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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/chandra05242006.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/chandra05242006.html</a><br><br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>May 24, 2006<br><br>
</font><h1><font size=5><b>Inside the People's Movement<br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Angels and Demons in
Nepal</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5>By
PRATYUSH CHANDRA<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">T</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>oday, the talk of people's power in Nepal is
the order of the day. Even the Mainstream Media, Moriarty, Manmohan and
their intellectual goons are full of that. Evidently they are having
hysterical fits intensified by the return of the Cold War paranoia. The
possibility of the Maoists' coming over ground and their revolutionary
agenda -- targeting the Nepali dependency -- being constitutionalized is
definitely a grave crisis for Indo-American imperialism in South Asia.
And in order to have a scope for diplomatic engineering, they need
sanitized expressions like people's movement, people's power etc without
identifying who the people are and without detailing their demands.
<br><br>
Definitely the mainstream hatred against the Maoists knows no bound. The
media campaign to denigrate the Maoists has never been so vigorous as
now, showing the crisis and desperation in the imperialist camp -- its
failure to color and control the democratic upsurge in Nepal as in East
Europe and other parts of the world. As one of the coup organizers
against Chavez in Venezuela, Vice Admiral Ramírez Pérez told a private
channel just after the coup on April 11, 2002, "We had a deadly
weapon: the media." And as Pablo Neruda, once reminded us,
"He's the skulking coward hired to praise dirty hands. He's an
orator or journalist. Suddenly he surfaces in the palace enthusiastically
masticating the sovereign's dejections".<br><br>
<br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>1. People's
Movement: a New Phase in the People's War?<br><br>
</b></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Just a cursory reading of the
mainstream media headlines on Nepal and the Maoists today show that they
increasingly concentrate on Maoist "extortions" and other
"criminal" activities. One needs to just go through the reports
under those headlines to have a glimpse of the conscious game plan. Only
to cite a couple of examples: <br><br>
1. As reported, recently, Indian company Dabur suspended its operations
in Nepal. The headline and the first paragraph of the report in Telegraph
(May 20), one of the mainstream newspapers in India, told it was because
the company refused "to buckle under the extortion threats of the
Maoist rebels". But the same report subsequently went on: "The
Maoist-affiliated trade union, All Nepal Trade Union Federation (ANTUF),
on May 15 issued a 22-point charter of demands to all the units in the
Bara-Parsa-Birgunj industrial belt. They demanded scrapping of the labour
contract system, payment of a minimum monthly wage of Rs 5,000 and
provisions of housing, medicare and education facilities to the workers
and their families. The union warned of dire consequences if its demands
were not met within a week." So the genuine workers movement and its
demands in the Nepali sweatshops controlled by Indian imperialists are
extortions.<br><br>
2. The prestigious International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) issued a
media release on May 19, where a subheading said - "Maoists attack
radio station" (later "attack" was changed to
"threaten"). It is obvious that many people who have the habit
of reading just headlines will interpret -- Oh! These gun-trotting
"polpotists" must have raided the radio station. But no!
"The Maoist-aligned All Nepal Trade Union Federation issued a letter
on May 12, 2006 accusing the two FM radio stations of exploiting their
respective staffs, dismissing staff without reason, extreme excesses and
mental torture of the staff, and called for the immediate termination of
the Kalika FM station director, alleging him to be a pro-royalist."
So, this was an attack! <br><br>
In order to understand the impact of such unambiguous media reports, one
needs to remember how even a great novelist from the Left Jose Saramago
went on to dub the great guerrilla movement under the Frente Armada
Revolucionaria de Colombia (FARC) as an "armed gang" dedicated
"to kidnapping, murdering, violating human rights." One can
only imagine what will happen in the case of Nepal. <br><br>
The international left movement divided into innumerable sects is taking
its toll on the Nepali movement too. So we find even sober Marxist
analysts indulging in subjective analyses of the peasant movement in
Nepal displaying their rich repertoire of inter-sect abuses ready for the
Maoists just because they have learnt from the Chinese peasant movement
and call themselves Maoists. The irresponsible reactive armchair leftism
ever online enamored of the rights discourse and neutrality too in its
efforts to justify its own passivity is increasingly involved in this
media redbaiting. As James Petras noted in his open letter to Saramago
(Counterpunch, December 22, 2004): <br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>"[T]here are many types of "communists" today: Those
who stole the public patrimony of Russia and became notable oligarchs;
Those who collaborate with the US colonial regime in Iraq; Those who have
struggled for forty years in the factories, jungles and countryside of
Colombia for a society without classes; And those "communists"
who fear the problem (imperialism) and fear the solution (popular
revolution) and make it all a question of personal preferences.</i>"
<br><br>
</dl>All kinds of media and ideological manipulations are going on
endeavoring to disrupt the New Phase of People's War in Nepal -- its
extension to the urban streets with its own peculiarities, to the urban
proletarian struggle - with the increased Maoist interventions in urban
mobilization and trade union activities.</i> We find rosy words being
showered on the People, while denigrating their War. The rightists,
"leftists" and imperialists are all united in this propaganda
campaign. <br><br>
