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The Maoists dictate the agenda in the CA, direct the government and rule the streets through the YCL, student and labour wings. And yet its leadership exhibits extreme paranoia. The reason could be that they don't control the Tarai armed groups, ethnic activists in the mountains are doing their own thing and the media is irrepressible.
After trying to face the threats head-on, Prachandapath strategists have devised a way to co-opt them. In order to wrest back control of the Madhes, they seem to have re-deployed the mercurial Matrika Yadav to form his own militant party to reinject the class struggle into that communal cauldron. The Mohan Baidya prot?g? hopes to consolidate the Maoist support-base among Dalits, Janajatis and the poor without antagonising Madhesi traders and farmers aspiring for a bigger role in national politics.
In the midhills, however, the class war is going ethnic. The Maoists are past masters in this game, and have concluded that ethnic activists aren't happy with the crumbs they have thrown their way. From the Tharu armies in Dang, Kailali and Udaypur to the Tamang force in Kathmandu or the Kirat battalion in the east and the Magarat militants in Rolpa, the militants bear the hallmark of Maoist mobilisation. Could the Maoist strategy be to contain ethnic activism before it spins out of control? If so, it is risky business: the whole thing could easily degenerate into warlordism.
It remains to be seen if the Maoist leadership will be successful in appeasing hardcore ethnic militants within their party and put the communal genie they unleashed back into the bottle.
That leaves the media. Here, a two-pronged strategy seems to be at work. A section of the media is being persuaded to believe that 'freedom' of the press is guaranteed if they agree to cooperate, or else. Another section is being lured by being shown the economic benefits of being on the right side of the government.
The Maoists received the benefit of doubt from all of us without even once attempting to show they really deserved such an advantage in the first place. Now, they are playing with fire by trying to set the ethnic agenda. Civil society and the international community must press the Maoists harder to complete their transformation into a fully-democratic political force that eschews violence.
Over the past nine years we have warned in this space that Nepal's class war shouldn't turn into a caste war. It's now much worse than that: there is a danger of multiple-ethnic conflict down the road.
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One country two armies
