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HISTORY |
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For a tiny Himalayan backwater, Nepal has played a surprisingly
pivotal role in Asian history. In its early days it reared the Buddha
and hosted the great Indian emperor Ashoka; much later, its remarkable
conquests led it into wars with Tibet and Britain, and during the past
three decades it has come to be regarded as a vital buffer state by both
India and China. Its name and recorded history go back nearly 3000 years,
although it has existed as a nation for barely 200: before 1769, "Nepal"
referred only to a kingdom based in the Kathmandu Valley
Beginnings
Neolithic tools found in the Kathmandu Valley indicate that humans have
inhabited parts of Nepal for tens of thousands of years - and the fact
that the shrines of Swayambhu and Changu Narayan are located on hilltops
suggests that ancient animists may have lived and worshipped there as
much as 200,000 years ago, while the valley floor was submerged under a
primordial lake. The Newar creation myth, which tells of the bodhisattva
Manjushri releasing the waters and establishing Swayambhu, perhaps
preserves a dim racial memory of that prehistoric era.
Nepal's early semi-mythological geneal-ogies aren't borne out by any
archeological evidence, but at some points they tally with other sources.
The Kirata (or Kiranti) tribe pops up in several Hindu texts - and even
in Ptolemy - although the term might well have applied to all hill
people in the first millennium BC. Significantly, the Kirata were often
described as a warlike people known for carrying deadly knives. Whoever
they were, by the sixth or seventh century BC the Kirata appear to have
divided into two distinct groups, one controlling the eastern hills and
the other the Kathmandu Valley.
Hindus were by this time encroaching on the less malarial parts of the
Tarai and founding the city-states of Mithila (modern Janakpur), the
scene of many of the events in the Ramayan epic, and Kapilvastu (now
Tilaurakot), where the Buddha spent his pre-enlightenment years during
the sixth century BC. North India was unified under the Mauryan empire
(321-184 BC), whose most famous ruler, Ashoka, was responsible for
spreading Buddhism throughout the subcontinent, including Nepal.
Following the fall of Maurya, north India was again divided among a
number of states and Hinduism began a slow but inexorable comeback in
the Tarai.
Early dynasties
Nepal's history comes into sharper focus with the arrival of the
Lichhavis , a north Indian clan who overthrew the Kiratas around 200 AD
and established their capital at Deopatan (modern Pashupatinath).
Exploiting Nepal's position as a trading entrepôt between India and
Tibet, the Lichhavis founded a strong, stable and culturally
sophisticated dynasty. No buildings from the period survive, but
contemporary accounts by Chinese travellers describe "multi-storeyed
temples so tall one would take them for a crown of clouds" - perhaps a
reference to the pagoda style that was to become a Nepali trademark.
Under Lichhavi sponsorship, artisans ushered in a classical age of stone
sculpture and produced Nepal's most acclaimed pieces, many of which
still casually litter the Kathmandu Valley. Although Hindus, the
Lichhavis endowed both Hindu and Buddhist temples - Pashupatinath and
Swayambhu were built, or at least expanded, during their rule - and
established a policy of religious tolerance that has been maintained to
the present day.
Much of what we know about the Lichhavis comes from a handful of stone
inscriptions whose authors were probably more intent on self-praise than
historical accuracy. The earliest inscription, dated 464 AD and still on
view at Changu Narayan, extols Manadeva , the legendary builder of the
Boudha stupa. The greatest of the Lichhavi line, Amsuvarman (605-621) is
said to have composed the first Sanskrit grammar and built a splendid
palace believed to have been located at present-day Naksal in Kathmandu.
"Down to the reign of this monarch the gods showed themselves plainly in
bodily shape," intone the Nepalese chronicles, "but after this they
became invisible." By this time Nepal had become a vassal of Tibet, and
Amsuvarman's daughter Bhrikuti, who was carried off by the Tibetan king,
is popularly credited with introducing Buddhism to Tibet.
The Lichhavi era came to a close in 879, and the three centuries that
followed are sometimes referred to as Nepal's "Dark Ages". The Nepalese
chronicles record a long list of Thakuri kings , although the title was
probably a Hindu honorific and not the name of an hereditary dynasty;
these kings may well have been puppets installed by one or more of the
powers controlling the Tarai at the time. Nonetheless, learning and the
arts continued to thrive, and from the eleventh century onwards the
valley became an important centre of tantric studies.
