Mao must be squirming in his mausoleum. As someone who charted a peasants' path to revolution quite different from the urban worker-driven Bolshevik revolt in Moscow, Mao Zedong was an original thinker and a true revolutionary. He elevated armed struggle to a credo, and the lesson from it is that, once unleashed, violence takes on its own momentum-going beyond the elimination of class enemies to be an end in itself.

Before he knew it, Mao's revolution had claimed the lives of anywhere between 10 million and 20 million peasants (no one knows for sure). Some were eliminated, others died in camps and countless perished from hunger and famine. When the end justifies the means, as we have seen in other revolutions that have invoked Mao's name, violence ends up hurting the very people who are to be saved. Violence begets violence-think of the Maoist movements in Cambodia (the only place aside from China where a Maoist party has actually ruled), the Philippines, Sri Lanka. In all these places, purges within the party have been more ruthless and bloody than attacks on class enemies.

Mao's gigantic portrait may still hang at the northern end of Tiananmen Square, but he looks there more like something out of Andy Warhol than a picture that launched a thousand uprisings. The Great Helmsman is embalmed in his glass crypt, and this is the only relic left in the land of his birth. His people have abandoned him, and his successors keep his legacy as a political fa?ade. The famous tenets of the little Red Book have been replaced by latter-day aphorisms like "getting rich is glorious", or "it does not matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice". The Chinese leadership came to realise that Mao's way had no answers for the massive job-creation, the need to boost agricultural production and economic growth that was urgently required to stave off social anarchy. They decided it was time to give capitalist means of production a try while keeping politics firmly under the control of the party.

Here in Nepal, our venerable comrades have pored through the Red Book and found many parallels for an agrarian insurrection. The hinterland was ripe for revolution. Oppressed and neglected peoples everywhere will rise up when oppression and neglect gets intolerable, they don't need to call it Maoism. It doesn't need a name. The question is will they fall into the trigger-happy trap like Mao's followers in Cambodia, Peru and Sri Lanka? The attack on the Chief Justice's convoy in Surkhet last weekend was a grievous mistake: it was a mistake if it was a botched assassination attempt, it was a mistake if it was not an assassination attempt.

In this issue of our paper, we have leftist thinkers and diplomats debating the need for talks. It is our belief that negotiations are the surest way to resolve this crisis. Otherwise, "accidents" more serious than the ambush of the Chief Justice's convoy will keep happening if the militants' chain of command breaks down. Maoists need to seriously look at the futility of violence, and take the open road of parliamentary struggle. Our comrades would do well to learn the lesson the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) in Sri Lanka, which unleashed a useless slaughter, but decided to contest elections and is now a major opposition force in parliament. Some of our own UML leaders had actually initiated an armed struggle in the 70s, look at them now. Singha Durbar needs to shake itself out of its stupor, and provide the necessary environment for the Maoists to come to the table and then to the mainstream of politics.