The places in between

TKP 23/2/2010


The eclipse in the social demands that the Maoists raised and pursued will likely cost the party

The Maoists are facing an existential crisis. Fourteen years after beginning their armed movement, they neither hold state power nor are they waging a struggle against it. In a sense, they have become an establishment force, where in theory they are an opposition force in a parliamentary system. But they cannot act like a normal opposition party, engaging on specific issues with the government, supporting some and opposing others. The effort to institutionalize a democratic system has failed due to the continuing absence of the rule of law. The calculations among the top political leadership are still chiefly about considerations of brute power. The other parties wish to weaken the Maoists at all costs, the Maoists wish to further weaken the other parties and emerge as the unchallengeable political force.

The Maoists may enjoy greater political support than the other political parties, but they too are struggling to remain relevant. The party did succeed in creating spectacle and taking their message to the population during their recent four-phase agitation against the government. But the issues they raised -- civilian supremacy and Indian expansionism -- are removed from the concerns of most people in the country. The Maoists likely recognize this, yet they haven’t even tried to raise issues that will have greater resonance with the population -- of livelihoods and development, for instance. Indeed, it is difficult for them to do so. Their position as a party to the peace process, rather than as a rebel group bent on overthrowing the state, has changed their worldview and limited their options. The demands they have raised against the government now are chiefly political. There has been an eclipse of the social demands that they raised and pursued and, it can be claimed, came to power on the back of. This is likely to cost the party.

Nowhere is this clearer than in their approach to land. From the very beginning of the war, the Maoists forcibly confiscated land from landlords and “usurers” and settled supporters -- many of them poor and disenfranchised -- on it. The objectives were authentically Maoist. Obviously, this exercise was first meant to increase their popularity among the marginalized sections of the population. Then, as it was mostly landowners who exercised social and political power, confiscation of their land and property enabled the Maoists to “eliminate” the locally influential groups that had links to the parliamentary parties and represented the state. Having murdered some landowners and having caused many others to flee to the cities, the Maoists could then attempt to exercise parallel state power. If the area was sufficiently remote and the elimination of landlords sufficiently widespread such areas could even be converted into Maoist base areas.

The peace agreements meant, of course, that the Maoists had to commit to return all of the land they had captured during the war. However, recognition that doing so would mean losing much of the support base cultivated during the past decade, the party insisted that intensive land reform be part of the agreement that was reached. And despite agreements reached on paper, the Maoists were unwilling to return captured land and property. During the first two or so years of the peace process, they claimed that it was difficult to do so because there were now new tenants on the land who could not be easily evicted. The other parties, the Nepali Congress in particular, repeatedly demanded that such land be returned. But there was an absence of a central mechanism consisting of all parties that could monitor the return of the land, the issue largely fell under the control of local party activists and power brokers.

Over time, the Maoists returned some of the land unilaterally. What happened more often, however, was that the captured land was a tool to increase the power and resources of the party. Since after the Constituent Assembly (CA) elections, many Maoist leaders and activists have emerged as land brokers. In a large number of cases they have returned the land to the original landowner in exchange for a large sum of money, some of which went into party coffers and some of which into the pockets of party activists. In other cases, they have pressured the original landowner to sell the land to a third party. The Maoist activists who have brokered such deals have of course earned large “commissions” in the process.

Meanwhile, with the political struggle at the centre has focused only on which party is to have access to state power and on other political issues disconnected from livelihood concerns, there has been no movement on forming a commission meant to undertake large-scale land reforms. An attempt was made to form such a commission during the time the Maoists were in government, but it soon became defunct. Over time, this is likely to have a negative impact on the Maoist party. In the public eye, this is likely to be considered a failure to transform the social demands the party had pursued during their armed movement into policies of the state, and will likely raise disillusionment among sections of the population whom the party has repeatedly promised land over the past decade and a half.

The Maoists are now unable to instigate or lead social movements -- violent or non-violent -- for this could inevitably mean infringing on the interests of some group or the other and would thus invite condemnation from the other political parties and perhaps the international community too. And being out of power, neither do they have the capacity to form and implement policy. Enmeshed in power games that bear a striking resemblance to those of the 1990s, the interests of the party’s “corporate” body supersede everything else. This was of course true during the conflict as well: the seizure of land and the elimination of other sources of power were undertaken chiefly to expand the party’s own strength. But at that time these attempts at least served to grant some resources to deprived socio-economic groups and to earn their loyalty. Now, the Maoist party body, involved as it is in its various land and other transactions, can only appear parasitic to those it claims to serve.