Is the CPA still relevant?

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Maoist Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal, after labouring for weeks to put together a document for the party's extended plenum at Palungtar in Gorkha District, has come up with a great discovery: identifying our national enemy.

Congratulations. Now we know what has held back our progress, our march to peace and prosperity. And who else but the favourite punching bag of communists and royalists alike: India. Identifying India as Nepal's enemy means protecting nationalism, safeguarding sovereignty, and ending our southern neighbour's interference in internal matters. Did someone say patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels?

Dahal is known for his capacity to surprise people, be it in striking deals and in breathtakingly breaching them, shedding timely tears, resorting to uncontrolled outbursts (usually at the sight of thousands of his cadre), or simply in his interactions with national and international actors. He is a charmer, no doubt.

However, this time he has failed to surprise. Unable to secure a meeting with top Indian officials despite a series of efforts, he is frustrated. India's sustained snub is having an effect on Comrade Chairman. So he is back to India-bashing.

Faced with an open challenge to his leadership by two vice chairmen � Mohan Baidya and Baburam Bhattarai � and confronted by disappointed and angry cadres in Palungtar who feel betrayed, something drastic had to be done. Hence the methodical madness in parliament, in the full glare of live TV coverage.

Dahal may have felt a bit easier in the aftermath of this ugly incident, but it will be a challenge for him to escape unscathed this time. The chairman can hope to contain the damage done so far to the lustre surrounding his leadership. Like in the past, the leaders are likely to patch it up and show a public face of unity with raised fists.

But the Maoists' internal feud is reality. What is equally true, and perhaps of more significance to non-Maoist parties, is the absolute inability and unwillingness on the part of the Maoist leadership to wean their cadre off revolutionary misadventure.

The leaders have been unable to drill home the point that the kind of revolution they are espousing is simply not possible. They are too cowardly to tell their cadre that their 'jana yuddha' (people's war) failed to achieve the goal of state capture, which was why they had to enter into a peace agreement with the very political parties they had vilified throughout their decade-long insurgency.

This is the crux of the problem. The Maoists see doublespeak as an effective tool to clear hurdles in the way of their march to power. After all, it has paid them rich dividends so far.

However, there is a growing realisation among other political parties that they have been unable to transform the Maoists. The leaked documents of Dahal, Baidya and Bhattarai have a common goal: absolute control by the Maoists of the state apparatus. The peace process and drafting of the constitution are a means to that end and the Maoists have said so a number of times. What can and will the non-Maoists parties do about it?

The fate of the 12-point agreement of November 2005 that brought the Maoists and non-Maoists together against the absolute monarchy and the subsequent Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA) of 2006 hangs in the balance. The Maoists have violated these pacts at will and the latest example is the participation of Maoist ex-combatants, who draw government salaries and are supposedly not under the Maoist Party's leadership, at the Palungtar plenum.

Are these two landmark agreements still relevant? These are the questions that non-Maoist parties need to reflect on before they hastily enter into another non-implementable agreement with the Maoists.
damakant@gmail.com

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1. K. K. Sharma
Yes, they are still relevant as a ploy. Yes, the other parties will be presented with yet another ploy in the name of agreements. And yes, the other parties, Nepali intellectuals and the Europeans [ particularly the Scandinavians ] will once again take the bate.

As for the faction within, it is natural dialectic within the party. The synthesis will come about when either Baburam, or Baidhya or Dahal will be made a Trotsky or Lin Piao of Nepal.

Posted on: 26 NOV 2010 | 10:54 AM NST

2. Arthur
Suppose that writers like this were actually able to convince somebody that Maoists are inventing the idea that India is opposed to them and that the People's Liberation Army could be surrendered despite refusal to democratize the Nepal Army?

The audience would have to be either foreigners who know nothing about Nepal or people who automatically agree with anything said against Maoists. (Though even the latter would have trouble swallowing the idea that India is not opposing the Maoists, since that is their main hope, and would also have difficulty believing the PLA could be surrendered, since that is their main fear).

So what is the point of articles like this?

Does it feel more "intellectual" than simply shouting "WE HATE MAOISTS"?

Posted on: 26 NOV 2010 | 11:05 AM NST

3. who cares
commies need enemies!

but the problem here is this commie is a pussy.

this commie tag india enemy and if/when india behave/respond in the similar fashion, then these commie start to cry.

and my suggesting to all columnists is stop repeating same old story like what maoist are? what they want? how they play? internal, external conflict..... maoist's lies etc and etc. ....... cause this is the statuesque and since maoist are not here cause of their strategy, vision, plan - they have reached this far cause of india, shahs and girija,,,, so they have no idea what to do!

my suggestion is write about the future strategies- how to deal with present problem, scenarios, result etc and etc..... write about future,,, present is statuesque and people are bored with turning round and round.

normally, it is possible to guess what intelligent person would do- they do what is the best possible, but it is almost impossible to guess the action of idiots.................. but here maosit are doing nothing, they are just creating deadlock..... they neither have guts to go forward nor can they go backward....

even though idiots can not be guessed, but there is one major weakness of fools, they can can be trapped, they can be fooled, they can be monopolized.

Posted on: 26 NOV 2010 | 3:19 PM NST

4. chasing_che
being intellectual, i don't know if i should use this tag, may be columnist is enough, does not necessarily means reciting rhetorics against the maoists....If this would have done any good, then we wouldn't have seen this day. And still so called intellects had not learned. Abject pity. You side line the force who had been elected by majority of the people. No matter what their principles are, or how feroscious their tactics are, or how horrifying their planned ends are, they still are voted by the people. We must admit the fact.

Or we should, may be, regard who voted for the maoists as extortionist, murderers, looters and blah blah blah , what exactly kathmanduites had been doing.....Go on. Its not gonna solve any of our problems

Posted on: 26 NOV 2010 | 5:10 PM NST

5. pasdl
the red-wallas are nothing more than those stuck in nostalgia of the days of lenin. why don't they just look around the world?

Posted on: 27 NOV 2010 | 2:54 PM NST

6. rishav
Interesting points.

"And who else but the favourite punching bag of communists and royalists alike: India. Identifying India as Nepal's enemy means protecting nationalism, safeguarding sovereignty, and ending our southern neighbour's interference in internal matters."

The Maoists, have always used ploys to make it appear as a victim rather than aggressor. Blaming others inorder to defelct any weaknesses and failures.

"The leaders have been unable to drill home the point that the kind of revolution they are espousing is simply not possible. They are too cowardly to tell their cadre that their 'jana yuddha' (people's war) failed to achieve the goal of state capture, which was why they had to enter into a peace agreement with the very political parties."

Very good point here. The propanganda they tell their cadres is that they are now fighting a political insurgency as they have won the military insurgency. But the truth is far too bitter, the efforts and sacrifice of their guerilla PLA force didn't achieve the revolution that they percieved, but ended up with their leaders doing deals with the "feudal" parties, which they supposedly have contempt for.

The Maoists leaders will have to break the bad news to it's PLA combatants that they are to be set free. It's only a matter of when they decide to let them go rather than if they would let them go now. Supposedly the AISC was in charge of these combatants but that has been proved to be wrong recently in their particpation of the Maoist convention.

"The Maoists have violated these pacts at will and the latest example is the participation of Maoist ex-combatants, who draw government salaries and are supposedly not under the Maoist Party's leadership, at the Palungtar plenum."

Posted on: 27 NOV 2010 | 5:08 PM NST