A spreading insurgency in Nepal

A Maoist insurgency, which first surfaced in February 1996 in two remote hill districts, has spread to over a quarter of the Himalayan kingdom. Gross underdevelopment and a vicious campaign of repression by the police have only served to advance the insurgents' cause.

RITA MANCHANDA

IN Libang, the headquarters of the remote hill district of Rolpa in western Nepal, the jail seemed to have become a cell for indoctrinating its inmates in radical leftist ideology. On the walls were life-size portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong. All the 57 "political prisoners" lodged there may not have been Maoists, but inside the jail they were given "lessons" in political conscientisation by other inmates. Mohan Dakal, 30, one of scores of schoolteachers who were arrested in a police crackdown following the Maoist uprising in February 1996 in Rolpa and Rukum districts, said that if the "political prisoners" were ever released, many of them would go out as committed Maoists.

The Maoist insurgency, which first surfaced in two districts in February 1996, has over a period of two years spread to 23 of the 75 districts, many of them in the western and central hill areas and in the western Terai region which borders India. Estimates of the number of people killed, largely in police action, during the 30-month-old "people's war" varies from 217 according to the police version to 1,500 according to human rights activists. The INSEC Human Rights Nepal Yearbook 1996 and 1997 documented that in the police repression that followed the February 1996 uprising, thousands of villagers were killed or arrested and tortured. Hundreds fled into the forests. Women and children were allegedly arrested and tortured, and women were gang-raped, to extort information about the men who had gone into hiding. These allegations have been detailed in a report by a team of six women journalists, including this writer, who visited Rolpa and Rukum districts in May 1998. The report is being published by the South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR), Kathmandu.

The declaration of the "people's war" was made in February 1996 by the Samyukta Jan Morcha (United People's Front), which had until then been a recognised political party. The UPF participated in the 1991 parliamentary elections, the first since the advent of multi-party democracy in the Himalayan kingdom, and won nine seats in the 205-seat Lower House. However, by 1994, the UPF had become disenchanted with the democratic experiment. UPF chairman Dr. Baburam Bhattarai denounced the "failure" of democracy to usher in fundamental changes in the feudal social structure, which had been entrenched during the years of one-party panchayat rule. The UPF boycotted the 1994 parliamentary elections and concentrated on raising the level of political and social awareness of the people in areas where it enjoyed support - Rolpa, Rukum and Jajorkot districts. It subsequently went underground after giving a call for the overthrow of the system through a protracted armed struggle.

The years before the launch of the insurgency witnessed widespread violence between activists of the Nepali Congress, which came to power in the 1991 elections, and the UPF. The Nepali Congress used the police to unleash a violent campaign against UPF supporters. The INSEC Human Rights Yearbook 1996 records many instances of police harassment, backed politically by the Nepali Congress. Many UPF supporters were arrested on trumped-up charges and allegedly tortured. Violent clashes between the police and UPF activists during a mass culutral mobilisation meet in 1995 prompted a major police crackdown, called Operation Romeo.

BINOD JOSHI / AP
Members of Leftist groups protest in Kathmandu in July against the killing of innocent persons allegedly by the police during an operation against Maoist insurgents. Human rights groups have alleged that thousands of people have been killed or tortured by the police in the 30 months since the insurgency surfaced in February 1996.

Maoist insurgents struck for the first time in February 1996: police stations were attacked and feudal landlords who had enjoyed power under the panchayat system and who had trimmed their sails to suit the winds of political change were killed - most often beheaded.

IN a village en route to Musikot in Rukum district, we met Bhawani (name changed in the interests of his security), who recalled the years of feudal repression under the panchayat system and the build-up of people's resistance to it. During the panchayat days, said Bhawani, there were hardly any big landlords in Rolpa or Rukum districts, but the people felt oppressed by Bir Bahadur Khatri, a local landowner who was protected by the panchayat system and who held sway. Khatri's property was frequently looted by the people, but, Bhawani said, it was considered entirely justifiable since "looting property that was amassed out of the free service of people is tantamount to revolt."

