Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  He had the serenity of a man at the end of his life. And given the circumstances, he had not done too badly. I had spent much of that day on the road from Kathmandu to the Tarai, shuffling past long queues of Tata trucks from India, through a fog of dust and thick diesel smoke, ragged settlements occasionally appearing beside the road: shops made of wooden planks, selling food fried in peanut oil and tea in sticky clouded glasses; mud houses with thatched roofs, a preindustrial bareness in which only the gleaming automatic guns of young soldiers and the tangle of barbed wire behind which they sat spoke of the world beyond Nepal.

  The jittery soldiers who approached the car with fingers on their triggers were very young, hard to associate with stories I had heard in Kathmandu, stories no newspaper would touch, of the army marching men out of overcrowded prisons and executing them. My companion, a Nepalese journalist, was nervous. He knew that the soldiers in the countryside attacked anyone they suspected of being a Maoist, and journalists were no exception. Many of the soldiers barely knew what a journalist was.

  There are few places in Nepal untouched by violence—murder, torture, arbitrary arrest—and most people live perpetually in fear of both the army and the Maoists, without expectation of justice or recompense. Dahal, however, appeared to have made a private peace with his surroundings. He told me that he spent much of his day at the local temple, listening to recitals of the Ramayana. He said that he still believed the king had good intentions. He appeared both bemused by, and admiring of, his famous son, whom he had last seen at the funeral of his wife in 1996. The ideas of equality and justice, he thought, had always appealed to Prachanda, who was a sensitive man, someone who shared his food with poor people in the village. He couldn’t tell me how his son had got interested in Mao or Marx in such a place as Chitwan, which had no bookshop or library. But he did know that Prachanda had got involved with Communists when he couldn’t find a good job with the government and had to teach at a primary school in his native hills of Pokhara.

  In his speeches, which claim inspiration from Mao and seek to mobilize the peasants in the countryside against the urban elite, Prachanda comes across as an ideologue of another era; he’s an embarrassment to the Chinese regime, which is engaged in the un-Maoist task of enriching Chinese coastal cities at the expense of the hinterland and feels compelled to accuse Nepalese Maoists of besmirching the Chairman’s good name.

  In the few interviews he has given, Prachanda avoids answering questions about his background and motivation, which have to be divined from details given by Dahal: the haphazard schooling, the useless degree, the ill-paid teaching job in a village school, all of which seem to lead inexorably to a conflict with, and resentment of, unjust authority.

  The “modernization” and “development” of Nepal during the 1950s and 1960s created millions of men like Prachanda, lured away from their subsistence economies and abandoned on the threshold of a world in which they found they had, and could have, no place. Nepal’s agricultural economy offered few of them the jobs or the dignity they felt was their due, and they were too aware of the possibilities thwarted by an unequal, stratified society to reconcile themselves to a life of menial labor in unknown lands and an old age spent in religious stupor. Educated, but with no prospects, many young men like Prachanda must have been more than ready to embrace radical ideas about the ways that an entrenched urban elite could be challenged and even overthrown if peasants in the countryside were organized.

  Growing up in Nepal in the 1960s, Prachanda watched these ideas grow in the Naxalbari movement in India. Communist activists lived and worked secretly in parts of Nepal during the Panchayat era; in the 1950s, a famous Communist leader called M. B. Singh traveled in the midwestern hills and acquired followers among the Magars, one of Nepal’s more prominent ethnic groups now supporting the Maoists. But Prachanda says that the “historic Naxalbari movement” of India was the “greatest influence” on the Communists of Nepal.

  In the late 1960s, thousands of students, many of them middle class and upper caste, joined an armed peasant uprising led by an extremist faction of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal and Bihar. Known as Naxalites, after the Naxalbari district where the revolt first erupted in 1967, they attacked “class enemies”—big landlords, policemen, bureaucrats—and “liberated” territories which they hoped would form bases for an eventual assault on the cities, as had happened in China. The Indian government responded brutally, killing and torturing thousands. Driven underground, the Naxalite movement splintered and remained dormant for many years.

