Interview by Rumela Sen

In 2006, after ten years of armed struggle, Nepal’s Maoists signed a peace agreement with the government and embraced electoral democracy. Eighteen months later the Nepalese people rewarded them at the ballot box, as the Maoists won thirty percent of the vote in the constituent assembly elections. Outside of China, where Mao Zedong took power after the 1949 revolution, Nepal is the only country where Maoists (together with other Left parties) have led the national government. The changes of 2006–8 also saw the party play a key role in turning Nepal from a monarchy into a federal republic.

Yet Nepal’s Maoist movement is today divided. In July 2018, twelve years after the historic peace agreement, I interviewed several of its top leaders, who have now split into two broad camps. The establishment Maoist camp, led by Prachanda, has united with other parliamentary-left parties and has eschewed the path of armed struggle. The breakaway dissident faction, led by Mohan Baidya “Kiran,” has denounced the “counterrevolutionary” compromises by the establishment faction and has raised the slogan for renewed People’s War.

I met up with Mohan Baidya, better known by his nom-de-guerre, Kiran, and his wife and comrade Sushmaji. I sought to understand why Kiran, an erstwhile member of the Maoist party’s own politburo, and the country’s best-known radical hard-liner, has denounced the peace process and the Maoists’ transition to democratic methods, instead favoring a return to the old ways of armed struggle.

But first, the history of Maoists in Nepal.

The Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) was formed in 1949. Even in its first years, it played an important role in overthrowing the Rana regime that had ruled Nepal since the 1846 coup against the Shah dynasty. But in 1951, the Shahs were restored to power and the following year the CPN was banned.

In the 1960s, the CPN fragmented into many smaller groups, after the split between the USSR and Mao’s China. A reformist faction that controlled the CPN’s central committee backed the King when he orchestrated a coup to take absolute power. Dissidents left the party in rejection of this inadmissible compromise, but they themselves then split into several factions. Through the 1970s, several attempts to unite this revolutionary Left failed.

During this time, the prevailing political system in Nepal was a party-less “guided” democracy (the so-called Panchayat System) in which the people could elect their representatives, but the real power remained in the hands of the monarch. A series of student protests in 1979 forced the King to hold a referendum, under universal suffrage, on the question of replacing the guided democracy with a multiparty system. But the status quo prevailed and attempts to democratize Nepal were temporarily thwarted.

Amidst this political upheaval, the radical left factions in Nepal were primarily represented by the CPN (Masal) platform led by Mohan Bikram Singh (MBS). In early 1980s, Kiran led a revolt against MBS’s leadership and broke away to create CPN (Mashal), with an h.

This latter faction affirmed Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as its party ideology. In line with this ideological position, it called for an armed struggle with the aim of instigating a mass popular uprising against the King and the “guided democracy” regime.

In this attempt at armed struggle, CPN (Mashal) attacked a few police posts in the capital and defaced a statue of the monarch. However, these actions failed to inspire the popular imagination and prematurely exposed the party’s underground organization, leading to the arrest of several activists. Faced with severe internal criticism, Kiran resigned as General Secretary. He was replaced by Pushpa Kumar Dahal, a charismatic young Central Committee member, then known by as “Biswas” (meaning Trust) and eventually proclaimed as “Prachanda” (the Fierce One). It is said that Kiran was the “kingmaker” who handpicked young Prachanda and mentored him as the future leader of Nepal’s Maoists.

When several radical-left factions united to form the CPN (Unity Center), Kiran and Prachanda each took part. However, in 1996 a faction led by this pair left the CPN(UC) and formed the CPN (Maoist). Almost immediately afterwards the Maoists launched the ten-year People’s War, primarily demanding the abolition of the monarchy.

In June 2001, the monarchy in Nepal suffered a severe setback when a mysterious shootout wiped out the entire royal family. Amidst several rounds of clashes between the Maoists and the state, the new king declared a state of emergency in 2002, sacked the entire cabinet and postponed elections indefinitely. Under the state of emergency, through 2004-5 the King clashed with the parliamentary parties as well as the Maoist rebels, amidst international concerns about an imminent humanitarian crisis in Nepal.

Political parties in Nepal formed a united opposition to call on the King to relinquish power and reinstate the parliament. By the end of the ten-year war, the Maoists declared that they were ready for peace talks in May 2006 on the condition that the government agreed to establish a constituent assembly tasked with writing a new constitution, and also to include the Maoists in the subsequent unity government.

The postponed elections to the Constituent Assembly were finally held on April 10, 2008. The Maoists emerged as the largest party with 30 percent of the vote. Sooner afterward, on May 28, 2008, the Constituent Assembly declared Nepal to be a federal democratic republic effectively abolishing the monarchy — a significant victory for the Maoists.

Despite this achievement, however, the party split in June 2012 with Kiran walking away with several other senior leaders to form a separate Nepal Communist Party (Maoist). Kiran, who had been in an Indian prison during the peace process, was critical of many of the decisions by Prachanda and Dr Baburam Bhattarai, the top leaders representing the Maoists during that process.

In the interview, Kiran emphasizes that the biggest mistake of the establishment-Maoist leaders Prachanda and Dr Bhattarai was to agree to disband the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) that had fought the People’s War, without consolidating their gains and securing all their demands in a constitution. Kiran elaborates his assessment of the state character in Nepal, asserts that the revolution is incomplete, and lays out a plan for the future armed struggle.