Personalities who were never on the streets to suffer police beatings and
face bullets were the first ones to declare victory of the People's
Movement with the King's pronouncements. The desperate Indo-US
imperialism and its media touts were booed when they prematurely partied
after the King's April 21 invitation to the parties to name the prime
minister, which every force in the movement duly rejected, including the
nervous parliamentary leaders. However the panicky US-EU-India interests
ultimately found loyal agency in this "responsible leadership"
when it unilaterally accepted the April 24 declaration restoring the
defunct parliament.<br><br>
And thus started the sanitization program -- of talking about People's
War vs. People's Movement, of the failure of the first against the
successes of the latter as proof of the virtue of non-violence. The
hidden agenda is very apparent, that is to restore the sanctified
institutions of State Terror while disarming the People by preaching them
non-violence. The neutral apostles of Human Rights do this by treating
the State's offence at par with the Popular defense. Imperialisms do this
via their "Community Faces" too - through well funded
"Civil Society" groups and NGOs, who specialize in
administering and selling the social agenda of Neoliberalism, providing
"Social Cushion" in the face of the growing marginalization and
social unrest. As perfect plainclothesmen, all these apostles of
non-violence can be spotted here and there in the Nepali unrest with
their clear job of policing the movement from within. After the so-called
"victory" of April 24, their additional job has been to write
anecdotes about their participation in the
"Turn-the-other-cheek-Revolution" with the mainstream and
"civil society" media ever ready to channel the processes of
sanitization and betrayal. <br><br>
In this regard, it suffices to quote Black revolutionary Malcolm X who
was himself the epitome of Popular Suffering, Anger and Movement right in
the belly of the beast:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>"I don't go for anything that's non-violent and
turn-the-other-cheekish. I don't see how any revolution-I've never heard
of a non-violent revolution or a revolution that was brought about by
turning the other cheek, and so I believe that it is a crime for anyone
to teach a person who is being brutalized to continue to accept that
brutality without doing something to defend himself. If this is what the
Christian-Gandhian philosophy teaches then it is criminal-a criminal
philosophy."<br><br>
</dl><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">2. The Nepali Movement
Beyond Sectism<br><br>
</b></font>There is far more to a movement than just its personalities
and ideologico-cultural labels - Zapatistas, Chavistas and Maoists.
However, there is always a mainstream tendency to relegate these
movements to a few personalities, symbols and ideological lineages. This
definitely benefits the status quo as the movements are effectively
portrayed as sects with some innate pathological tendencies. The failures
and problems of the older movements whose idioms the present movements
have adopted and adapted to mobilize and organize the masses are
extrapolated to vilify the latter. The fundamental issues of the changed
conjuncture and the composition of the movements are effectively swept
aside through this exercise, ideologically arming the status quo to
contravene the 'subversive' forces.<br><br>
Feeding to this is the widespread sectism prevalent within the Left,
which aids the hegemonic forces in this regard. The leftist dissection,
labeling and libeling are more effective than any repression and
mainstream media propaganda in forming and deforming the opinion, as they
can be projected as internal dissensions. Karl Marx while summarizing his
experience in the First International rightly notes in his letter to
Friedrich Bolte (November 23, 1871):<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>"The development of the system of Socialist sects and that of
the real workers' movement always stand in inverse ratio to each other.
So long as the sects are (historically) justified, the working class is
not yet ripe for an independent historic movement. As soon as it has
attained this maturity all sects are essentially
reactionary."<br><br>
</dl>The recent upheaval in Nepal has once again brought this sectism to
the center-stage as people everywhere are trying to cope up with the
Maoist element in it. We find Mao's failures and Pol Pot's barbarism
discussed more than what the Nepali Maoists have done in Nepal - how they
have energized the issues of land, land reforms, decadent forms of
gender, national and ethnic oppressions, neo-liberal commercialization,
distress migration etc as their central concerns. <br><br>
In the hands of the Maoists, the issue of the constituent assembly, which
was forgotten by the democrats, became a rallying point for uniting the
rural and urban downtrodden. It was the Maoists' strength with the
growing influence of their slogans and radicalism on the lower leadership
and the mass base of the petty bourgeois parliamentary parties that
shattered the Nepali ruling machinery's ability to control the growing
rage of the people's war. Eventually the 1990 historic
"compromise" between the royalty and the democrats brokered by
the imperialist interests in the region collapsed leading to the latter's
historic alliance with the Maoists in 2005. <br><br>
This alliance triggered the mass upsurge that we witnessed throughout
April this year. The imperialist onlookers were awe-stricken by the
response to the General Strike called by the Seven Party Alliance
facilitated by the unilateral ceasefire declared by the Maoists in the
Kathmandu region with an increased armed assault on the (then Royal)
Nepalese Army in other regions. US Ambassador went on with his rumor
mongering and presented the situation as "pre-revolutionary" in
one of his interviews, which was correct but was meant to terrorize the
Nepali petty bourgeois leaders and mobilize international opinion against
the revolutionaries. India, who has the history of utilizing the unequal
treaties with Nepal for changing the internal political arrangement that
best suited India's interests that necessarily used to include a cosmetic
democracy, this time was (and is) desperate to preserve the monarchy.
