What follows was my final paper for one of my Anthropology courses: “Bandits, Rebellions and Social Revolutions.” In this course we looked at various forms of peasant resistance to hegemony. Given my time in Nepal, and the relative familiarity/interest I cultivated in Nepal’s recent political history, this was a natural topic for a final paper, and I’m quite proud with the result.
Questions and/or commentary is more than welcome. I apologize if the formatting is a little bit off, as well. I’ve had a cursory look to make sure everything copied over okay, but there could be a few issues which I haven’t yet noticed.
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The Agency of the Peasantry and the Maoist Insurgency in Nepal
The Maoist insurgency in Nepal, lasting a decade and constituting what might be called the 21st century’s first peasant uprising, concluded just over five years ago. Since its end in 2006 a UN mission has come and gone, a multi-party coalition has ended the country’s centuries-old monarchy, developed new political apparatus, held elections, and attempted to leave a violent era in the past and turn toward a future full of potential development. Yet, despite the conclusion of the conflict, and the events that have followed the armistice agreement, there is still no generally accepted model to adequately account for the rise or success of the Maoist insurgency or its impressive postbellum electoral performance which also bears application to a local context. The Maoists have been painted as a cabal of terrorists and violent instigators, or as a ragtag band of freedom fighters not unlike Robin Hood. Economic analysis, exploration into ethnic activism, and theories of greed and grievance have been applied to the ten-year war in order to find the factor most responsible for Maoist success. As with any historical moment, however, the truth almost certainly lies somewhere in the middle of the caricatures and beyond just a single ingredient. The truly interesting question is whether the focus on the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-Maoist) and its People’s Liberation Army is itself the problem muddling the understanding of a decade of conflict. Rather than being a creation of the Maoists, can the social and political awareness of Nepal’s peasantry be identified as the chief factor in the successes and the failures of the “people’s war?”
In this paper we will look briefly at the history and nature of the CPN-Maoist and its revolutionary program. Examination of the party’s agenda will allow us to understand both its appeal to cadres, as well as its implications for the uninitiated peasantry. This will give us a context for the success of both the insurgency and the 2008 election in which the Maoists emerged as the largest party. We will follow up with the examination of two midwestern hill villages: Deurali, a community selected by the Maoists to serve as a model village, and Dullu, a village taken by the Maoists which eventually rejected by force the party’s domination and model of governance. These two cases, and particularly the latter, should demonstrate that while the Maoist agenda must certainly hold an attraction for the peasants of Nepal, the political awareness and agency of the peasantry is the peasantry’s alone. Both the successes and the failures in the execution of the Maoist agenda can only be fairly assessed by understanding the Maoist’s interaction with the peasantry, and more importantly, the peasantry’s reaction to that engagement.
The story of the Maoist party begins with the foundation of the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) in Calcutta, India, in 1949 at the end of an era of Nepali history referred to as the Rana period (Ishiyama and Batta 373). As the despotic Rana regime weakened, a number of political parties formed inside and outside of Nepal to help bring about change in the country, and just two years later in 1951 the CPN and other parties helped to dislodge the Ranas and usher in a new era (373). Despite the communists’ part in shaping the outcome of the uprising, however, the new government was quick to ban the CPN, moving the party underground where it would stay for several decades (373). Banished to the political underworld, the CPN fractured into a number of much smaller parties over the years, only seeing a slight reprieve beginning in the sixties when the monarchy abolished all political parties during the panchayat years (Lawoti 5). While the crown faced off with the more openly organized and belligerent Nepali Congress party, the various communist organizations spread, occasionally even colluding with the monarchy under the common banner of nationalist sentiment (5). The following decades saw a series of splits and mergers between communist factions, as well as one violent episode in 1971 (modelled on the Naxalite uprising in West Bengal) perpetrated by a faction who would eventually merge to form the CPN-United Marxist Leninist (UML), the primary opposition party following the 1991 election (5).