  In the 1990s, when India began to move toward a free market, the Naxalite movement revived in some of the poorest and most populous Indian states. Part of the reason for this is that successive Indian governments have steadily reduced subsidies for agriculture, public health, education, and poverty eradication, exposing large sections of the population to disease, debt, hunger, and starvation. Almost three thousand farmers committed suicide in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh after the government, advised by McKinsey, cut agricultural subsidies in an attempt to initiate farmers into the world of unregulated markets. In recent years, Naxalite movements, which have long organized landless, low-caste peasants in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, have grown quickly in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh—where an enfeebled Indian state is increasingly absent—to the extent that police and intelligence officials in India now speak anxiously of an unbroken belt of Communist-dominated territory from Nepal to South India.

  The Naxalite uprising in the late 1960s invigorated the few Communists in Nepal, who, like the members of the Nepali Congress, the main underground political organization, sought guidance and encouragement from India. In 1971, some Nepalese Communists living across the border from Naxalbari declared a “people’s war” against the monarchy. They killed seven “class enemies” before being suppressed by the king. As fractious as their Indian counterparts, the Nepalese Communist parties split and split again over petty doctrinal or personality issues. In 1991, after the restoration of multiparty democracy, several of them contested elections and even did well; a Communist coalition became the biggest opposition party and briefly held power in 1994. In the early 1990s, however, few people in Nepal could have predicted the swift rise of Prachanda and the obscure faction he led.

  The Maoists under Prachanda resolved as early as 1986 to follow Mao’s strategy of capturing state power through a “people’s war.” They did not start the war until the mid-1990s, however, when disillusionment with parliamentary democracy created for them a potentially wide popular base in the countryside. Still, hardly anyone noticed when on February 4, 1996, the Maoists presented the government with a list of forty demands, which included abrogating existing treaties with India, stripping the monarchy of all power and privileges, drafting a new constitution by means of a constituent assembly, nationalizing private property, declaring Nepal a secular nation, and ending all foreign aid. These demands were not likely to be met, and as though aware of this, the Maoists began their “people’s war” by attacking police stations in six districts four days before the deadline.

  For the next five years the Maoists forced their way into the national consciousness with their increasingly bold tactics. They financed themselves by collecting “taxes” from farmers, and they exacted “donations” from many businessmen in the Kathmandu valley. They indoctrinated schoolchildren; they formed people’s governments in the areas they controlled and dispensed rough justice to criminals and “class enemies.” But much of the new power and charisma of the Maoists came from their ability to launch audacious attacks on the police and the army.

  The military wing of the Maoists initially consisted of a few ill-trained men armed with antique rifles and homemade weapons. But they chose their first target cannily: the police, nearly the only representatives of the central government in much of Nepal. Poorly armed, often with little more than sticks and 303 Lee Enfield rifles, the police retreated swiftly before the Maoists,
who also attacked roads, bridges, dams, administrative offices, power plants, anything they felt might aid the counterinsurgency efforts of the government.

  In recent years the Maoists have grown militarily strong, mostly through conscription in the countryside, and regular training, allegedly provided by Indian Naxalites. They have acquired better weapons by looting police stations and buying from the arms bazaars of India: they have also learned how to make roadside explosives, pipe and “pressure cooker” bombs. In November 2001, the Maoists launched forty-eight attacks on the army and the police in a single day, forcing the Nepalese government to impose a state of emergency. More than five thousand people died in the next fifteen months, the bloodiest period in Nepal’s modern history.

  But violence is only a part of the Maoists’ overall strategy. In an interview in 2000, Prachanda criticized Indian Communist groups for their lack of vision and spoke of the importance of developing “base areas.” Since 1996, the Maoists have spread out from their traditional home in the midwestern hills of Rolpa and Rukum districts. Their cadres, estimated to number as many as a hundred thousand, travel to deprived areas, addressing, and often recruiting from, the large and growing mass of people deeply unhappy with Nepal’s new democratic dispensation.

