Since February 1996 an armed, mass revolutionary insurrection has been raging in Nepal. This has grown to the point whereby imperialist powers such as the USA and Britain are actively intervening to try to crush this popular uprising.

NEPAL (Link To Map)

Nepal is situated along the edge of the Himalayas between India and Chinese-ruled Tibet. There is little modern industry and the great majority of the people - around 90% - are peasant farmers. It is one of the poorest countries in the world and its people are desperate to change and improve their lives. The population consists of many different peoples with their own distinct languages, customs and religions. The dominant, ruling class element was originally of Indian origin and is Hindu in religion. Although they lord it over the people there are many poor, oppressed people in this ethnic group with a low caste status (dalits).

In the early 19th. century the Gorkha kingdom in Nepal was defeated by the British Raj and the country became a client state of British imperialism. When India gained political independence in 1947 hegemony over Nepal passed to the new Indian state. The Nepalese ruling class consists of feudal landlords, such as the royal family, comprador capitalists, (i.e. those whose interests are tied in with foreign capital), and bureaucrat capitalists, (i.e. those who use the state apparatus to exploit the people). They are closely allied with and dominated by the Indian monopoly capitalist class. These oppressors ruthlessly exploit the Nepalese people and their resources, such as water which is diverted to India, to their own advantage. Like many less developed countries, Nepal has massive foreign debts and is undergoing privatisation and trade liberalisation at the behest of the World Trade Organisation. Millions of Nepalese are forced by poverty to work abroad, particularly in India. Some of them are driven to prostitute themselves as mercenaries in the Indian and British armies. The so-called "Gurkha" units in the British Army - Gurkha being a corruption of Gorkha, one of the many peoples of Nepal - are made up of many nationalities from this country. Nepal is a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country and to achieve liberation its people need to defeat both internal and external reactionary forces.

The Nepal Communist Party (NCP) was formed in 1949 and although in theory it claimed to favour armed struggle to overthrow the feudal monarchy, in practice it mainly engaged in peaceful, parliamentary politics. Despite the predominantly revisionist leadership of the NCP, there were some armed uprisings such as the one in the Western region in 1952-3 which was crushed by Indian troops. The eastern border of Nepal is next to the part of India where an armed uprising under Maoist leadership broke out in 1967, the Naxalite movement named after the village in which it broke out. In 1971 this rebellion spread over the border into Nepal but the NCP denounced it. In 1974 the NCP actually claimed to have adopted the revolutionary political line of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung Thought but avoided preparing for people’s war in Nepal by claiming that first it had to begin in India! During the next twenty years there was protracted political struggle between the revolutionaries and revisionists in the Nepalese communist movement until there emerged the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) CPN(M) which in 1995 decided to start a people’s war of national liberation.

The ideological outlook of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and it is a participant in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the international network of Maoist parties and organisations. Its leader and Chairman is Comrade Prachanda and the application of Maoism to the particular concrete conditions of Nepal is called Prachanda Path. This political line has not been developed solely by Comrade Prachanda but as he says is "…a centralised expression of the collective effort of the great martyrs of the People’s War, the general masses of the people, the whole Party rank and file and its team of leaders." Prachanda Path is the continuous summation in both theory and practice of the experience of the developing Nepalese revolution.

Given its semi-feudal and semi-colonial character, the CPN(M) hold that Nepal is at the stage of New Democratic Revolution and that only when this has been achieved will it be possible to move forward to socialist revolution. In Nepal the immediate problem is to destroy feudal oppression and exploitation from within and imperialist, capitalist exploitation from without. This necessitates the building of a Revolutionary United Front of workers, peasants, the middle strata intelligentsia and even the national bourgeoisie, i.e. those capitalists whose interests are obstructed and limited by feudalists, comprador/bureaucrat capitalists and imperialists. The working class are only a few per cent of the population, concentrated in the towns, but their objective position in society disposes them to recognise the necessity for socialism. This class is the fundamental, necessary force for leading the revolutionary movement. The peasantry are the great majority of the population but are divided into poor (landless) peasants, middle peasants who have land insufficient to provide all of their sustenance and "rich" peasants who employ landless labourers. The poor, landless peasants are the largest group and are the main force in the revolution and their immediate aim is land redistribution. The worker-peasant alliance - symbolised by the hammer and sickle - is the crux of the United Front but provided the Party correctly handles the contradictions between them and the other class elements all of them can unite to defeat feudalism and imperialism. Only when this has been achieved will it be possible to inaugurate the socialist revolution.

Another aspect of the Nepalese Revolution that the CPN(M) is addressing are the contradictions among the various national and ethnic groups in Nepal. The feudal monarchy has tried to maintain the dominance of Hindu religion, Nepalese language and the Khas nationality over all of the different peoples of Nepal. The CPN(M) recognises that national oppression is widespread throughout the country and upholds the right of self-determination and even secession for the different national groups. There cannot be a United Front unless these national contradictions are handled correctly.

