Nepal's rulers need to study the history of the Peruvian insurgency and look at how they can reverse the historical neglect of the peasantry and address the roots of the crisis

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia: There are strong reminders of home in this landlocked South American country. The Andes loom to the west, just like the Himalaya to our north, but here in the sweltering Amazon basin just 450 m above sea level it feels uncannily like Chitwan. La Paz, the highest capital city in the world at 3,627 m is 14 hours away by road. Like Nepal, Bolivia is also multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, but it is five times larger than Nepal, it is rich in minerals, and it has a per capita income several times greater than Nepal. Ten percent of the population are whites descended from early Spanish settlers. Next door is Peru, which has similar topography: the Andes like the high Himalaya, the Sierras like the Mahabharat and the Amazon plains like the Tarai.

And Peru also had the Shining Path movement (Sendero Luminoso) which erupted in 1980 and raged for 12 years in the remote and arid altiplano of Peru. It was led by a revolutionary Peruvian academic teaching at the University of Ayacucho, Abimael Guzman. There are many similarities between the Andean plateau and the mid-western districts of Rukum, Rolpa, Salyan and Jajarkot where our own Maoists launched their insurgency in Feburary 1996. And like his comrade in Nepal, Babu Ram Bhattarai, Guzman came from a middle-class background, was a top student and also a PhD. Guzman's doctoral thesis was on the status of the indigenous Andean people in a state dominated by whites and mixed-parentage mestizos. The Senderistas were mainly indigenous people, although their leaders like Guzman tended to be white or mestizo.

Within three short years, Comrade Gonzalo (Guzman's nom de guerre) had chased off a demoralised Peruvian police from his stronghold around Ayacucho. The Army was called in, and the insurgency raged on till 1992 when Guzman was captured and ignominiously caged like a lion for the benefit of the media. In the 12 years that it dragged on, 25,000 Peruvians were killed, and the country lost half its GDP. David Scott Palmer, writing in his book The Shining Path of Peru (St Martins Press, New York, 1994) states that the government in Lima did not take the Senderistas seriously in the beginning. When the army did get involved, it was to take brutal and repressive measures in rural areas in which the Andean peasants were caught in the crossfire. This strengthened the local support for the Senderistas who were suffering from joblessness, inflation, lack of government and corruption.

Sounds familiar? Palmer says the other factors that fed the Shining Path revolution was that the indigenous Andean peasants were not integrated into Peru's social and economic mainstream, and they felt left out. In the beginning the Senderistas took action against corrupt officials and won populist backing, in urban areas they identified key opposition figures and intimidated or killed them. They tried to neutralise grassroots leaders from the moderate left. Towards the end, there was a personality cult surrounding Comrade Gonzalo who launched purges against suspected spies. After 12 years of war, according to Palmer, the peasants were fed up and felt that the Government could take better care of their needs.

An important lesson for Nepal is why the revolution did not spread to Bolivia, a landlocked country, and the poorest among the South America countries. Here, in Santa Cruz, I asked several Bolivians if the objective conditions for revolution were not the same in Bolivia as in Peru. But Bolivia was different: it had initiated largely-successful agrarian reforms in the 1950s, the country's decentralisation policy had devolved decision-making to the grassroots and also 20 percent of the national budget for local development so the peasants felt they were being heard, and there was considerable popular participation at the local level.

One of the classic studies of the Shining Path by Simon Strong, Terror and Revolution in Peru (Times Books, 1992) concluded that there was less of a chance for Sendero-type revolutions to succeed in countries like Bolivia and Ecuador because they had strong peasant organisations, more responsive central governments, and successful agrarian reforms. Our own Prachandanistas seem to have borrowed a leaf or two from the book of Comrade Gonzalo, and their strategy show remarkable similarities to the Sendero Luminoso. It will be important for Nepal's government and rulers to also study the conflict and look closely at the need to address their own legitimacy, at reversing the historical neglect of the peasantry and genuinely addressing their grievances by giving them political space to join the mainstream.

(Prakash A Raj is a Kathmandu-based writer who recently visited Bolivia as a consultant for the IUCN.)