The Maoists call it 'direct action'. In effect it is a kangaroo court, inquisition and paranoid cultural revolution-style persecution all rolled into one.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the revolution would degenerate to this: using militant unions to set fire to newspaper premises, attack printing facilities, damage machinery and threaten to annihilate staff. The worst transgression was by the head of the Maoist trade union Salik Ram Jammarkattel who in a vicious speech delivered to YCL goons outside Kantipur Publications on Monday publicly threatened to make the paper "history" and to "break the head" of its managing director. The fact that Jamarkattel is also a member of the interim parliament just makes all this much worse for his party.

No longer can the Maoists now hide behind excuses of not being able to control hardline cadre, or of taking the war to class enemies. For too long this peace process has been a one-way street, where the Maoists have been allowed to blackmail the nation with threats of going back to war. The people have seen through their duplicity, the forked tongue of its leaders and their blatant shifting of goalposts. The vandalism at Kantipur was no accident. There is a method to the Maoist madness and its repercussions will be equally serious on the party.

The supreme irony in all this, of course, is that it was Kantipur that helped the Maoists occupy their moral high ground by highlighting the failings of mainstream politicians, the human rights violations of the army, and giving lavish space to friendly columnists. It was Kantipur's job, as a medium for public debate in a democracy, to allow them that space. But when a party no longer cares for public opinion, and has no intention of facing the people in elections, it has no qualms about killing the messenger.

Now that their masks have been pulled off, the Maoist leadership has suffered irreversible damage to the public support it still had. If their threats and attacks on the media don't stop forthwith, they will have no future in open politics. The Maoists have shot themselves in both feet, and not accidentally.