The Khasas and Mallas
While the Thakuris were ruling central Nepal, yet another Hindu clan,
the Khasas , were migrating up from the plains and carving out a small
fiefdom in western Tibet. In the early twelfth century a Khasa king,
Nagaraja, moved his capital down to Sinja in the Karnali basin and
established a powerful dynasty which at its height controlled a broad
sector of the Himalaya from Kashmir to present-day Pokhara. The history
of the Khasas is little understood, for they left few written records
and only minor ruins at Sinja (now Hatsinja) and Dullu, south of Jumla.
Nepal entered a new and much better documented period of its history
when the Thakuri king of Bhaktapur, Arideva, took the title Malla ,
probably in the year 1200. Malla was, in fact, a popular form of royal
address in India at the time - the Khasa kings also called themselves
Mallas - but the name has come to be associated with at least three
separate dynasties, lasting more than five centuries, that presided over
the renaissance of Nepali culture during which most of the temples and
palaces still on display in the Kathmandu Valley were built.
The early Malla era was marked by great instability: the Khasas mounted
several raids on the valley, although they were never able to gain a
ruling foothold, and in 1349 Muslims swept up from Bengal and pillaged
both Hindu and Buddhist holy sites in a brief spree of destruction and
violence. Despite these disruptions, trade flourished, many of the
valley's smaller cities were founded, and Arniko, the great Nepali
architect, was dispatched to the Ming court to instruct the Chinese in
the art of building pagodas. Jayasthiti Malla (1354-95) inaugurated a
period of strong central rule from Bhaktapur, but his most lasting
contribution was to dragoon his Buddhist subjects into the Hindu
hierarchy by dividing them into 64 occupational castes - a system which
remained enshrined in Nepali law until 1964. Malla power reached its
zenith under Yaksha Malla (1428-82), who extended his domain westwards
to Gorkha and eastwards as far as present-day Biratnagar. Upon his death,
the kingdom was divided among three sons, and for nearly three centuries
the independent city states of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur (and
occasionally others) feuded over lucrative trade arrangements with Tibet.
Judging by the opulent durbars built during this period, there must have
been enough to go around, and the intense rivalry seems to have been
good for both art and business.
The Khasa kings didn't fare so well, and by the late fourteenth century
their empire had fragmented into a collection of petty provinces. The
Muslim conquest of north India during the early part of the century
figured indirectly in Khasa's downfall: a steady stream of princes from
Rajasthan, which had borne the brunt of the invasion, limped into the
Khasa hills in search of consolation prizes, and rapidly wheedled their
way into positions of power. Those who took the reins of the Khasa
provinces came to be known as the Baaisi Raja (Twenty-two Princes),
while others who subjugated Magar and Gurung states to the east became
the Chaubisi (Twenty-four).
Unification
For three centuries the Chaubisi and Baaisi confederacies were able to
maintain an uneasy status quo, forming numerous defensive alliances to
ensure that no one state could gain control over the rest. Divided, they
were small, weak and culturally backward. Gorkha , the most easterly
territory, was no different from the rest, except that it was that much
closer to the Kathmandu Valley and that much more jealous of the Mallas'
wealth. Under the inspired, obsessive leadership of Prithvi Narayan Shah
(1722-75), Gorkha launched a campaign that was to take 27 years to
conquer the valley, and as long again to unite all of modern Nepal.
At the time of Prithvi Narayan's rise to the throne, in 1743, rivalry
between the three Malla kings had reached an all-time high. Still,
Gorkha wasn't nearly strong enough to invade Nepal outright; Prithvi
Narayan first captured Nuwakot, a day's march northwest of Kathmandu,
and from there directed a ruthless twenty-year war of attrition . By
1764 he was able to enforce a total blockade, starving the valley and at
the same time replenishing Gorkha's coffers with Tibetan trade. Kirtipur
was targeted for the first major battle, and surrendered after a six-month
siege. Answering a plea from the Kathmandu king, Jaya Prakash Malla, the
East India Company sent in 2400 soldiers against the Gorkhalis, who
proceeded to cut them to shreds; only 800 returned. On the eve of Indra
Jaatra in 1768, Jaya Prakash, by now rumoured to be insane, let down the
city's defences and Kathmandu fell to the Gorkhalis without a fight.