  Some measure of democracy was inevitable in Nepal by the 1980s. In previous decades the state’s halfhearted efforts at development had produced many low-level bureaucrats, small businessmen, teachers, students, and unemployed graduates. This new class resented the continuing dominance of upper-caste clans and families. The conflict between the old elite and its challengers was aggravated by a series of economic crises in the late 1980s. In 1985 and 1986, Nepal had negotiated a loan with the IMF and World Bank. The bank’s euphemistically named (and free market–oriented) structural adjustment program, which was then causing havoc in Latin American economies, forced the Nepalese government to cut farm subsidies and jobs in the public sector. GDP grew as a result, but the gains were canceled out by inflation of up to 10 percent and a trade and transit embargo imposed by India in 1989, which caused severe fuel shortages and price rises.

  The protesters who filled the streets of Kathmandu in the spring of 1990 were convinced that the decaying Panchayat system could not deal with the shocks of the new world and needed to be reformed. In acceding to demands for multiparty democracy, the king appeared to acknowledge the strength of the new educated class and to recognize that the old political system needed a degree of popular legitimacy if it was to survive. It’s clear now that what happened in 1990 was less a revolution than a reconfiguration of power, sanctified by elections, among the old royalist oligarchy and an emerging urban middle class. Many courtiers and sycophants of the king managed to reinvent themselves as parliamentary politicians, often joining the Nepali Congress, the political party that ruled Nepal for all but one of the next thirteen years. There were few ideological differences between the Nepali Congress and the main opposition party, the radical-sounding Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist), both of which continued to be led by upper-caste men motivated largely by a desire for money and power. Elections were held frequently, and a procession of governments—thirteen in as many years—made Nepalese democracy appear vibrant. But the majority of the population, especially its ethnic communities, went largely unrepresented.

  In 1992, when democracy still promised much and Maoism was no more than another rumor in the streets of Kathmandu, Andrew Nickson, a British expert on Latin America, wrote prophetically: “The future prospects of Maoism in Nepal will … depend largely on the extent to which the newly elected Nepali Congress government addresses the historic neglect and discrimination of the small rural communities which still make up the overwhelming bulk of the population of the country. As in the case of Peru, this would require a radical reallocation of government expenditures towards rural areas in the form of agricultural extension services and primary healthcare provision.”

  Needless to say, this didn’t happen. In 2002, Dalits, low-caste Hindus, had an annual per capita income of only $40, compared to a national average of $210; fewer than 10 percent of Dalits were literate. The upper-caste men who dominated the new democratic regime were competing among themselves to siphon off the money pouring into Nepal from foreign donors. A fresh convert to the ideology of the free market, the Nepalese government dedicated itself to creating wealth in urban areas. Trying to boost private investment in Kathmandu, it neglected agriculture, on which more than 80 percent of the population depend for a living. Not surprisingly, absolute poverty continued to increase in the late 1990s, even as the Kathmandu valley benefited from the growth in the tourist, garment, and carpet industries and filled up with new hotels, resorts, and villas.

  In such circumstances, many people are likely to be attracted to violent extraparliamentary groups. The Maoists in Nepal had their first ready constituency among rural youths, more than a hundred thousand of whom fail their high school examinations every year. Unemployed and adrift, many of these young men worked for other political parties in the countryside before becoming disillusioned and joining the Maoists.

  Mohan was one of the young men who joined a newly legitimate political party after 1990 and found himself remote from the spoils of power. He then worked with the Maoists for almost five years, living in jungles, once traveling to the easternmost corner of Nepal, before deciding to leave them. He couldn’t return to his village, which lay in the Maoist-dominated region of Rolpa, and had gone to India for a while. He was now trying to lie low in Kathmandu, and although he didn’t say so, he seemed to be “passing his days” and making a living through odd jobs, like so many other people in the city.

