New New York

New New York: 

Growth and its Discontents

By Fritz Tucker

Introduction

One must be careful when talking about New York. “New York is beautiful in the spring.” “New York is dangerous at night.” “New York is the greatest city in the world!” Each of these statements begs the question: for whom? New York is so multitudinous that people who have lived here their entire lives have trouble making sense of their own experiences, let alone those of different races, genders, classes, and communities.

New York is bigger than anybody can imagine. Since the Dutch arrived, New York City grew until it enveloped five counties: New York, Kings, Queens, Bronx, and Richmond. Now New York has gotten too big for its municipal britches, as what constitutes New York City conceptually extends far into Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A tourist who says, “I saw New York last summer,” might only have seen ten streets in Midtown Manhattan over the course of a few hours, one subway car, a few miles of the Hudson River, and Liberty Island.

Throughout the last year, I have studied the history of New York from economic, political, sociological, and geographical angles. The physical growth of New York, the rising rents, the increasing corporatization, and the expansion of governmental authority all fit within the narrative of progress. The City’s constantly shifting demographics, however, more closely resemble the ocean’s tides—communities flowing into an area, developing distinct cultures, then ebbing as other communities replace them.

The constant creation and destruction of community is a byproduct of New York’s economic growth cycles. The sounds of a generation give way to new sounds when one generation ages out of the network’s target audience. Seasonal fashions demand even more rapid appropriation of what is cool through a process that is inherently un-cool––a fact that, lucky for the industry, demands ever new kinds of cool. A migrant leaves the motherland to work in New York, settling in the same ghetto that everybody else from his or her town settled in, the same ghetto they’re all trying to get out of. Damned if they do, they move to a suburb where they’re alienated from their old community and not accepted by their new one; damned if they don’t, they’re eventually priced out of their rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Only by constantly moving up the economic ladder can they afford to stay put. New York inevitably grows. Everything in it eventually dies.

Expansion 

Initially, New York’s potential as a city was as deep as its harbor. “No other seaport [in America] could claim the combination of the short, seventeen-mile-long sea approaches... the roomy interior anchorage that provided sanctuary from the winter storms... and the interior trade route up the Hudson River” (Hood, p. 32). In order to compete with other cities—some of which had existed for thousands of years—New York’s proponents used their growing economic clout to overcome the city’s geographical limitations. In the early nineteenth century, New York merchants diverted the American-European cotton trade, making New York the midpoint of this journey (Hood, p. 32-3). New York profited from the cotton going to Europe and the immigrants who made the journey back (Hood, p. 33). By 1825, the Erie Canal had been constructed, undercutting Canada and establishing New York as the new intermediate between the Great Lakes of the Midwest and the rest of the world (Hood, p. 33).

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, New York could no longer be contained to Manhattan Island alone. Spurred by a complex combination of public and private investment—with most of the profit going to the private sector, and ownership over the infrastructure held by the city—New York was transformed (Hood, p. 71). A city of islands became a city of bridges and tunnels that connected New York’s new boroughs to Manhattan by way of the fastest and most extensive rapid transit system in the world (Hood, p. 155-9).

Throughout the twentieth century, the commercial interests that dominated New York varied era by era, but each expanded the scope of the City in its own distinct way.  In the pre-war, liberal era, private investors built subway tunnels to New Jersey (Hood, p. 145). As motor vehicles proliferated in the New Deal era, the municipal government—facilitated by federal dollars—destroyed enough of New York to renew it in a car-friendly manner, further incorporating Westchester, Rockland, and Long Island (Hood, p. 227).

During the industrial era, New York became America’s largest manufacturing center (Freeman, p. 8). Post-war New York is not often regarded as a manufacturing powerhouse, in part because New York did not primarily produce longer-lasting goods like cars and electronics. New Yorkers manufactured goods that were consumed almost immediately, and predominantly by New Yorkers—newspapers, clothes, and food (Freeman, p. 9). This concentration in non-durable, daily and seasonal items helped New York not only survive deindustrialization, but thrive as the world’s leader in art, entertainment, and fashion (Currid, p. 10).

While mass production enables the outside world to consume the fruits of New York’s labor, the immediate consumption and rapid turnover rate of so many of New York’s products demand one’s presence in New York to keep up with the latest trends. The street-level interactions and social networks that exist in New York make it hard for people to produce and sell sufficiently trendy art elsewhere in America.  This attracts young, hopeful artists to The City, further cementing New York’s status as a center for the arts.