However the Indian response has been moderated due to the immense
mobilization within India in solidarity with the Nepali democracy
movement. <br><br>
The petty bourgeois leaders of the parliamentary parties feared direct
action in the rocking streets and burning fields of Nepal destroying
every institution that mothered them. Instead of the path of revolution,
they chose the path of legislation, which allows manipulation and
compromise. Afraid of the revolutionary 'uncertainty' they found a ready
opportunity to withdraw their support to the movement when the King
restored their parliamentary privileges. But the movement continued as
the Maoists and the grassroots of these parties rejected this compromise
and sustained the spontaneous upsurge in popular consciousness, ever
vigilant of the old leadership returning to its old habits and forcing
some concrete progressive "concessions" that we hear in the
news today. <br><br>
<br>
<font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">3. Hands Off Nepal: Rebuff
the possible 'Plan Nepal'<br><br>
</b></font>Today, most dangerously, all imperialist manipulations, media
propaganda and the parliamentary drunkenness in Nepal might prepare the
background for something like Plan Colombia, which derailed the similar
process of overgrounding of the peasant and people's upsurge in Colombia
under the leadership of the FARC. The FARC in 1999-2001 suspended their
armed struggle and negotiated with the Pastrana regime, insisting on a
demilitarized zone, putting forth "a political program of agrarian
reform, national public control of strategic resources, and massive
public works programs to generate jobs". All these radical measures
were destined to destroy the reactionary political economic institutions
that allowed the imperialist network to operate in the country,
devastating the peasantry, indebting the economy and entrenching
corruption in the state structure. Therefore, "with the backing of
the US government the Pastrana regime abruptly broke off negotiations and
launched an attack on the demilitarized zone" and restarted funding,
training and arming the drug traffickers and private armies of the
landlords as para-military forces to harass and destroy the people's
movement.<br><br>
There are well-documented evidences of the drug mafia network under the
CIA of which "The King of Nepal" has been an important part.
Last year there were reports that Crown Prince Paras "has been
allegedly in the drug business for seven years, but his stakes and that
of the Nepali royal family have grown by leaps and bounds in the last few
years[T]he crown prince is now reported to be operating his network
beyond South Asia." (Newsinsight.net, July 6, 2005) With the history
of the linkages between the drug trade and the US' counter-insurgency
drive, one cannot ignore the possibility of a Plan Nepal in the pipeline
until and unless the revolutionary Nepali people are vigilant enough
forcing the country's ever shaky "democratic" leadership to
facilitate the 'overgrounding' of the Maoists and the crushing of the
military leadership trained for imperialist wars, thus thwarting the
danger of any imperialist manipulation. <br><br>
Remember the US insists to keep the Maoists on their terror list, which
allows it to intervene and manipulate regimes beyond the seven seas for
their domestic security interests. The first thing that the US did after
"welcoming" the April 24 proclamation was to sit with the
military leaders, not even with the King. The parliamentary forces might
remove R(oyalty) from the name of every institution, might add Secular in
the official name of Nepal, but the country needs the negation of the
whole system nurtured by 200 years of semi-colonialism, that allowed the
imperialist powers to use the Nepali people, army and resources as
reserve for crushing liberation struggles internationally (in India,
Afghanistan among others), as canon-fodder. And all these in exchange
with a promise that the Nepali royalty and elite could handshake and dine
with the White Royalty, while the Nepali people suffered dual
exploitation, and later, in exchange with rents in the form of foreign
aid.<br><br>
In the age of neo-liberalism, when the Nepali soldiers are not sent for
killing, they can be used as guinea pigs too for pharmaceutical
researches. Recently, there was news about "the American
government's exploitation of Nepali soldiers as human guinea pigs to find
a Hepatitis vaccine." As Jason Andrews wrote in The American Journal
of Bioethics: <br><br>
<dl>
<dd>"Noting the millions of dollars, military training, and arms
that the State Department and Military have been giving to the RNA to
help them put down the Maoist rebellion, it seems plausible that the
resultant military and economic dependence of the host
institution/population (RNA) upon the research sponsor (the U.S.
Military) threatened the voluntary nature of the institutional and
individual participation in the trial. That is, the RNA probably was not
in a good position to say 'no' to the small request by their generous
benefactor." <br><br>
</dl>Servility and loyalty towards global imperialism entrenched in the
Nepali state structure and elites can never be removed only by
legislations -- it needs a complete structural transformation, it needs a
revolution, which has just begun and can go anywhere from here. With the
growing imperialist counseling to the newly formed Nepali government, and
the consensual ideological campaign endeavoring to alienate the movement
from its revolutionary leadership through 'neutral' rights discourse and
by media, any complacency on the part of the revolutionary masses of
Nepal at this juncture will curb the process of democratization of the
Nepali society and state. <br><br>
Pratyush Chandra</b> can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:ch.pratyush@gmail.com">ch.pratyush@gmail.com<br><br>
</a><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
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