They took Patan two days later, and Bhaktapur the following year, and by
1774 had marched eastwards all the way to Sikkim.
Suspicious of Britain's growing influence in India, Prithvi Narayan
adopted a closed-door policy that was to remain in force until the
1950s. Missionaries were thrown out forthwith: "First the Bible, then
the trading station, then the cannon," he warned. The bloody battle for
succession that followed Prithvi Narayan's death set the pattern for
Nepali politics well into the twentieth century. Yet when they weren't
stabbing each other in the back, his successors managed to subdue
Gorkha's old Chaubisi and Baaisi rivals in the west, so that by 1790
Nepal stretched far beyond its present eastern and western borders.
Lured on by promises of land grants - every hillman's dream - the Nepali
army became a seemingly unstoppable fighting machine, with Kashmir in
its sights.
Westward progress was interrupted, however, by a brief but chastening
war with Tibet . Troubles had been brewing for some time over trade
relations, and the Tibetans were growing alarmed by Nepal's
encroachments on their ally, Sikkim. In 1788 and again in 1791, Nepal
invaded, plundered a few monasteries and exacted tribute from Tibet, but
in 1792 the Tibetans launched a counterattack, penetrating as far as
Nuwakot and forcing Nepal to accept harsh terms.
Nepal's further adventures in the west brought it into increasing
conflict with Britain 's East India Company, which by now controlled
India, and open hostilities broke out in 1814 when Nepal annexed the
Butwal sector of the Tarai. For the British, the dispute provided a
perfect pretext to "open up" Nepal, which had been so tantalizingly
closed to them, and thus to muscle in on trade with Tibet. Britain
attacked with a force of 50,000 men against Nepal's 12,000, expecting an
easy victory; in the event it took two years and heavy losses before
Nepal was finally brought to heel. The Treaty of Segauli forced Nepal to
accept its present eastern and western boundaries and surrender much of
the Tarai, and worst of all, to admit an official British "resident" in
Kathmandu. Yet so impressed were the British by "our valiant opponent" -
as a plaque at an Indian battle site still proclaims - that they began
recruiting Nepalis into the Indian Army before the treaty had even been
signed. These companies formed the basis for the famed Gurkha regiments
. Britain restored Nepal's Tarai lands in return for its help in
quelling the Indian Mutiny of 1857.
The Rana years
The Kathmandu court was practically paralysed by intrigue and
assassinations during the first half of the nineteenth century,
culminating in the ghastly Kot massacre of 1846, in which more than
fifty courtiers were butchered in a courtyard off Kathmandu's Durbar
Square. In the ensuing upheaval, a shrewd young general, Jang Bahadur ,
seized power, took the title Rana and proclaimed himself prime minister
for life, an office which he later made hereditary by establishing a
complicated roll of succession. Though the "Rana" title has generally
been equated with that of a prime minister, technically it conferred a
grade of kingship. The holder's full title was Shri Tin Maharaja (short
for Shri Shri Shri Maharaja; "Shri" is an honorific prefix). The king's
was, and still is, Shri Paanch (Five Shri) Maharajdhiraj. For the next
century, the kings of Nepal were nothing more than puppets, while Ranas
ruled like shoguns and packed the palace with their ever-increasing
offspring. Authoritarian and blatantly exploitative, they built
grandiose palaces while putting virtually no money into public works,
suppressed education for fear it would awaken opposition, and remained
firmly isolationist to avoid losing control to the British. (Ironically,
an impoverished Nepal suited Britain, since it assured a steady supply
of willing Gurkha cannon fodder.) Only a handful of foreign dignitaries
were allowed to enter - usually only as far as Chitwan - and even the
British resident wasn't allowed to venture beyond the Kathmandu Valley.
To survey Nepal and Tibet, Britain had to send in Indian spies disguised
as Buddhist monks.