By the time of the dot-com boom at the end of the twentieth century, New York’s business elites were so entrenched that predominantly internet-based businesses were drawn to the City.  Despite the fact that the internet had eliminated space-time constraints on human communication, online companies were willing to pay New York’s high rents just to access the New York labor market and rapidly evolving trends. As the twenty-first century approached, approximately 140,000 New Yorkers were employed by almost 4,000 ‘new media’ firms (Neff, p. 312). The shift to online trading in the financial world has similarly not weakened New York’s status alongside London as the world’s two leaders in finance.

In “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” Louis Wirth writes about the social expectations of urbanites, and why they might find it difficult to interact with non-city folk. The “social interaction among such a variety of personality types in the urban milieu,” as he puts it, has psychological ramifications that urbanites are often unable to articulate even after they leave the city (Wirth, p. 101). Living in America’s most densely populated city, New Yorkers of different classes and races intermingle with much greater frequency than do suburbanites. These interactions can have a humanizing effect, introducing New Yorkers to members of varying social strata that they would not meet elsewhere (Wirth, p. 100). On the other hand, these interactions often lack the intimacy of traditional relationships (Wirth, p. 100). With so much of their social interaction mediated by transactions, New Yorkers often end up with a uniquely utilitarian and dehumanized view of others as ones who serve them, from waiters, to firefighters to bankers (Wirth, p. 100). Wirth also points out that urban density “tends to produce differentiation and specialization” of neighborhoods into commercial centers and residential neighborhoods that are further divided into ethnic enclaves, a situation that is exacerbated by the rapidity of the city’s transit system (Wirth, p. 100). Thus, as New York grows, New Yorkers come into more frequent contact with greater numbers of people whose life stories they are increasingly ignorant of. New York means a billion different things to ten million different people.

Displacement 

New York is in a constant state of becoming something it isn’t and of ceasing being everything it is. Unbridled economic and geographical growth has taken a toll on New York’s communities. Four hundred years after its entire indigenous population was killed or removed, New York became the most populated city in the world. Instead of being dominated by one slowly expanding ethnic group, the ethnic makeup of New York is a patchwork quilt cut from a map of the world.

In the eighteenth century, New York was Manhattan, which stopped well south of Canal Street (Anbinder, p. 14). In 1797, Newgate Prison opened in Greenwich Village, a suburb of New York City.[1] After the War of 1812, typically poor European immigrants flooded New York’s ports at unprecedented rates, nearly quadrupling New York’s population between 1825 and 1855 (Anbinder, p. 43). Irish, German, and Polish immigrants began to settle on the outskirts of New York.  What had been a bucolic suburb of New York quickly became the City’s densest neighborhood, Five Points (Anbinder, p. 15).

Despite noxious living conditions the immigrants made it their own, carving out ethnic enclaves.  According to Tyler Anbinder’s study of state and federal census statistics, “In 78 percent of the tenements, one ethnic group made up 75 percent or more of the inhabitants” (Anbinder, p. 97). For almost half a century, a Little Ireland was created, with a culture so seductive that it not only attracted generations of Irish émigrés, but also writers like Charles Dickens and Fredrika Bremer, who toured Five Points embedded with police escorts (Anbinder, p. 34).

Eventually, the Irish were displaced by the next wave of indigent immigrants, Italians (Anbinder, p. 345). Though this group has since been replaced, their historic Little Italy is a staple New York tourist attraction. The next group to dominate the Canal Street area was the Chinese, whose Chinatown, curiously, remains there now (Anbinder, ch. 13). Skyrocketing real estate prices have traditionally led to the gentrification of successive ethnic enclaves, as the rich urban center expands and pushes the poor urban periphery ever outward. African-American and Chinese communities, however, faced so much discrimination and exclusion from upward social mobility that their ethnic enclaves in Harlem and Chinatown have endured well over a century (Anbinder, ch. 13) (Chauncey, p. 245). In this way, New York’s most oppressed communities share something in common with the Anglo-Saxons of the Upper East Side that no other social group does: a multi-generational sense of belonging in a historically continuous New York.

