the Indian border, 450km from Kathmandu. On February 17, I discovered, local Maoists had kidnapped two men, one of them a former policeman, the other suspected of being an army informer. According to the two men, their neighbours attacked the Maoists and released them and in the course of the fighting captured three of the kidnappers. They were taken to a local army camp and beaten to death. The next day a further nine suspected Maoists were killed in the army camp and, in the days that followed and with the evident encouragement of the security forces, a large mob of people attacked a series of villages, looting and burning houses and, on occasion, killing. By the time the trouble died down four days later, 21 people were dead.
The worst-hit village was Hallanagar, a settlement of landless day labourers who had migrated from the hills of Rolpa four years ago. Rolpa was where the Maoist insurrection had begun and the migrants said they were fleeing the violence. Some locals, though, suspected that anyone who came from Rolpa was Maoist.
At the nearby army base, battalion commander Lt Col Komar Lama told me that Hallanagar was an illegal settlement that the government had wanted to clear for some time. He himself suspected that the migrants were Maoist sympathisers. Hallanagar, he said, had 325 houses. “If there are two Maoists to a house, that makes 600 Maoists.” Col Lama made no secret of his enthusiasm for citizen militia. “Self defence is the best defence,” he said. “Though torching houses,” he added, as an afterthought, “cannot be condoned.”
Whoever had initiated the violence, the results were devastating. On February 20, the village of Hallanagar had been reduced to a charred landscape in which families sheltered in the scorched remains of their roofless houses, unable to afford to rebuild them and with nowhere else to go. They crowded round and showed their unhealed wounds, describing a nightmare attack by a mob intent on driving them out. One house stood burned out and empty. The old man who lived there, they said, had been beaten to death. The army, the villagers complained, had stood back and let it happen and on February 21, the king’s three ministers had arrived by helicopter to offer their encouragement to the mob.
In a nearby town a bespectacled man who gave his name as Narayan Khan told me he was the Maoist political leader of the district. There were 26 dead, he claimed, of whom 12 were supporters of the Maoists. The others, he said, had no connection with the party.
A local schoolteacher summed up his fears: “Some people say the local landlords were involved, people who had to run away to India when the Maoists arrived. Now with the king’s coup they have come back.” His worry was that officially sponsored violence could escalate into a general conflict of hill migrants against Terai plains; Muslim against Hindu.
Back in the capital, the city wore a slightly desperate face: the big hotels that stood ready to receive the tourists who supply a vital part of Nepal’s foreign earnings were virtually empty; anxious taxi drivers harassed the few foreigners on the street. Heavily armed military patrols guarded key intersections. The network of FM radios, once an important source of local news, was broadcasting nothing but music, and the mobile phone networks, closed down on the day of the coup, had not been restored. The city was full of people looking for each other. Many still carried their dead phones and toyed with them absent-mindedly, as though hoping they might suddenly spring back to life.
The city’s vibrant media were under military occupation: on the day of the coup censors appeared in editorial offices and ordered certain items cut, then insisted that white space was also banned. Some editors defied the ban, others published bizarre photographs to signal the censor’s activities to their readers or articles laden with irony about topics such as Kathmandu’s tree blight.
Gyanendra had declared open season on Nepal’s constitutional politicians: some were in prison, others were under house arrest. (Last month some 259 political prisoners, including a former prime minister, were released without charge but Amnesty International estimated the number of arrests since the king’s coup at more than 3,000.) Also on the king’s hit list were Nepal’s human rights activists, lawyers, journalists, university teachers and prominent figures in Nepal’s sprawling NGO sector. Some had been detained. Many more had been harassed, their telephones tapped and their movements restricted.
Kathmandu’s intellectuals and activists were still discovering the extent of the new restrictions: distinguished professors had turned up at Tribhuvan Airport ready to board flights to meetings or conferences abroad, to be told that the king’s measures prohibited their travelling. Others had returned from trips and been detained on arrival. Others still tried to leave the Kathmandu valley for another part of Nepal, only to be turned back at an army roadblock or arrested.
All of their names were on a list. It was a list whose nature and extent was unclear, but page 17 of it had been leaked to a foreign embassy. Under the heading “miscellaneous” it named 19 eminent individuals. They included an editor, a former Speaker of parliament, a former chief justice and a distinguished academic, and a former chairman of the Bar Association. Which names appeared on pages 1-16, how many pages might follow or what exactly the list denoted, could only be guessed at.
The Maoists’ first response to the king’s coup was a 10-day transport “strike” that slowly strangled the cities. Kathmandu, sitting in the heart of a large and fertile valley, maintained a reduced supply of fresh fruit and vegetables, though other necessities - cooking gas and kerosene for instance - rapidly became scarce and prices steadily rose. Just outside the capital, on the main road that leads eventually to India, the source of most of Nepal’s imported necessities, long lines of lorries waited for the military to organise them into protected convoys. The Maoists periodically reminded those who ventured to travel without protection that they meant business: a bus driver shot dead, a truck burned out and the driver killed, a family car destroyed.