Yet Jang Bahadur knew the value of staying on good terms with the
British Raj, now at its zenith; in 1850 he broke with tradition and
travelled to England, where he met Queen Victoria and by all accounts
cut a dashing figure. He returned with several Western affectations,
including a fondness for Neoclassical architecture and epaulettes; soon
after, to his credit, he abolished the practice of sati.
Other Ranas continued in the same vein. Chandra Shamsher Rana , who came
to power in 1901 by deposing his brother, is best known for building the
thousand-roomed Singha Durbar and (belatedly) abolishing slavery. He
also made some feeble attempts at modernization, including the
construction of Nepal's first college, railway, hydroelectric plant and
paved roads. By 1940, underground resistance against the regime was
developing, and Juddha Shamsher Rana had four plotters executed; after
the fall of the Ranas these men were declared martyrs and a monument
south of Kathmandu's Tudikhel was erected in their honour.
The monarchy restored
The Ranas' anachronistic regime wasn't able to survive long after World
War II, from which over 200,000 soldiers returned with dangerous ideas
of freedom and justice. In 1947 the British quit India, and with them
went the Ranas' chief support. The new Indian government mistrusted the
Ranas, and became genuinely worried about Nepal's weakness as a buffer
state after the Communist takeover of China in 1949. Seeking stability,
India signed a far-reaching " peace and friendship " treaty with Nepal
in 1950 which, despite the upheavals that were to follow, remains the
basis for all relations between the two countries.
Later the same year the strategic balance shifted again as a result of
the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and the Nepali Congress Party , recently
formed in Calcutta, called for an armed struggle against the Ranas.
Within a month, King Tribhuwan had requested asylum at the Indian
embassy and was smuggled away to Delhi; the next morning, the Nepali
Congress Party launched simultaneous assaults on Birganj and Biratnagar.
Sporadic fighting continued for two months until the Ranas,
internationally discredited, reluctantly agreed to enter into
negotiations. Brokered by India, the so-called Delhi Compromise arranged
for Ranas and the Congress Party to share power under the king's rule,
with Nepalis given the right to vote in the parliamentary-style
democracy.
The compromise was short-lived. Tribhuwan , a previously retiring
figure, emerged as a "hero of the revolution" and an adroit politician,
and before the end of 1951 he had dismissed the Rana prime minister.
This was an end to the Rana regime, but not Rana influence: by an
agreement that has never been made public, the Shah royal family
continues to appoint Ranas to most key military posts, and the families
are inseparably tied by marriage (the queen is a Rana, and two of her
sisters are married to two of the king's brothers). In his four years as
king, however, Tribhuwan neither consolidated his power nor delivered
the elections he promised. Unaccountable to the voters, the party bosses
who controlled the interim government weren't much of an improvement
over the Ranas.
Panchaayat politics
Crowned in 1955, King Mahendra lost no time in offsetting the parties'
power by developing his own grassroots network of village leaders,
forcing the parties to do likewise. They demanded elections; the king
stalled, but finally agreed to a vote in 1959. Amazingly, the Nepali
Congress Party swept seventy percent of the seats, and under Prime
Minister B. P. Koirala began bypassing palace control and creating a
party machine very much like India's. Mahendra was none too pleased with
this " experiment with democracy ", as it came to be called - the
following year he sacked the cabinet, banned political parties and threw
the leaders in jail. For the rest of his reign he relied on heavy police
measures to quell dissent.
In place of democracy, Mahendra offered the " partyless " panchaayat
system , a uniquely Nepali form of government that grew out of the
king's old-boy village network. Village councils ( panchaayat) were
established to look after local affairs; these were to send one
representative on to a district council, which in turn elected members
to a national assembly. The king chose the prime minister and cabinet
and appointed one-fifth of the national assembly, which served as a
rubber stamp for his policies. "Partylessness" meant, of course, one
party - the king's. The panchaayat system conveniently preserved an
illusion of democracy while silencing opposition and ensuring loyalty to
the king: in other words, it was a new and improved version of absolute
monarchy. Corruption was the same as before, only now more decentralized,
as every village panchaayat wallah had a tiny piece of the pie.
India was unhappy with the changes, but Mahendra, unlike his father,
didn't owe his crown to India, and sought wider international support.
He threw open Nepal's doors to foreign aid , which endeared him to the
major powers, enriched the state's coffers and swelled the bureaucracy.