In 1990 the panchayat system was abandoned and multiparty democracy embraced once more. At about this time a small handful of extremist communist parties coalesced as the CPN-Unity Center, but did not preform well in the subsequent election (6). Before the next election a faction within Unity Center split off once more forming a new party, and driving the portion of the party who remained to boycott the election when the Election Commission did not allow them a place on the ballot (6). Shortly thereafter this remainder of Unity Center renamed itself to the CPN-Maoist and began to prepare for an insurgency. An ultimatum listing 40 demands was drafted which touched on wide ranging issues including several aspects of Nepal’s relations with India, secularization of the state, land reform, and rights for indigenous peoples, women, and Dalit (low-caste) persons. Finally, the ultimatum called for the end of royal privilege and the drafting of a new constitution (7). On the thirteenth of February 1996, when it was clear that the list of demands were not going to be met by the deadline provided, the Maoists launched their insurgency in the rural areas of three districts (7). By 2001 the Maoists claimed control over four fifths of the nation (Ishiyama and Batta 374), and the Nepali government assessed Maoist strength at “5,500 active combatants, another 8,00 militia, 4,500 full-time cadres, 33,000 hardcore followers, and 200,000 sympathizers” (Joshi and Mason 395), seriously affecting in various degrees the governance and goings-on in all of Nepal’s seventy-five districts.
The item of the Maoist program which seems the most obvious and is the most often cited reason for the insurgency’s success is its stance on land reform. Previous to the uprising in 1951 there had been two major forms of land tenure: kipat described communal lands which generally belonged to ethnic groups, chiefly in Nepal’s eastern areas, while raikir lands belonged to and were administrated by the state (400-1). As a strategy to both engender political support for and reward service to the state, use-rights for raikir lands were given to nobles, soldiers, and religious figures under various arrangements (400). These landholders became important and powerful authorities in their communities since they functioned as landlord for the peasants who lived on and worked ‘their’ land. However, this did not result in the creation of a landed elite: since only use-rights were granted to these individuals, all lands reverted back to the state whenever the recipient died, terminated their service, or their favour with the current authority in the capital expired (400).
When the Rana regime had ended, one of the first programmes of the new Nepali Congress-led government was to enact land reform that would end landlordism and give the peasants ownership of the land that they lived and worked on (402). However, one glaring oversight in the 1957 Land Act resulted in disaster when individuals were only granted title to their land if the taxes they paid to live there were registered in their own name (402). In reality, the majority of taxes that were collected were registered in the landlord’s name (402). As a result, the legislation which had been brought in by the same Nepali Congress party that had adopted as part of their slogan “Land Belongs to Tillers” granted permanent ownership of lands to the landlords (402).
This established a new status quo which would remain unchanged for decades. The landlords who administrated raikir lands were there because they already had close ties to the monarchy, and they were further indebted to the government for bestowing permanent titles to them, even if that was not the government’s intention. During the following panchayat years of ‘partyless democracy’ the king held great influence over electoral results since the indebted elites were granted control over who could run for office (403). Even in later years powerful parties such as the UML, who claimed land reform as a major component of their platform, relied heavily on landlord support to win seats (394).
This was the situation that the Maoists sought to address, first via their political platform, but eventually as an insurgency. After decades of political turmoil which did not serve the needs of the rural people of Nepal, the political climate “… left the field wide open for the Maoists to propose armed insurgency as the means to realize people’s expectations” (Joshi 93).
The obvious question presents itself quickly: given that 82% of Nepal’s workforce are agriculturalists (Joshi and Mason 394), why did the return of multi-party democracy in the 90′s not resolve the land issue without driving the country to civil war? As Madhav Joshi states, Goodwin and Skocpol call the ballot box “the coffin of revolutionary movements” (92), so why didn’t the peasants of Nepal vote for parties that would solve this issue? There are two possible answers. First, and less convincingly, one might argue that they did bring this problem to the ballot box, at least in some part. As was previously observed, the United Marxist Leninist party did have land reform on their agenda, and they did receive enough of the vote to become official opposition. The UML even formed the government for slightly less than a year between 1994 and 1995, only shorty before the Maoist insurgency was launched (Joshi and Mason 394). Unfortunately, it seems clear now that land reform was an empty campaign promise, and landlord support for the UML points to the second possible (and far more convincing) argument as to why democracy did not solve the land issue.
