The indefinite general strike starting from May 3, called by the Maoists in Nepal to force Madhav Nepal to resign as head of the coalition Government, was called off abruptly by the Maoist leadership, under tremendous pressure of receding support for them. The strike however has made the Maoist leadership realise the new alignment of forces, leaning strongly against them and in favour of bourgeois. Maoists had to take the abrupt decision after government-sanctioned 'vigilantes' succeeded in hijacking the peace rally organised at the behest of Maoist party on May 7 in Kathmandu.
A perturbed Prachanda, the chief of UCPN(Maoist), accusing the government of trying to instigate violence in the Maoist demonstrations, vented his anger on the press and intellectuals for their role in not supporting the strike.
After calling off the strike, addressing a rally of party workers on Saturday, who had gathered and camped in Kathmandu for the past six days, hoping to return only after pulling down the coalition government under Madhav Nepal, Prachanda warned that “his party would not forget the dishonesty of these two groups of people towards the strike”. “We will settle scores with journalists and intellectuals for the dishonesty they showed towards our movement. We have in our mind what all you have written and done", he said referring to the media and the intellectuals.
Saturday's rally was mainly called to explain to the cadres the reason behind the sudden withdrawal of the strike. "If our demands are not met, we will go for a peoples' revolt and the six-day strike will prove to be a rehearsal," Prachanda added further.
However, unable to bring down the government through general strike, the Maoist leadership was compelled to pledge to disband its guerrilla army, at a moment when the bourgeois has established complete control over the National Army.
Maoist chief and supreme commander of its People’s Liberation Army, Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda has drawn up a four-month plan to empty the PLA camps, as demanded by the bourgeois parties. The Janadisha daily, a Maoist mouthpiece, on this Thursday has given the details of the plan.
The shamefaced Maoists are now asking the bourgeois parties to seek the opinion of their over 19,600 combatants of PLA, as to whether they would like to join the national army or be rehabilitated.
The process can be completed by mid-June and the armed fighters can be segregated in separate camps till they are fitted according to their desire within four months.
The main sticking point is the number of PLA fighters to be inducted into the national army.
While the former rebels want an en masse induction, the ruling parties say the Maoists inflated the size of the PLA and are entitled to have only 3,500-4,000 combatants taken in the regular army.
Prachanda has further pledged to dismantle the camps of the party’s militant youth wing, the Young Communist League, which is accused of being the paramilitary wing of the once underground party.
In return, the Maoists are asking for the formation of a commission that will disclose within two months the fate of nearly 1,000 people who went missing during the “People’s War” and are feared to have been killed by security forces or the former rebels themselves.
It remains to be seen if the Maoist road map will be accepted by the ruling parties.
Creeping towards the total power, step by step, the bourgeois gave another blow to the Maoists after the Supreme Court allowed the Nepal Army to make fresh recruitments, in derogation of the peace agreement signed in 2006, where both sides were to refrain from fresh hiring. Recruitment is allowed on the pretext that the vacancies were for technical posts like doctors and engineers.
While the bourgeois parties are busy in stabilising and consolidating power in their hands and perfecting the structures of Army, the Maoist appeal among the toilers in Nepal is fast losing its steam. Withdrawal of indefinite strike on May 8, without any success, is clear evidence of their decline.
Meanwhile, the time is running out with the UN supervising agency that is monitoring the Maoist camps nearing the end of its tenure. After a recent extension, the UN Mission in Nepal will now monitor the PLA till mid-September, within which the UN member countries want the fate of the PLA to be decided.
In no case, bourgeois is going to allow the writing of Constitution by the Parliament dominated by the Maoists, till May 28, the scheduled date, for the purpose. The sole targeted task before the bourgeois is to waste the time till then, while keeping its hold on power. In any case, bourgeois is not ready to share the power with Maoists, the misguided representatives of petty bourgeois.
If Parliament fails to adopt a Constitution by May 28, the same may trigger a political crisis, for which bourgeois has prepared for long. While perfecting its armed forces, it has succeeded in virtually disarming the revolutionary youth, with the aid of Maoist leadership. In case of a direct conflict, it is ready to inflict heavy loss upon the opposition.
Forced to call off the indefinite strike on Saturday, Prachanda warned the government of Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal that it had two days time to respond to their demands. Two days had passed, but nothing happened, except that the Maoist leadership has made itself more laughable and politically irrelevant.
Bourgeois leaders were quick and jubilant in their response to the backtracking by the Maoists on protest agenda.
Welcoming the decision of withdrawal of protest, Madhav Kumar Nepal, the Prime Minister in ruling bourgeois coalition government, said in a statement that “the decision would play a positive role for discussion, consensus and cooperation among the political forces”. He further said, “the parties have no alternative to consensus and cooperation to ensure that peace process concludes and a new constitution is written”. Advising the Maoists, he urged them to “seek solution of all problems through consensus, constitutional principles and democratic values”.
The European Union and the United States also welcomed the Maoist decision to postpone the indefinite general strike. In their statements, the ambassadors of Norway, Switzerland the United States of America as well as the Head of the Mission of the European Union expressed hope that “this will prove to be a decisive step in the pursuit of a solution to the protracted political deadlock”.
Following the dictum of Mao on ‘new democracy’ the Maoists in Nepal had continued to dream of a petty bourgeois republic, where they would take power in conjunction with bourgeois. They misled themselves through ossified texts of Mao’s petty bourgeois and class conciliatory prescription of ‘bloc of four classes’, in believing that the capitalist landlord parties would enter into a coalition to power, under their leadership.
The capitalist landlord parties remained however unambiguously clear in their mission and outlook. After engaging Maoists in writing Constitution for their cherished ‘democracy’, the bourgeois deliberately delayed in time awaiting the tide of movement of 2006 to die down, and used the opportunity to prepare their forces to take the power.
Coalition of Maoists with bourgeois parties in 2006, not only prevented the forcible overthrow of Monarchy, but also preserved the structures of the Royal Nepal Army, the main plank of old power, with only cosmetic change of its name. On the contrary, Maoists were forced by bourgeois to send the armed fighters under their command to barracks monitored by the UN and thus stultify their fighting forces.
As the Maoists had refused to fight against bourgeois parties like Nepali Congress, after the tumultuous events of April 2006, the bourgeois has found time to regroup its forces to capture the political power and stabilise it. Maoists had remained adherent to bourgeois in the name of ‘new democracy’ and ‘seven party alliance’, but the bourgeois had prepared itself to take the power, marginalise its rivals and crush them later completely.
Maoists, the opponents of the program of permanent revolution propounded by Leon Trotsky, and the disciples of bogus ‘two stage theory’ of revolution-capitalism today, Socialism tomorrow, have little space for their fantasies in today’s world under extreme imperialist domination. They could not get even upto where they could reach in China and would not get anywhere else even upto where they could get in Nepal.
The crushing failure of the Maoist program in Nepal, is not the result of errors or mistakes of Maoist leadership in Nepal, but the whole political flaw stems out of the program proposed by Mao himself, which in its turn is a Menshevik program, taken up by Stalin in opposition to the program of world socialist revolution- the program of permanent revolution. Nepal only reveals the logical end of the program of Maoism.
Great article. You go easy on them. This is another historic betrayal of the lives of the fighters sacrificed over the years.
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