After the 1962 Sino-Indian border war, Mahendra was able to exploit
Nepal's buffer position with particular skill, alternately playing off
the two powers against each other to obtain economic and military aid;
no sooner had India completed the Rajpath, Nepal's first highway from
the plains to Kathmandu, for example, than Mahendra persuaded the
Chinese to extend the road to Tibet, much to India's horror. The " China
card " became an important unofficial strand of foreign policy, but
ultimately it was to help bring about the downfall of the panchaayat
system.
The present king, Birendra , assumed power after Mahendra's death in
1972, although for astrological reasons wasn't actually crowned until
1975. Educated at Eton and Harvard, the young king set out as an
enlightened reformer, taking steps to curb the bureaucracy and cronyism
that had flourished under his father. Reacting to Mahendra's
laissez-faire policies on tourism - which had become Nepal's major
industry - he cracked down on the growing hippie population by
tightening visa restrictions. In 1975, in what was to be the shrewdest
and most popular move of his career, the new king proposed designating
Nepal a Zone of Peace , a Swiss-style neutrality pledge that would at
first glance appear to be completely unassailable. India, however, has
consistently opposed the measure as a violation of the 1950 "peace and
friendship" treaty, which provides for mutual defence, while cynics like
to point out the irony of Nepal - home of the Gurkhas, the world's most
formidable mercenary soldiers - declaring itself a peace zone.
Birendra's domestic reforms soon ran out of steam, and discontent grew
over corruption and the slow pace of development. Widespread uprisings
broke out in 1979, forcing the king to promise a national referendum in
which voters could choose between the panchaayat system and multiparty
democracy. Democracy lost by a margin of 55 to 45 - many say the vote
was rigged - and the panchaayat system was retained.
During the 1980s Birendra proved himself to be an earnest but weak
leader, easily manipulated by advisers and the queen - forever
chaperoned by minders with walkie-talkies, he simply fell out of touch
with the people. Despite token tinkerings with the system, the gravy
train got more crowded throughout the decade, and insiders, sensing that
the regime's days were numbered, tried to grab everything they could in
the time remaining. In 1988 the king's brother, Dhirendra, was forced to
relinquish his title as prince to avoid wide-ranging corruption charges.
The king himself was rumoured to have Swiss bank accounts and an island
in the Maldives (or Greece). Political opponents were imprisoned, while
freedom of speech and the press was nonexistent. Diplomats insist
Birendra was uninvolved with any shady dealings, but he would have had
to be incredibly naive not to have known what was going on in his name
Democracy restored
The chickens started coming home to roost in March 1989, when India,
outraged by (among other things) Nepal's purchase of anti-aircraft guns
from China, retaliated with a crippling trade embargo . Indian Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi - who had long professed a deep distaste for
Birendra's antiquated monarchy - apparently believed shortages of fuel
and medicines would touch off a popular uprising and topple the regime
in a matter of weeks. Only his timing was off. The government rode out
the immediate crisis by closing the universities, rationing fuel and
whipping up traditional anti-Indian sentiment, until the Indian
elections in December, when Gandhi's more conciliatory successor, V. P.
Singh, eased the embargo.
But after eight months of hardship, inflation and police action, Nepalis
were fed up, and India could no longer be cast as the villain. The
previous year had witnessed China's failed pro-democracy movement at
Tiananmen Square and the spectacularly successful revolutions in Eastern
Europe: Nepalis were enormously stirred by these examples. Seeing their
chance, the banned opposition parties united in the so-called Movement
to Restore Democracy , demanding an end to the panchaayat system and the
creation of a constitutional monarchy. They called for a national day of
protest on February 18, 1990 - a date already designated by the
government, with unintended irony, as Democracy Day. Hundreds of
opposition members were duly placed under house arrest, and the planned
revolt got off to a shaky start. Yet Faagun 7 (the Nepali date of
Democracy Day) marked the true launch of the Jana Andolan ("People's
Movement"), which in subsequent weeks gathered strength, resulting in
violent clashes and deaths in Bhaktapur, Narayanghat and Hetauda. Even
while under detention, opposition leaders were able to call strikes and
blackouts at will. The king, counselled by hardliners, kept silence.