The advent of multi-party democracy gave rise to hopes that the oppressors of the people would no longer enjoy political protection. Bhawani recalled that in Rolpa and Rukum, it was the radical-Left UPF rather than the Nepali Congress or the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist Leninist), the dominant Left party, which enjoyed popular support. (Most of the Left political groupings emerged from the 1971 Jhapa rebellion.) Once the Nepali Congress came to power, it sought to suppress the UPF, and Khatri took advantage of this to protect his interests. However, once the Maoist insurgency took root, he fled to Musikot, the district headquarters, fearful of being beheaded.

The Maoists virtually run a parallel administration in their strongholds. In March 1998, insurgents blew up a telecommunications tower, and communication lines to Rolpa and Rukum districts have remained cut off since then. In Libang, the offices of the land revenue and district administration wear a deserted look. No new cases have come before them since March, since the people prefer to go to the Maoists to get their problems redressed. Of the 56 village-level committees in Rolpa district, 26 are under the control of the Maoists.

In Thawang village, a stronghold of Maoist insurgents, blacksmiths Lal Bahadur Biswakarma and Kripas Biswakarma repair iron implements. The police have forbidden blacksmiths from making farm implements such as sickles, khukris and axes on the ground that they are also used as weapons by the insurgents.

Kumar Dasaudi, the district representative of the CPN(UML), said: "The Maoists have opened parallel administration offices in many villages and have even put up signboards." The insurgents hold jan adalats (people's courts) and, according to the villagers, lay roads, organise the distribution of looted grain, oversee collective sowing of seeds and planting of saplings and even help run model schools.

If the Maoists' writ runs in these parts, it is largely because the area is untouched by development. From Kathmandu, it takes a 24-hour bus ride along rough roads to get to Libang. The remote hills are home of the Magars, Nepal's largest ethnic group who make up 7.5 per cent of the population but are one of the least politically empowered communities. Ironically, King Prithvi Narayan Shah, who united Nepal 300 years ago, styled himself the king of the Magars. Little has changed since then: there are no roads, there is hardly any sign of developmental activity, and the feudal stranglehold is just as strong. The harvest of maize and millet from the narrow terraced fields is barely enough to meet the food requirements of the people for five months a year. The people are left to choose between semi-starvation or migration to India. The political elite of Kathmandu have been untouched by the deprivation and the spiral of violence. As Kanak Mani Dixit, Editor of the magazine Himal, observed somewhat cynically: "Kathmandu does not care as long as it is only Magars killing Magars."

Owing to the disturbed conditions, many international development agencies have suspended or wound up their operations in these areas. In May, Maoist gunmen wearing masks forcibly took away money from officials of the German development agency GTZ, which had taken up a road-laying project in Gorkha district; the money was intended to pay about 200 workers. About the same time, a staff member of USAID, the American aid agency, was killed when his car went over a landmine in Salyan district. The Danish and U.S. embassies put out advisories about the troubled conditions in the kingdom.

Estimates of the number of people killed in the violence over the last three years varies from 200 to 1,500, depending on whom one talks to. Former Deputy Prime Minister Bamdev Gautam, who broke away from the CPN(UML) earlier this year and floated the CPN(M-L), claimed that more than 300 persons had been killed in the latest police operation against the Maoists, codenamed Kilo Sera 2. Inspector-General of Police Achyut Kharel, however, denied that any such operation was conducted. In June, the Home Minister said that 44 Maoists had been killed since May 26. According to Assistant Inspector-General of Police P.S. Rana, in the first two years of the insurgency, more than 3,500 people had been arrested, of whom all but 222 had been released. In the latest crackdown, hundreds more were arrested.

In July, Amnesty International put out an alert about widespread and arbitrary arrests, disappearances, police excesses and extra-judicial killings. In June, Ram Bahadur Bhandari, a peasant activist who was organising collective planting of saplings in a village in Dadhing district, was allegedly pulled out of his house at night by the police and shot. He survived and is in a Kathmandu hospital. Instances of innocent people being arrested on trumped-up charges are common. Buji Mala, 16, who belongs to the Kham Magar ethnic community in Thawang village, was arrested and kept in custody for two years. Her crime was that as a 14-year-old, she, like many other women of her village, provided food for the "Maoists" in the forests. The "Maoists" were in many cases relatives or fellow villagers.

