After reading your interview with Baburam Bhattarai (#51), I have some questions for him:

Can you define your norms for a New Democracy? Will it be a multiparty system or partyless? Will there be courts or will it be your cadre? Can people protest against you if they do not like your policies?

Can you elaborate your land reform theory of "land to the tiller"? How is it different from Comrade Madhav's krantikari bhumisudhar? How can you produce more if you fragment farms?

What does "national capitalist relations oriented towards socialism" mean?

You want to accelerate the process of industrialisation. Then who will till the small farms? Or you will bring foreign labour for industries?

You say your party will not be like the JVP in Sri Lanka. If there is no parliament, what will be the structure of your government?

You claim you have great public support. Can you prove this without guns?

Your answers to these questions are very important because, as you say, you are soon going to attain your goal of establish a Peoples' Republic. If you can ensure a new free society where people can breathe freely without terror,

we may even support you.

"Kiran"
Tripureswor

The anti-monarchist Maoists are leaving no stone unturned to capitalise on the popular grief following the royal tragedy through such dubious means as cooking up apocryphal stories about what was transpiring between the Palace and the Maoists before 1 June. Dr Baburam Bhattarai even goes so far as to claim that the then King Birendra and his family feared for their lives!

Dr Bhattarai knows that dead men tell no tales and so he can get away with the most outlandish lies vis-?-vis his party's tentative contacts with the late monarch's slain younger brother.

Anupama Ghale
Kalimpong