On April 3, protesters overran Patan, and three days later an estimated
200,000 people marched up Kathmandu's Durbar Marg towards the Royal
Palace. The army fired into the crowd, killing at least 45 people, and
an ominous shoot-on-sight curfew was imposed. Finally moved to action by
the massacre, the king dissolved his cabinet, legalized political
parties and invited the opposition to form an interim government with
Bhattarai as prime minister. The panchaayat system was dead.
After a few hiccups, the changeover to democracy proceeded in an orderly,
if leisurely, fashion. By November 1990 the interim government had
ratified a new constitution guaranteeing free speech, human rights and a
constitutional monarchy. Under its provisions, the king "reigns but does
not rule": he remains the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but
cannot make any executive decisions without consulting the prime
minister and cabinet. The old Rastriya Panchaayat was replaced by a
Parliament consisting of a directly elected House of Representatives and
a smaller National Assembly.
After a suitable interval to allow the news of democracy to percolate
into the remoter regions, Nepal's first free elections in more than
thirty years were held in May 1991. The Nepal Congress Party, which had
paid its dues in exile for three decades and could claim much of the
credit for bringing down the panchaayat system, won a majority - but not
by much. While the rest of the world was backpedalling from communism as
fast as it could, Nepal's several Communist parties put in a strong
showing, maintaining their traditional strongholds in the east and,
incredibly, sweeping the comfortable Kathmandu Valley. The National
Democratic Party, largely packed with former panchaayat -wallahs, went
down in a ball of flames. It was a clear referendum against the old
guard, but a less than enthusiastic vote of confidence for the Congress
Party.
Congress, communism and breakdown
Any government inheriting such immense challenges with so slender a
mandate was probably doomed to disappoint, and the first Nepali Congress
government's honeymoon was short-lived. Prime Minister Girija Prasad
Koirala, brother of the late B. P. Koirala, Nepal's first democratically
elected prime minister, lost little time not only in attracting the
enmity of the opposition Communists but also alienating many in his own
party.
Antagonism between the Indian-sponsored Congress Party and the
Communists, who looked to China as their only remaining ideological
mentor, produced strong political polarities on almost every issue. For
example, Congress supported the cause of Tibetan refugees in a way that
the panchaayat regime never did, which the Communists viewed as
provocative to China. Yet the Communists certainly spoke for many
Nepalis when they accused Congress leaders of selling out Nepal's
interests to India. This frustration coalesced into a long squabble over
the Tanakpur project - a $65 million hydroelectric diversion built by
India on the Mahakali River, which forms the western border between the
two countries - in which the government was accused of signing away most
of Nepal's rights to the water and power generated from the river.
Unemployment, unrest, Indianization and political infighting produced
widespread disillusion, forcing Koirala to step down in 1994. The
ensuing election produced a hung parliament, with the Communist Party of
Nepal-United Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML) , the largest of several
communist parties, stepping forward to form a minority government. Among
supporters, Asia's first democratically elected Communist government
kindled much idealism, but lacking a parliamentary majority, CPN-UML
leader Manmohan Adhikari could only pursue a modest programme of reform.
The Communists' leadership came to an abrupt end after only nine months,
when in 1995 the Supreme Court nullified the earlier election results
and reinstated the previous parliament. This controversial decision, in
which the Court interpreted the Constitution as barring the prime
minister from calling midterm polls, was to have a crippling effect on
the functioning of the Nepalese state: in effect, it saddled the country
with a hung parliament and prevented the voters from doing anything
about it until the next scheduled election. This set in train five years
of political chaos, with no fewer than six governments attempting to
cobble together coalitions in every combination: left, centre-right,
left-right and centre-left.
A Nepali Congress-led government, headed by Sher Bahadur Deuba, lasted
eighteen months with a slim majority before falling in early 1997. The
Rastriya Prajanatantra Party (RPP) , a rightist group comprised mainly
of Panchaayat-era veterans, presided over the two short-lived
governments that followed. However, the RPP proceeded to self-destruct
in early 1998, provoking a constitutional crisis and causing power to
return to the Nepali Congress Party under G. P. Koirala. As if things
weren't unstable enough, the CPN-UML then split in two, adding further
fragmentation and acrimony. That opened the door for the Nepali Congress
to take on the breakaway CPN-ML as its minority partner, but the bitter
rivalry between the CPN-ML and the UML opposition created paralysis. By
the end of 1998, the ML had pulled out of the coalition, and the Nepali
Congress, seeing the writing on the wall, formed a caretaker government
with essentially no role but to conduct fresh elections the following
May.
