Once more, we are made to pay for the tiny minds and large egos of our politicians. Once more the nation is held hostage by their myopia. The dissolution of parliament, the November elections are just outer manifestations of infighting in the ruling party. We can only hope that by making this desperate move to save his own skin, Prime Minister Deuba has inadvertently done the one thing that could bring the Moaist leadership to the mainstream. But will the underground comrades grab this chance? One of the lessons Nepal can take from Peru is that if you want to fight an insurgency, you have to first put your political house in order. You can\'t have political parties clawing at each other in parliament while the security forces try to fight a guerrilla war.
Nepal's Maoists are travelling the well-trodden path of the Peruvian revolutionaries. The parallels between these antipodal uprisings are striking. Their remote and rugged altiplano is our mid-west. Peru and Nepal have similar populations of disenfranchised, marginalised ethnic groups and capital-centric elites who have shown breathtaking disregard for the hardships and misery of fellow-citizens. When revolutionaries took up arms to capitalise on this bitterness, the state in both Peru and Nepal came down hard. But responses designed to nip the rebellion in the bud had the opposite effect: the atrocities of the Peruvian security forces in Ayacucho in the mid-1980s had parallels with human rights violations that accompanied Operation Romeo and Operation Kilo Sierra in the mid-west in 1996-98.
For anyone who wanted to predict that this country was going the way of Peru, the writing was quite literally on the wall. Back in 1993, the streets of Kathmandu were painted over with blood-red graffiti proclaiming solidarity with the Peruvian struggle, and when Sendero Luminoso leader Abimael Guzman was caught that year there were "Release Comrade Gonzalo!" slogans emblazoned across the country.
Our comrades have followed the Shining Path model to the letter, even cleverly naming their doctrine the Prachanda Path by playing on the Nepali word "path". (Of course, the Peruvians were such purists, they didn't want to start a personality cult by naming their revolution after a leader.) But there is no doubt about it: both revolutions essentially follow the paths of destruction. The aim is to destroy the presence of government and symbols of its oppression through devastating slaughters that spread panic and demoralisation through the sheer shock of brutality.
The core of the ideology in both cases is therefore to play on the psychological impact of violence and mayhem so that people, in the end, lose faith in government, in the economy, and, to cut a long story short, in everything "old". By their own admission, the comrades in Peru and Nepal both like to say that they don't believe in the "old", and if any residue of the "old" is allowed to remain, it will undermine the "new".
The panic and anarchy feeds on itself, and Peru came close to Year Zero. The security forces had been chased away from large parts of the country, and the strangulation of the capital from the countryside had begun. It was in fact while the Shining Path guerrillas were on the verge of advancing into Lima that an intelligence breakthrough led to the arrest of Abimael Guzman.
The difference between the Shining Path and Nepali Maoists is that our comrades have contested elections and served in parliamentary parties. Some of them have even been members of parliament. They could go back if the conditions are right, and elections in six months may be just the thing. To be sure, they will first have to live down and atone for the mayhem that they have unleashed. But more brutal rebel movements have been known to join the political mainstream in other countries.
In Peru, the government reacted late, but it got its act together with a multi-pronged counter-insurgency strategy that employed a classic "shield" and "sword" approach. The shield was a grassroots development programme that aggressively redressed past neglect. The sword used military pressure and effective intelligence to go after hardcore cadre, while sparing the followers. It would be counterproductive to make the people suffer. That's what worked with the Shining Path. Can it be made to work with Prachanda's Path?