Madhav Joshi argues that because the peasants of Nepal were heavily concentrated in subsistence agriculture, and because access to land was largely only available through a landlord, peasants remained “in networks of patron-client dependency that limit the autonomy of their political behaviour” (Joshi 98). Landlords in this situation extract political support from peasants in a similar way to how they otherwise extract rent and labour. Because there existed a population of landless peasants who would be eager to take their place, very few rural agriculturalists were willing to risk their livelihoods in order to vote contrary to a landlord’s instruction (98). Even official guarantees regarding ballot secrecy did not appear sufficient to incite peasants to cast votes on their own behalf, rather than on behalf of the landlord’s wishes.
It is utterly unsurprising, then, that when Maoist cultural teams arrived in an area to educate, indoctrinate, entertain and recruit rural people, particular focus was put on recounting for the assembled peasants tales of battles won and landowners punished and killed (Eck 40). This retelling of the destruction of class enemies had several dimensions: first, it demonstrated that the Maoists, unlike mainstream parties like the UML, were willing and capable of carrying out their promises of reform, no matter how dirty the work was; second, it served as a warning for other potential enemies not to oppose them; third, it freed rural people from the client-patron relationship that the peasants believed was responsible for their poverty, and more importantly removed that impediment from political activism (40).
This fits well with an assessment of the insurgency by Bishwa Nath Tiwari, who is concerned with whether the Maoist people’s war can be understood as a conflict rooted in greed or one rooted in grievance. To relate these dimensions to the previous issue of client-patron relationships, we can break down the contrast between greed and grievance this way: the inequality between landlord and peasant, as well as possible ethnic and political subjugation can be understood as issues of grievance, while engagement in the insurgency for access to resources or revenue is a matter of greed. Tiwari references previous studies along this dimension and observes that “the grievance approach is more applicable in countries with caste and ethnic divisions and exclusion in different spheres including in the sphere of state/politics” (246). While we have not touched on the ethnic dimension in any substantial way, if we accept Joshi’s analysis of client-patron relationships we have already seen that rural agriculturalists were always excluded from truly participating in Nepal’s democracy. What emerges from Tiwari’s analysis of the data, however is that neither dimension alone sufficiently explains the motivation for the peasantry to engage with the Maoists. He observes that “[economic inequalities] … increase the likelihood of conflict, and once the conflict is initiated …. the intensity of conflict is guided more by the social variables” (253).
We have established the inequality of the client-patron relationship, and the fundamental brokenness of the land tenure system as excellent motivations for the peasant’s sympathy for the Maoist insurgency. It is also very telling that after the insurgency concluded the Maoists won 120 of Nepal’s 240 single-seat constituencies (Ishiyama and Batta 374), which appears to be a resounding vote of confidence for a party entirely unsympathetic to landlords in a country where landlords previously dominated politics. It would appear that whatever the insurgency achieved for the Maoists, it also achieved peasant independence in the polling station.
This is admittedly a very naive and excessively optimistic assessment of the 2008 election. While Mahendra Lawoti’s study of the 2008 election grants that “The Maoists would have probably become the largest party without intimidation and violence” a campaign of coercion before the election date “paid a rich dividend” to them (301). Certainly the account of Maoists spreading rumours that they owned binoculars which allowed them to see how people voted (298) echoes previous beliefs that landlords would discover and issue punishments to those who did not vote for the landlord’s preferred candidate. But while changes may seem most expedient when brought by ballots, elections are not the only way for the peasantry of Nepal to affect political outcomes. Certainly two case studies from during the insurgency will help to demonstrate this.
During the insurgency, the village of Deurali was selected by the Maoists to serve as a model village, an instance of a community fully integrated into the Maoist program and an example to others (Lecomte-Tilouine 115). The community underwent many changes, from a programme of caste levelling whereby high and low caste villagers were compelled to share food, enter each other’s homes, and even marry by the Maoists, to prohibitions against previous religious practices, and forcibly introducing beef into the diet of Hindus (124). The people of Deurali resisted these intrusions into their religious space: most villagers celebrated forbidden festivals at home, while one man sacrificed his goat in front of the chained-up temple for Dasai. The villagers also rejected the new diet shortly after the Maoists ceased insisting on it, and embraced the caste-levelling programme with a conspiratory wink: as Lecomte-Tilouine observed, low caste Dalit villagers would agree that they were free to enter the homes of their high caste neighbours, while never deigning to actually do so (124). Before the insurgency was even over, a local had managed to take over administration for the village and relaxed the Maoist rules, allowing village life to return to normal (128).