IN Rolpa and Rukum, only the police guns announce the presence of the state. In Libang township, policemen armed with .303 rifles patrol the streets. The tension is palpable. Villagers who are on the "hit list" of the Maoists have sought shelter in Libang and live with police protection. There are men like Bir Bahadur Khatri in Musikot. Then there are women like Puran Maya Rokka, whose husband was killed by the Maoists on the charge of being a police informer. She closed down her shop in Thawang village and opened one in Libang with police help. The residents of Thawang village, however, say that she could have stayed on in the village, since the Maoists "were not after her".

In these remote, inaccessible villages, the man who comes masked at night could be a neighbour or a police informer. With dusk comes total darkness: a lamp or a flashlight attracts the unwelcome attention of the police. No lamps flicker in the hill villages at night.

SHOBHA GAUTAM
Sixty-nine-year-old Donga Rokka, mother of Lali Rokka, a social activist who was allegedly killed by the police when she was administering polio vaccine in villages under the control of Maoists. Rural Nepal is untouched by development, and the plight of the poverty-stricken villagers is made worse by a feudal system that has remained impervious to change despite the advent of multi-party democracy.

Strangers, who were welcomed warmly, are now told to go on their way. Newspapers sympathetic to the Maoists reported recently that in Sindhuli district, villagers were duped by policemen disguised as jogis (religious mendicants) and some others who claimed to be Maoist sympathisers who were carrying urgently needed medicines for Maoists hiding in the village. The unsuspecting villagers led them to the Maoists who were killed by the men in disguise. Among those killed was Jaydhal, a woman commando.

As we, the group of six journalists, trekked our way in early May through the inaccessible and impoverished villages of Rolpa and Rukum districts, we found the people caught between the Maoists and the police. From Libang, we took a steep track through a thick forest called kala lek where a red flag was visible on a lonely hill. Beyond it lay Mirul village in Rolpa district, where 19 persons - the largest number in any village - have been killed in violence between Maoists and the police.

There are no men left in Mirul or in the scores of villages dotted across the western hills where the Maoist insurgency has spread. To stay in one's village is to risk being picked up by the police, tortured and executed on suspicion of being a Maoist. To collude with the state - to be a "class enemy" - is to invite the midnight knock: masked men and women with red headbands have been known to drag away suspected informers and chop off their limbs with khukris.

The men have fled into the forest or crossed the border into India. The women have been left behind and forced to take charge of their own lives, and the stories they narrated spoke of a truth different from the stories we had heard in Kathmandu about "Maoist terror".

Mirul has an elected, all-women local village body. "There were no men to contest," said Asapura, 40, a member of the committee. Because she dared to take up a leadership role, she was falsely implicated in a murder case.

Pura Budha, 17, was on the roof of her house, carrying out repairs before the onset of the rainy season. Her aged grandparents sat on the balcony and her 13-year-old sister scrambled about. Months earlier, Pura Budha's father Pun Budha had fled into the forest to escape police repression after a Maoist attack on Man Bahadur Rokka, a suspected police informer, in November 1996. The "execution" of Rokka triggered a wave of killings by the police in Mirul and Thawang villages. Within five days of his killing, the police picked up five members of a family in Mirul, including a young girl, on the ground that they had links with Maoists. The five men were shot dead on the way to a nearby police post; the girl was raped and killed. Their bodies were burnt by the police. Pun Budha feared that he would be the next: he had been associated with the UPF before it went underground. He therefore fled, leaving his daughter to face police harassment. She and her sister too fled into the jungle, but returned to the village after six months. "What was I going to do?" asks Pura Budha. "Spend my entire life in the forest? Who will look after the house, the animals and the land? There is no one to plough the fields."

Others like Sita Kumari Pun, 13, are spurred by feelings of revenge. Her father Pun Bahadur Pun said that in December 1996, her brother Jan Bahadur Pun, 23, and a friend were picked up by the police and shot dead; their bodies were disposed of. Pun Bahadur Pun suffered a paralytic stroke; Sita and her younger brother do all the work. Sita, however, wants to avenge her brother's killing, and is waiting to get her own back against a village tyrant who she believes incited the police against her brother. She says defiantly: "No, I have not lost a brother, I have a thousand more brothers."

