The Bullet and the Ballot Box: The Story of Nepal's Maoist Revolution

"Nepalese Maoism as an intellectual and a grassroots phenomenon goes back to the 1950s. There were multiple different Communist groups working in Nepali politics and society then, many of which were sympathetic to Mao’s revolution. But it was only in the Maoist Civil war, which started in February 1996, when these political tendencies took on an instrumental power to change Nepali politics. A small unit, 36 members, of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)—a recently formed splinter group—attacked a police station in northwest Nepal, beginning the Civil War. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter A decade later, the Maoist insurgency’s impact on Nepal was huge: in 2006, the Nepali Maoists, often using quite a textbook version of Mao’s military strategies, had fought their way into a position of decisive political influence, pushing back against the superior fire power of the Nepali police and army. Their own People’s Liberation Army was 10,000 strong, and they had taken 80% of Nepali territory out of state control. The Maoist civil war was the principal reason for the collapse of the Nepali monarchy and the establishment of a federal republic in Nepal after 2006. And in the ten years following, two members of the Maoist party have served three terms between them as Nepali Prime Minister. So although the Maoists didn’t realise their ambition of unchallenged control of the country, as the CCP did in China, Nepal is the only country in the world where you can encounter self-avowed Maoists in power. One of the most surprising adaptations that Nepali and Indian Maoists made to the original creed was to use Mao’s ideology to champion the rights of underprivileged ethnic minorities. Even the critics of Maoism in Nepal would acknowledge their contribution in giving voice to ethnic minorities and low castes who had been marginalised by high-caste elites. However, many Nepalis today feel that this inclusive promise of the Nepali Maoists has not been realised, and that they squandered the radical potential of their movement to help the poorest and most neglected in Nepali society. There is a strong sense that the Maoists, when in power, compromised too much with high-caste elite politics in Kathmandu. There are two incorrect ideas about Maoism that I often picked up on when researching the book: firstly that Maoism is only a story of China; and secondly that Maoism is a story of the past. But Maoism is a force that has changed not just China but many other parts of the world as well, between the 1930s and present day. My book tries to tell it as both a Chinese and a global story, of the past and present. “Maoism is a force that has changed not just China but many other parts of the world as well” The ideas of Mao’s revolution spread practically to every continent, beginning with the de-colonising world. Mao’s ideas strongly influenced the Malayan Communist Party as it fought the British state in Malaya, one of the first hot conflicts of the Cold War. There was a big impact on the North Vietnamese Communist state, and also on the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, between 1975 and 1979. States and insurgencies in Africa borrowed Mao’s ideas, and benefited from Chinese aid programmes. Left-wing Latin Americans also acclaimed Mao’s revolution as the path that needed to be followed in their own continent. One famous example is Abimael Guzmán, who began the Shining Path war against the Peruvian state in the 1980s. So this is a very wide-ranging story, that takes in the tea plantations of north India, the sierras of the Andes, Paris’s fifth arrondissement, the fields of Tanzania, the rice-paddies of Cambodia and the terraces of Brixton."