The rejection of Maoist ideology is a much starker matter in the case of Dullu, another midwestern village. Like in Deurali, the Maoist arrival had meant the introduction of a Maoist program forbidding certain traditional practices, and establishing a new local governmental structure (Shah 483). However, in early November, 2004, a Royal Nepali Army platoon patrolling the region shot dead a local man who had been forced into serving in a Maoist “people’s government.” Even though the shooters were soldiers of the national army, when the Maoists did not step in to do anything about the killing of ‘one of their own,’ barely acknowledging the tragedy at all, the people of Dullu lashed out against them and drove them permanently from their lands (483-5). In introducing a Maoist programme deconstructing key social and religious institutions without providing an alternative or even helping to develop one, the Maoists seemed to demonstrate to the villagers that the Maoists were not in fact acting with the villagers’ interests in mind. The Nepali government was quick to capitalize on this event for propaganda purposes (486), and the urban intelligentsia was just as quick to dismiss the political or historical consciousness of the villagers (488), but Saubhagya Shah observed that the villagers were quite conscious of the political and historical consequences of their actions, and that individuals took great pride in their personal contributions to the effort to rout the Maoists (489). Given the example of Dullu particularly, and what we have seen about Maoist severing of client-patron relationships, it seems that instead of simply indoctrinating peasants the Maoists have given them room to express their inherent-but-subdued political consciousness, often in favour of but sometimes against the Maoists themselves.
It is hard to say what will come of Nepal in the future as the country continues to pick up the pieces the insurgency left behind and attempts to blaze a trail ahead. There are many problems to be resolved surrounding development, ethnic rights, caste and gender equality, and more. The future of the CPN-Maoist is unclear as well: certainly as the largest party currently in government they will not disappear anytime soon, but their ability to participate in government is still being proven, and whether the difficulties of parliamentary democracy are preferable to the people’s war is an open question for many. In the end, one of the chief lessons from the decade of civil war seems to be the easiest to miss and stands at risk of being forgotten in power-brokering at the centre: that the agency and independence of thought of the rural citizenry is a potent factor which can make or break a state.
Works Cited
Eck, Kristine. “Recruiting Rebels: Indoctrination and Political Education in Nepal.” The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal. Ed. Mahendra Lawoti and Anup K. Pahari. New York: Routledge, 2010. 33-51. Print.
Ishiyama, John and Anna Batta. “Swords into Plowshares: The Organizational Transformation of Rebel Groups into Political Parties.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 44 (2011). 369- 379. Web. 17 February 2012.
Joshi, Madhav. “Between Clientelistic Dependency and Liberal Market Economy: Rural Support for Maoist Insurgency in Nepal.” The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal. Ed. Mahendra Lawoti and Anup K. Pahari. New York: Routledge, 2010. 92-112. Print.
Joshi, Madhav and T. David Mason. “Land Tenure, Democracy, and Insurgency in Nepal: Peasant Support for Insurgency Versus Democracy.” Asian Survey 47.3 (2007). 393-414. JSTOR. Web. 17 February 2012.
Lawoti, Mahendra. “Bullets, Ballots, and Bounty: Maoist Electoral Victory in Nepal.” The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal. Ed. Mahendra Lawoti and Anup K. Pahari. New York: Routledge, 2010. 287-303. Print.
—. “Evolution and Growth of the Maoist Insurgency in Nepal.” The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal. Ed. Mahendra Lawoti and Anup K. Pahari. New York: Routledge, 2010. 3-30. Print.
Lecomte-Tilouine, Marie. “Political Change and Cultural Revolution in a Maoist Model Village, Mid-Western Nepal.” The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal. Ed. Mahendra Lawoti and Anup K. Pahari. New York: Routledge, 2010. 115-132. Print.
Shah, Saubhagya. “Revolution and Reaction in the Himalayas: Cultural Resistance and the Maoist “New Regime” in Western Nepal.” American Ethnologist 35.3 (2008). 481-499. Web. 17 February 2012.
Tiwari, Bishwa Nath. “An Assessment of the Causes of Conflict in Nepal.” The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal. Ed. Mahendra Lawoti and Anup K. Pahari. New York: Routledge, 2010. 241-262. Print.
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