For Sabita Khatri, or Sangeeta as she has been rechristened by the Maoists, even the sindoor (vermilion mark) she wears on her forehead is a symbol of defiance. Her husband, she said, and five others had been shot dead when they went to the forest to fetch roots. The police brought back the bodies to the village and proceeded to eat a meal right next to the bodies, all the while taunting the villagers. When Sabita was going through the rituals of widowhood - removing the sindoor and the pothi (the red necklace worn by married women) - the police mocked her. Today she wears them as red badges of courage.

DURING our visit, we learnt that many UPF supporters had been drawn into the insurgency after the police foisted "false charges" on them. In a sense, they were driven to seek the "protection" of the Maoists in order to escape from police repression. In Thawang village, we were sitting in a Maoist stronghold into which, we were told, the police would dare not enter. As a result, in 1997, village council elections were not held there or in 72 other villages. The district development committees have not been set up and therefore funds have not been disbursed - even for relief work in areas affected by landslips or where dirt roads had been washed away during the rains. A model school supported by the Maoists functions in Thawang, but in most other villages, the schools are virtually non-functional because many of the teachers have been arrested or transferred.

Home Ministry sources claimed that 95 per cent of the victims of Maoist violence were Nepali Congress activists; in many cases they were also the most prosperous residents of the village. The villagers, however, said that the Maoists targeted those whom they suspected were police informers, irrespective of which party they belonged to; since it was Nepali Congress activists who provided the political patronage for police excesses, they accounted for a large share of the Maoists' victims, the villagers added.

SHOBHA GAUTAM
Sabita Khatri, whose husband was allegedly shot dead by the police. She continues to wear the sindoor and the pothi, symbols of married status, as a mark of protest.

During the first phase of the insurgency, Left intellectuals were critical of the Maoists' resort to a "people's war" since, in their view, democratic means of attaining social change had not been exhausted.

Police estimates put the number of militant cadres between 100 and 150 in each of the affected districts. The Maoists themselves claimed, when they flagged off the third phase recently, that their hierarchically structured revolutionary army headed by the military supremo Prachanda had 10,000 uniformed armed cadres. Some Nepali ex-servicemen from India are reported to have joined the Maoists; they have given an edge to recent Maoist attacks. Thus far, the insurgents have used only rudimentary guns, muskets and crude farm implements, including khukris, as weapons. The police are armed with .303 rifles.

SUCCESSIVE governments in Kathmandu have treated the insurgency as a terrorist problem that requires to be dealt with through resort to force. In August 1997, however, Home Minister Khum B. Khadka said that it was a "political problem" and that the Government was willing to begin negotiations aimed at a political solution. But even the designated representative for the parleys, Member of Parliament Padma R. Tuladhar who belongs to the Left, said that the Government was "not serious" about negotiations. Even as it claimed to favour a political dialogue, the Government sought to arm itself with more stringent laws to put down the insurgency.

Political analysts and human rights activists have repeatedly urged the Government to address the core issues - widespread poverty and unemployment in rural Nepal. But even as recently as January 1998, Prime Minister Surya Bahadur Thapa said: "We are yet to analyse the reasons for the insurgency. We need to do that before we finalise a development package."

Soon after taking over as Prime Minister earlier this year, Girja Prasad Koirala undertook a whirlwind tour of five districts that have been affected by the Maoist insurgency; he followed this up with the most brutal police crackdown to date - Operation Kilo Sera 2. More manifestations of the Government's intolerance came in June, when human rights activist Gopal Sivakoti Chintan was arrested in Kathmandu on the eve of a public meeting with its focus on the Maoist problem.

Daman Dungana, a former Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament who recently visited some areas where Maoists have popular support, believes that this kind of response from the Government will be counter-productive. "There will be retaliatory targeting of Nepali Congress activists. It will end up destroying democracy," he said. In his opinion, the insurgency cannot succeed. "The revolution may not succeed, but may end up damaging multi-party democracy." And that, he says, is fraught with perils, for it could see a return to autocratic rule.

Table of Contents

Home | The Hindu | Business Line | Sportstar