Rumours were filling the vacuum created by the king’s censorship. None of them were to his credit. In Kathmandu it was pointed out that the king’s coup would, if anything, have a negative influence on the war against the Maoists: troops had been pulled back to the capital to guard the large numbers of political prisoners and keep order on the streets. The only real difference was that, with human rights monitors and journalists confined to the city, the army’s actions could no longer be investigated or reported. But the real target, observers said, were the democratic politicians. Curiously, it was an argument that the king’s right- hand man did not contradict.
The government offices are housed in the Singha Durbar, the grandiose remnant of a once vast palace built in unabashed imitation of Versailles. Long lines of petitioners were laying siege to a makeshift security desk outside the back gate the day I visited, but at the far end of the compound the grandest of the original palace buildings was eerily empty. My footsteps echoed in the corridor as I passed rows of unmanned offices until, in a far corner, I found the office of Tulsi Giri, a veteran royal adviser who had recently returned from 35 years of self-imposed exile in India. Now he was the king’s vice-chairman of the council of ministers, and widely cited as one of the architects of the coup.
Giri is 79 and, unusually in Nepal, a Jehovah’s Witness. He sat, dressed in traditional Nepali costume, under a portrait of the king, looking at me across a wide desk on which his briefcase rested, slightly open. It appeared to contain nothing but a box labelled Toffee Almond Chocolate. I asked him why he had left the country in 1990, the year the popular revolt forced King Birendra to concede power.
The democracy that the late King Birendra had been forced to permit, Giri confessed, was not to his taste. His return to the inner circles of power in Nepal tended to confirm the widely held belief that Gyanendra planned to return Nepal to the pre-democratic era. “Democracy does not mean parties,” Giri said. “Under the panchayat we thought that parties do not express the people’s view. They express the party’s view. The party is a mechanism to get people elected. We used an indirect method of election to get people elected without parties.”
Multiparty democracy merely confirmed Giri’s low expectations. “It was crisis after crisis - strikes, extortion,” he said. “His Majesty was kind enough to give me this opportunity to try to sort out the mess.”
For Giri and his colleagues, there had been one unpleasant surprise: international reaction to the king’s coup had been overwhelmingly negative, particularly among Nepal’s traditional supporters and donors. India had demanded an immediate restoration of democracy and suspended military aid, leaving the US and Britain little option but to follow suit.
Giri would not admit to any miscalculation but acknowledged that his feelings were hurt. “We hear Bush and Blair say that terrorism is the first enemy. Is it applicable only in Iraq? We defended their empire for years,” he added, of the British. “We are hurt. We have every right to ask for help.” If it was not available from India, the US or the UK, he said, Nepal reserved the right to turn elsewhere. Shortly afterwards a trade delegation from Pakistan arrived in Nepal, promising a $5m soft loan that could be used to buy arms, followed by a visit from the Chinese foreign minister who was warmly received by the king. Nepal, the king seemed to be saying, had other options. It is unlikely, though, that either Pakistan or China will replace India as Nepal’s primary superpower. Geography, as well as history, dictates the importance of that relationship.
In late April, after a meeting in Indonesia between the king and India’s prime minister, the Nepalese government claimed that India would restore military aid. And on April 30, perhaps as a quid pro quo, Gyanendra lifted the state of emergency. However, Amnesty International and other human rights organisations said this coincided with new orders forbidding public gatherings, meetings or any kind of protest, and draconian detention measures were still in force. “A key test for the king is whether he will now allow journalists, lawyers and human rights defenders to operate freely,” said Amnesty’s Asia Pacific director Purna Sen. “If civil society continues to be suppressed, the lifting of the state of emergency will be meaningless.”
When we met, Mahara had declined to predict how long it might take the Maoists to win power, though he laid out possible ways the Maoists might prevail militarily. The movement had good relations with the junior ranks of the army who had no real stomach for the fight, and he considered a mass defection of junior officers a serious possibility. Blockades of the cities and military campaigns, he said, were preparation for a final offensive. The Maoists believe the end game has begun.
The afternoon wore on. I had asked him about reports of Maoist atrocities, forced recruitment and extortion. He insisted that people did not, in general, flee the Maoists. “The poor give voluntarily,” he said. As he spoke, Mahara’s manner became watchful and the tone of his conversation changed. A group of young men had chosen to sit quite close by. I could see Mahara grow tense and alert. He rose to his feet, shook hands and walked away - briskly but without obvious haste. At the edge of the park he paused, then disappeared, apparently unremarked, into the crowd in the street.
Isabel Hilton is a writer and broadcaster.