These political upheavals took a toll on Nepal and its already lagging
development. Preoccupied by short-term concerns and petty crises,
successive governments were in no position to take decisive action or
follow through on earlier plans. Nepalis looked on helplessly as their
unaccountable leaders engaged in unseemly squabbles, forged
Machiavellian alliances and lined their pockets at the public's expense.
Corruption and cronyism became institutionalized as political parties
relied on kickbacks to support themselves and created elaborate systems
of patronage, and as constant political infighting meant that any
accusation of wrongdoing could be dismissed as party-political. Frequent
changes of government gave politicians a further incentive to grab it
while they could. All this caused Nepalis to lose faith in their new
democracy. Many concluded that it had merely transferred power from one
set of elites to another, and some sought to overthrow the system
through armed rebellion. Even the normally apolitical donor community
began sending a clear message that foreign aid to Nepal was in jeopardy
if the government didn't clean up its act.
Nepal's Maoist insurgency
Despite outward appearances, Nepal is not at peace. Since 1996, an
underground Maoist movement has been waging a campaign of violent
opposition against the government. As of this writing, the so-called
People's War had claimed more than 600 lives; no incidents had involved
foreigners, as the fighting has largely been confined to remote rural
areas where tourists don't go. However, the insurgency has the potential
to escalate into a full-scale civil war.
Before turning to guerrilla warfare, the Nepal Communist Party (Maoist)
was one of several bona fide factions that participated in the 1990
democracy movement. Dissatisfied with the deals struck by the major
parties after the restoration of democracy, extremists in the group went
underground; the failure of the 1994-95 Communist government apparently
confirmed their belief that change wasn't possible by working within the
system. In 1996 they launched the People's War with sporadic attacks on
police stations in the midwestern hills, and subsequently expanded the
conflict to encompass more than half the districts of Nepal.
Intimidation and disruption - kidnapping and assassinating government
officials, bombing telecommunications facilities and other
infrastructure - have been their main tactics in an effort to undermine
support for the status quo, while at the same time playing for the
public's sympathies through populist stunts such as raiding banks and
destroying loan papers. They're able to call general strikes ( bandh) at
will, although it's debatable whether their success at this indicates
true support or merely shopkeepers' and bus owners' fear of getting
their windows smashed.
True to their name, Nepal's Maoists hope to bring about an agrarian,
peasant-based revolution modelled after the one led by Mao Zedong; like
China in the 1940s, Nepal is overwhelmingly rural, with relatively few
of the urban proletarians glorified in the Marxist-Leninist strain of
communism. The insurgents have therefore sought first to consolidate
their power in the countryside, recruiting cadres from among the
disaffected youth and driving out the forces of the establishment. The
plan is eventually to encircle the cities with "liberated" villages and
finally to overpower the urban areas.
Successive governments have considered the Maoists terrorists and
responded with force. This approach has made dialogue impossible, and
has left the underlying cause of the uprising - lack of development in
rural areas - unaddressed. And while to its credit the government has so
far refrained from calling out the army, it has used the police force to
conduct purges that, according to Amnesty International, have included
widespread arbitrary arrests, disappearances and extrajudicial killings.
It's notable that 500 of the 600 people who have died in the People's
War have been Maoists. All of this has helped force the rebels into a
position where they feel they have no alternative but to fight, and
nothing to lose.
The People's War is essentially a symptom of poverty, unemployment and
bad governance - it's a desperate struggle by desperate people. Nepalis
are amazingly tolerant of oppression, so by the time they get fed up
enough to take up arms the situation is probably very bad, and may be
irreconcilable. That's not to say the Maoists have the support of enough
of the populace to overthrow the government; what popularity they enjoy
seems to be mainly an expression of frustration with the mainstream
parties. But the government would do well to heed that message, rather
than shooting the messenger
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