PUNE- Raj Kumar is a Nepali lad from Pyuthan, eking out a living at a small eatery in this west Indian city. For seven years, almost every young man between the Bheri and Rapti rivers risked being abducted and inducted into the Maoist militia at the point of a gun. The fate of those who escaped was hardly any better: they would often fall into the dragnet of the security forces.

Only the lucky, like Raj Kumar, got away. He has managed to save his hard-earned money and flaunts what he has been able to buy with it: a mobile phone. There on a Pune sidewalk, he generously offers to help me make a call to Kathmandu.

Raj Kumar says he knows it's now safe to go back to his small pasal in Pyuthan, but he's staying put. "These people can't be trusted," he says about the Maoists. Raj Kumar knows more about the war being waged in his name than the fashionably left socialites in Kathmandu valley: as a refugee, he is a direct victim.

This new year also marks the end of a decade in Nepali politics in which we saw the dirt and slime of politics. It gave democracy a bad name, and by the end of the decade the stench got pretty unbearable. But the public outcry against crooked public figures had started to create a backlash. "Pajero" became a pejorative word. Had the Maoists not taken the short-cut of violence, democracy's inherent self-correcting mechanisms would have swung into motion.

But, the comrades were impatient and the insurgency diverted the nation's attention away from the challenges of democratisation. Seven years after, the country is in a worse shape than it was when the Prachanda Path was first announced. Whatever their newly-surfaced leaders may say, there is no doubt who is ultimately to blame for all these wasted years: the Maoists.

And now, we have the nauseating spectacle of the capital's ruling class stepping over itself to greet the Maoist team. What has Comrade Baburam Bhattarai done for this country that he deserves such a hero's welcome? The insurgency did succeed in bringing the grievances of the dalits and janjatis centre-stage, but was it worth the sacrifice of 8,000 Nepali lives? Couldn\'t that have been achieved through peaceful political activism?

Let's face it: the armed insurgency was unjust and immoral to begin with, and has failed to achieve what it promised to deliver to excluded Nepalis. The utopian republic of Comrade Prachanda is as far away as it was when he was a firebrand at Rampur. The federal structure of Matrika Yadav and Dev Gurung's dream is unlikely to materialse even if their impending talks with the government are successful. None of the Maoists leaders now mention the 1950 treaty with India that once agitated them so much. The Mahara mantra today is the free-market! If that's the new regime, what's so terribly wrong with the old one that so many people had to die?

Democracy was never as weak as it is now after the Maoists have begun to jostle for space in the power arena. Baburam Bhatarai says the constitution is dead and the old regime is a totalitarian set up. Presumably, all that he is bargaining for is his own version of authoritarianism at best, and a share in the ways of the old regime at worst. So much for the new model democracy.

Wonder what Raj Kumar would say about the red carpet being laid out for the Maoist leadership. And from their utterances since they came above ground, it looks like it will be fuitile to expect them to lift the country out of its misery. There must be a limit to our collective naivete.

By hurrying to confer legitimacy on the Maoists, the government has added firewood to the pyre of democracy in the country. There is no alternative but for them to disarm before they can be allowed to enter the national mainstream as a responsible political force. No election, whether national, local or for the constituent assembly, can take place under the shadow of the gun.

What kind of peace do we want? The 'peace' of North Korea? Compromising basic human values is too high a price to pay for peace. This New Year, more than peace, let's pray for sanity.