  We had arranged to meet in Boudhanath, Kathmandu’s major Buddhist site. Sitting in the square around the white stupa, among monks in swirling crimson robes and often with white faces, Mohan spoke of “feudal forces” and the “bourgeoisie”; their corruption had paved the way for the Maoists, whom he described as “anarchists.” He used the foreign words with a Nepalese inflection. He said that he had picked them up while accompanying a Maoist propagandist on tour, and it occurred to me, as he described his background, that he still used them despite having left the Maoists because he had no other vocabulary with which to describe his experience of deprivation and disappointment.

  He was born and brought up in a family of Magar shepherds in a corner of Rolpa District that had no proper roads, schools, or hospitals. Educated at a school which was a walk of several miles from his village, he had joined the Nepali Congress in 1992, when still in his late teens, and become a personal aide to a prominent local politician. There were many such young men. They received no money for their services but slept in the politician’s house, ate the food prepared for his family, and traveled with him to Kathmandu. Mohan said that it was a good time, the early years of democracy. He liked being in Kathmandu, especially with someone who had a bit of power. But he couldn’t fail to notice that the politician returned less and less often to his constituency in the hills and often refused to meet people who came to his door asking for jobs, money, and medical help. He was surprised to hear that the politician was building a new house for himself in Kathmandu. Soon he felt he was not needed, and one day the politician’s wife told him to eat elsewhere.

  Clashes between Nepali Congress activists and the Maoists were common in his area; Mohan felt that he could be useful to the Maoists with his knowledge of politics. He was also attracted to the idea of ethnic autonomy that the Maoists espoused. He had seen in his time with the politician how the upper-caste-dominated government in Kathmandu possessed an unjust share of the country’s wealth and resources. Many people he knew had already joined the Maoists, and in 1995 one of his friends introduced him to the Maoist “squad commander” in the region.

  As he spoke, I wondered if this was the whole truth, if he hadn’t joined the Maoists for the same reason he had joined the Nepali Congress, the reason many young men like him in India joined political pa
rties, for food and shelter. In any case, he joined the Maoists at a bad time; it was in 1995 that the Nepalese government launched Operation Romeo.

  This scorched earth campaign is described as an instance of “state terror” in a report by INSEC (Informal Sector Service Center), Nepal’s most reliable human rights group. According to the report, the police attacked in the Rolpa and Rukum districts, killing and torturing young men and raping women. When I mentioned this to Mohan, he said that things weren’t as bad as they were made out to be by the “bourgeois” intelligentsia in Kathmandu, who, he thought, were soft on the Maoists. He said the Maoists were simply another opportunistic political group; this was why he had left them. They were interested in mobilizing ethnic communities only to the extent that this would help them capture “state power”; they weren’t really interested in giving them autonomy. He had also been repelled by their cruelty. He had heard about, if not actually seen, instances of Maoists punishing people who refused to pay taxes, defied their alcohol ban, or were suspected of being police informers. Using rocks and hammers, they often broke all the bones in their victims’ bodies before skinning them alive and cutting off their tongues, ears, lips, and noses.

  Many of these stories appear in reports by Nepalese and international human rights groups. The Maoist leaders were, I often heard in Kathmandu, riding a tiger, unable to prevent their angry and frustrated cadres from committing torture and murder. Criminals had infiltrated their movement, and some Maoists now made a living from extortion and kidnapping. When confronted with these excesses, Maoist leaders deny or deplore them. They probably realize that they are losing many of their original supporters, who are as tired of the organization’s growing extremism as of the years of indecisive fighting. Nevertheless, these leaders can often seem constrained in their political thinking by revolutionary methods and rhetoric created in another time and place. Prachanda, for instance, is convinced that “a new wave of revolution, world revolution is beginning, because imperialism is facing a great crisis.”