People's War... Women's War? - Introduction

Introduction (Kersplebedeb)
The Question of Women's Leadership in People's War in Nepal (Comrade Parvati)
People's March Interview with Comrade Parvati
Where Do Correct Ideas Come From? (Butch Lee)
Prostitution Controversy in Nepal Revolution (Butch Lee)

Please note that The Question of Women's Leadership in People's War in Nepal by Comrade Parvati is available on the Monthly Review website at http://www.monthlyreview.org/0203parvati.htm
The People's March website is currently at http://peoplesmarch.googlepages.com

This pamphlet costs $4.00 US - to order copies please contact info@kersplebedeb.com

Introduction

by Kersplebedeb, June 2006

In the midst of the Himalayas, covering an area roughly twice the size of Ireland with a population only slightly smaller than Canada’s, until recently Nepal was a country that Westerners didn’t really think about. Except as a series of exotic stereotypes. But that’s all changing now.

The first anti-capitalist armed revolution in the world in twenty-five years has taken over the Nepali countryside and toppled the dictatorship of King Gyandra and his brutal Royal Army. The “Red” guerrillas of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) have joined with the former legal opposition political parties to form a new secular republic. In a celebration and a showing of strength, the Maoists recently held a mass rally in Kathmandu, the capital, of over two hundred thousand Nepalis. Busloads of guerrilla supporters from remote villages and underground party militants from the cities jammed the streets, wearing new red Maoist t-shirts, plastering the capitol with Communist posters. Events are changing the political landscape in Nepal almost evey day.

One thing hasn’t changed, however. When the Maoist rebels and the interim anti-Royalist government leaders posed for the press on June 16th, after announcing their agreement to end the civil war, some forty-four faces are visible in the Reuters photograph of the successful negotiators. All of these faces are men (there are two obscured faces behind other participants who could be women). It hasn’t even occurred to the “democratic” leaders of the new Nepal yet to fake it, to add women sprinkled here and there as window dressing. Now that’s really backward by both capitalist and socialist standards, since faking it is what “democratic” politics is about.

But thousands of Nepali women have fought in the revolution as guerrillas. Thousands have risked death as underground organizers. Many were killed, captured and tortured, executed. The party lists of martyred women members are long. There is a woman who has spoken up for all these women, for her comradres and sisters. Comrade Parvati is a senior woman member of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), a member of both the party’s central committee and politburo. Despite her years of being underground, Parvati has become one of the best-known revolutionary women in Asia. Because of the strength and honesty of her political thoughts. In a party that believes in “continuous struggle” internally of evolving political views, comrade Parvati has distinguished herself. Her truth-telling pushes at the boundary between the old male revolutionary parties and politics and women’s liberation.

Here are two of comrade Parvati’s political assessments of her own party and its revolution. The Question of Women’s Leadership in Peoples War in Nepal published in 2003 and her Interview With Com. Parvati from the Indian Maoist journal People’s March from 2004. Both these writings have been available on the Internet (The Question of Women’s Leadership previously appeared in the u.s. journal Monthly Review). Neither is available in print in North America right now, and we have been encouraged to help make comrade Parvati’s voice from the Nepali revolution more available to women here. This is in no way an “authorized edition”. Nor is there any necessary connection between this publication and the views of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). Also included here is a critical commentary on Parvati’s political thinking by the amazon communist Butch Lee.

Nepal is the second poorest country in the world, one which for most of the past forty years has been ruled by a series of autocratic despots; global capitalism has relegated the vast majority of Nepalis to lives of dire poverty. The entire country’s GNP is just over 39 billion dollars (by comparison, Bill Gates’ personal fortune is estimated to be somewhere around $46 billion), 70 percent of the population live below the poverty line, 2.6 million children have to work as child laborers and one million work without pay as “bonded laborers”. The infant mortality rate is more than 75 per 1,000, about ten times the rate of Japan or Sweden; studies by UNICEF in the 1990s were showing that malnutrition was widespread, indeed it was the norm amongst children, with 64% of children aged 6-36 months being stunted and 6% suffering from wasting.

This in a country where ten percent of the population earn 46.5 percent of the national income and own 65 percent of the cultivable land.

In 1990 a broad-based “People’s Movement” (the Jana Andolan) claimed to put an end to decades of absolutist rule by the Nepali monarchy. Nevertheless, what followed was a period of political turmoil as representatives of feudal and ruling class power succesfully resisted the various proposals - some radical, some reformist - which sought to better the lot of the Nepali majority, who remained super-exploited both by “their own” ruling class as well as foreign imperialism (most notably that of India to the south).

This deadlock was one of the factors that led to the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)’s 1996 initiation of “protracted people’s war”, a path that led to an escalating confrontation against the State, with the king increasingly isolated and eventually opting to suspend parliament, declare a State of Emergency and violently suppress any and all signs of dissent.

At first the initiation of armed struggle alienated some intellectuals and middle class elements, but the vacuum was quickly filled by a new generation who were inspired by the break from “politics as usual”. These people had been looking for a way to fight against their oppression, and in joining the CPN(M) they transformed the Party, in some ways taking it over and making it their own. Ten years later the CPN(M) controlled most of the country, laying the groundwork for the massive uprising against the monarchy which rocked the country earlier this year.

This popular revolt, the Loktantra Andolan, has politically disarmed the State, forcing the king to reinstitute parliament and recognize the CPN(M), releasing hundreds of political prisoners. Things are changing every day now, but what is remaining constant is the fact that the Maoists are more influential than ever, and seem guaranteed to play a decisive role in Nepal’s future.

As Butch Lee puts it in her commentary, “It is a milestone every time women put out truths about our own movements.”

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