Diwakar chhetri

Back in 1995 when a party inspired by Maoism was trying to decide whether or not to wage an armed struggle in Nepal, the staunchest advocate of violence was the party's influential ideologue and current prime minister, Baburam Bhattarai.

Inspired by Mao Zedong and his acolytes in India, Peru, Cambodia and the Philippines, Nepal's Maoists felt justified in waging 'righteous violence' to counter structural violence of the state. Revolutionary cruelty was considered legitimate to redress historical inequality, social injustice, exclusion and exploitation. Nepal's Maoists felt that 'objective conditions' were ripe, and they were egged on by the international revolutionary movement which needed a cause célèbre to replace the Sendero Luminoso movement in Peru, which had just been crushed.

Part of the Maoist party did not agree that geopolitical conditions were right to wage an armed struggle, and the party split. By Feburary 1996, the first police stations were attacked, heralding the start of a war that was to last ten years and leave at least 16,000 Nepalis dead.

The ideological justification for launching an armed struggle was feeble. It had been barely six years since the People's Movement of 1990, and although the multiparty system was having teething problems it was beginning to deliver results. Grassroots democracy and elections to local councils were throwing up accountable leaders responsive to the development needs of constituents. Empowered communities were protecting natural resources, and charting out their own destiny. 

It is not in the terms of reference of die-hard Maoists to ever admit they were wrong, or to say sorry. They will also be unrepentant about their belief in murder of a human being as a political principle. As it turned out, most of the victims of the Maoist war were innocent Nepalis who wanted no part in a conflict waged in their name. They were villagers forced to serve as human shields, poor men and women recruited by both sides to be cannon fodder, or civilians killed in the state's brutal counter-insurgency.

In India, the S. R. Sankaran Committee which tried to bring about a negotiated settlement to that country's own Maoist war acknowledged in a report that the root causes of violence lay in societal inequities and injustice. But the Committee said retaliatory brutality was neither politically, nor morally justified. Non-violent, democratic struggle is always more effective in the long-run, and it doesn't leave the corrosive residue of counterviolence, and the mass suffering of innocents. Gandhi himself reminded the world about the limits of violence. 

In interviews during the war, including one to this paper in 2002, Baburam Bhattarai said that the Khmer Rouge genocide was exaggerated ''western propaganda''. After the war in 2008 he justified violence by saying that it ''has to be seen from a historical and political perspective''. His boss, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, told a group of editors in 2006 that he had never condoned torture, but admitted instructing his fighters to execute class enemies with a ''bullet to the temple''.

He hasn't rescinded that order, and until he does, we will be forced to believe that the Maoist ideology of violence is still in force. In any other democratic country in the world, only an obsolete fringe party would still believe in violence as a political doctrine. Here in Nepal, such a party happens to be the biggest one in the legislature. Unless all political parties in Nepal officially, publicly, in words and deeds, give up violence and stop protecting war criminals, there is a danger volatile identity politics of the constitution-writing process can ignite ethnic bush fires.

It is time for Pushpa Kamal Dahal to realise that a public renunciation of violence will not be seen as a defeat, in fact it will most likely ensure his victory in a future election. And he wouldn't even have to cheat, or threaten anyone.

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