The CPN(M) is well aware of the strategic location of Nepal in the South Asia region of the world. On one side the country borders Tibet which is ruled by the Chinese counter-revolutionary state bourgeoisie and on the other side there is India and its monopoly capitalist class. The last thing either of these expansionist regimes want is for a revolutionary, Maoist regime to come to power on their doorsteps. Such a development could well stimulate fresh revolutionary upsurges in these neighbouring countries. Thus the CPN(M) has called for a coordinated united front of communist parties and national liberation movements throughout the whole region to oppose expansionist Indian monopoly capitalism. The CPN(M) considers that the Nepalese New Democratic Revolution can only achieve victory if there are similar revolutionary movements in nearby countries. The strategic aim is to establish a Soviet Federation of South Asia that could be the vanguard of the second wave of socialism in the world.

The basic orientation of the CPN(M) is internationalist. They see the revolutionary war in Nepal as but part of the international revolutionary struggle to destroy capitalism and commence socialist transformation. Nepal is a relatively small and very economically backward country but its people are providing a splendid example by revolting against oppression and exploitation. One spark can light a prairie fire.

When they launched the People's War in 1996 the CPN(M) were well aware that the struggle for victory would be protracted and involve many twists and turns. The strategic aim in this predominantly rural country is to surround the cities from the countryside. As the experience of people's war elsewhere has shown - in China and Vietnam - when the People's Liberation Army (PLA) have achieved victory in the rural areas the towns will fall with minimal resistance. In its early stage of guerrilla warfare a people's war is on the strategic defensive and it is only after it has achieved some significant successes against the enemy and mobilised mass support that it is possible to form more regular military forces and go over to the strategic offensive.

The People's War began with attacks on police posts and the burning of the mortgage and loan documents that consign the rural poor to eternal debt bondage. The landlords and Government forces responded in their customary ways with burnings of houses, beatings, killings and raping women. Women in Nepal are even more oppressed than are men and many of them have rallied to the PLA where they are among the most committed fighters and leaders. Needless to say, the various revisionist "communist" groups such as the United Nepalese Communist Party (M-L) (known as UML) were horrified at the armed insurrection and rushed to condemn it.

The guerrilla fighters had no modern weapons when they launched their offensive. Many of these comrades are armed with percussion cap rifles, the sort of equipment the British Army had 150 years ago. But this has not inhibited their determined struggle. As Mao Tse-tung pointed out, it is people and not weapons that win wars. Increasingly the PLA are capturing modern weapons and equipment from the Government forces they defeat. As young men go to the mountains to join the PLA, women take over full responsibility for agricultural production.

Targets attacked by the PLA include local government officials, informers and various international non-governmental organisations (NGO's). The policies of the latter are directed primarily at middle strata groups and are aimed at bolstering up the status quo. The Revolutionary United Front has called for a number of successful boycotts of both local and national government elections. These "elected" bodies are nothing but stooges, including various revisionist "communists", who try to give credibility to successive reactionary governments. Also there have been a number of national strikes in protest at the oppressive legislation passed and enforced by the regime in Khathmandu.

As the revolutionary forces have grown in strength and consolidated their power in certain areas, particularly in the Western region, it has become possible to set up organs of popular power consisting of three-in-one combinations of Party cadre, PLA personnel and local people. By late 2001 a central people's government had been created, the United Revolutionary People's Council, led by Comrade Bhatterai. A state structure is being created whereby the workers, peasants and their allies will increasingly exercise power and be in a position to immediately carry forward the aims of the revolution when the reactionary regime in Khathmandu is overthrown.

As the People's War has grown in strength differences have sharpened among sections of the Nepalese ruling class. King Birenda, who allegedly was assassinated by the Crown Prince in July 2001, had held back from ordering the Royal Nepalese Army to launch an all out offensive against the PLA. This was, in the view of the CPN(M), the primary reason for his murder. Clearly the feudal monarchy has been in a state of growing crisis and is rapidly disintegrating as a result of the onslaught of the People's War.

The new prime minister installed after the King's death, Sher Bahadur Deuba, ordered a ceasefire by Government forces so that there could be negotiations with the revolutionary forces. The PLA responded by suspending military operations and the CPN(M) called for the formation of an interim government truly representative of the various political forces in the country, the popular election of a constituent assembly and abolition of the monarchy. Deuba rejected these democratic demands thus exposing the dictatorial character of the Kathmandu regime. Military operations recommenced with intensified ferocity in November and many people such as students and journalists sympathetic to the revolutionaries were arrested and imprisoned..

Following the September 11^th. events in America, the Nepalese ruling class has turned to the US and British imperialists to step up support for the "war on terrorism" in Nepal. US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Nepal in January 2002 as has the British Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State Ben Bradshaw who said: "Britain will certainly help Nepal. We have also experienced in Northern Ireland a similar kind of problem for 35 years. There is need for a robust attack on this type of terrorism." In June 2002 the US and British governments held a meeting in London to step up their military intervention and aid to the reactionary Nepalese Government. The fact that the major imperialist powers are intervening is not a bad thing but a good thing because it reflects the growing strength and success of the revolutionary movement in Nepal.

British imperialism has been involved in the oppression and exploitation of the people of Nepal for nearly two hundred years. Thus people in Britain have a particular responsibility to support the revolutionary struggle in Nepal. We should widely expose and oppose the actions being taken by the New Labour British Government so as to try to forestall any further oppressive intervention.

HARRY POWELL