Forever feudal

Feudalists are the latest maha-villains in our political song and dance, earning a top berating in recent interviews with Maoist luminaries. Royalists, imperialists, Foreign Hands, and other notorious scapegoats were snubbed as feudalism and its shadowy proponents reaped all the blame for every national problem, including those created by the Maoists themselves.

In a land where criticising others is the national sport, talk is cheap and nothing can be taken at face value. Personally, the Hand wouldn't recognise a feudal if he walked up and conscripted me, which got me thinking about the real Who's Who of Feudalists in modern Nepal.

The dictionary defines 'feudalism' as a social system prevalent in Medieval Europe, whereby lords and barons allowed vassals (i.e. everyone else) to live on their estates in exchange for military service rendered.

The Nepal Army may be old-fashioned, but such practices haven't existed for ages. Though the top officer class remains the preserve of a few families, everyone else joins because they need the job; all are volunteers, none are conscripts.

This stands in stark contrast with the force raised by the Maoists. During their ten-year civil war each household in comrade-held districts was expected to contribute a family member to the cause; some joined willingly, many others didn't. Those families who resisted were extorted, dispossessed, and/or killed, a scenario any 14th century European peasant would be intimately familiar with.

Another quintessentially feudal custom is corvee, or annual unpaid labor to the landowner. Such a system requires organisation, making it ancient history in Nepal until the Maoists dragooned countless villagers to grow food for them, work on their projects, and lead human wave attacks against police posts. Again, our peasant from the middle ages would feel right at home in the New Nepal.

Before the modern age of nation states, armed forces were typically loyal to the monarch instead of the country and its people, an element that still exists to some degree in the Nepal Army. This ambiguity in the current constitution led to divided loyalties and confusion as to who's in charge, allowing a deluded king to seize power as commander of a military he considered his own.

The generals now supposedly profess loyalty to the prime minister and his government, unlike Maoist commanders, whose allegiance is still to an all powerful warlord, another aspect our medieval peasant wouldn't find surprising. There is no concept more feudal than a private militia, operating beyond the writ of the central government and beholden only to its paymaster.

With a pretend Liberation Army in the cantonments, the battle-trained cadre has resurfaced as the YCL. Despite diversionary tactics like planting a few trees in Kathmandu (while looting entire forests in the tarai) and arresting rich criminals late in payments to the party, there is no concealing the fact this military force acts on the whim of a private individual who isn't telling anyone his game plan. While the custom of keeping thugs on retainer is maintained by all national parties, the PLA/YCL is the only truly private/feudal army in modern Nepal.

It's become painfully obvious our comrades' knowledge of world history is limited to an idealised version of Mao's struggle, so a closer look at China might help us understand their approach. Historically, whenever the Beijing government was weak, warlords ran the provinces through such personal militias. Mao Zedong raised a private army in his home territory of Hunan, cloaked it in the ideology of communism while fighting the Nationalists for a decade, and got all the way to the Forbidden City. When his inept policies led to famine he unleashed the Red Guards to eliminate opposition, terrorise the populace, and keep everyone guessing.

Sound familiar? Those readers fond of history will note the copycat repetition at play; what worked for the Chairman is surely good enough for our home boys.

Not much surprises us any longer but many things still sadden and distress, like seeing the people used by yet another party calling itself their saviour.

Unfortunately, in the fight against 'feudalism' and its nasty traditions of servility and class/caste, the Maoists have adopted the age old tactics of the enemy. Despite rhetoric touting a foreign egalitarian ideology, their actions reveal the local forever-feudal mindset of those seeking power at any cost.