For most New Yorkers, neighborhoods are temporary. Puerto Ricans, for example, developed an ethnic enclave in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in the 1980’s, only to see it become increasingly Mexican in the 1990’s, a state that led to ethnic gang warfare (Smith, p. 34, 165-170). Mexican immigrants developed ‘transnational’ communities between their New York neighborhoods and their home villages. Dollars, gangs, fashion, and feminism transformed villages in Oaxaca into Little New Yorks, while Mexican politics, patriarchy, religion, language, and food turned New York neighborhoods into Little Mexicos (Smith, ch. 4, 5, 9, 10).  Latino Sunset Park is now facing encroachment from the East by an increasingly Chinese Borough Park and from the North by an increasingly White Park Slope.

Park Slope’s working-class Italian population began to be replaced in the 1950’s by indigent Blacks and Latinos who, in turn, began to be replaced by upper-middle-class White ‘yuppies’ in the 60’s (Osman, p. ch 7). Park Slope’s predominantly White, ‘yuppie’ civil society fought to maintain the class and racial diversity of the neighborhood through anti-redlining movements and support of squatters (Osman, p. 241-2). What the ‘yuppies’ didn’t discontinue, however, was buying brownstones in Park Slope, evicting their poor tenants, and driving up the cost of living throughout the neighborhood, all of which displaced the very people they were trying to help stay (Osman, p. 241, 260-5).

When the real estate market did not remove poor people fast enough for New York’s elites, they used the powers of the city, state, and federal government to carry out ethnic and cultural displacement.  In the early twentieth century, gay New Yorkers established enclaves in Greenwich Village and Harlem. In 1925, police used anti-prostitution laws to close all but three gay clubs in Greenwich Village (Chauncey, p. 238). White men found it easier to be openly gay in Harlem, a condition that resulted in an uncommon amount of interracial interaction (Chauncey, p. 244). The Committee of Fourteen, a moralizing proto-police organization, responded to the increasing racial integration of Harlem nightclubs by lobbying the government to enforce caste-like divisions, including outlawing interracial marriage and interracial boxing matches (Fronc, p. 103). Unable to pass Jim Crow laws, the Committee of Fourteen hired undercover investigators to report Harlem’s integrated establishments to the police, who would levy fines against the clubs for violating anti-prostitution laws (Fronc, p. 105-8).  More aggressively, during the New Deal era, the powerful New York City municipal government—backed by federal funds—demolished entire neighborhoods and replaced them with public housing, Lincoln Center, and MetLife’s privately-owned, racially segregated housing project in Stuyvesant Town (Zipp, p. 19-22).

While each successive group of immigrants has a unique New York story, each shares the experience of having its story take place in New York. No matter what neighborhood a person moves to, the subway fare is the same, a slice of pizza costs about the same as a subway ride, the neighbors’ music is too loud, and “the rent is too damn high.”[2] Everybody serves each other in some capacity, whether as social workers, cabbies, schoolteachers, or delivery boys, then takes the same train home––though each stop transports passengers to drastically different neighborhoods just half-miles away from one another.

The Final Frontier: New Jersey

For decades, New Yorkers developed a powerful civil society to combat government excess. Despite police repression, gay New Yorkers threw increasingly spectacular balls in Harlem throughout the ’20’s and ’30’s, and recently won the right to marry in New York. (Chauncey, p. 258). Groups like the American Labor Committee and Save Our Homes protested redevelopment around Lincoln Square, though were ultimately unsuccessful (Zipp, p. 204-7). “Brownstoners” in Brooklyn organized stroller rallies and fought for greater community control over investment in homes, and police patrols, with mixed results (Osman, 3-5, 242-49). Labor unions froze New York’s elevators, tugboats, and garment industry after World War II, and now have their own political party—the Working Families Party (Freeman, p. 3-5).

Two summers ago, I began working for the Working Families Party as a door-to-door canvasser. One of the first campaigns I worked on was an attempt to get Charles Hall the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Every day, twenty of us canvassers would eschew the public transportation system and carpool from Downtown Brooklyn, across the Manhattan Bridge, through Canal Street, and into the Holland Tunnel like Robert Moses and Michael Bloomberg intended us to. Due to the illegality of New York’s Working Families Party campaigning for a candidate in a New Jersey race, midway through the Holland Tunnel we became The Friends of Charles Hall organization (or something along those lines). After a day’s work for a day’s pay—the hourly wage was apparently lost in the 1990’s—we’d make the sometimes hour-and-a-half-long drive back to Brooklyn, where most of us would travel forty-five minutes by subway back to our homes in the inner city ghettos we were helping to gentrify—Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, Bushwick.

Long gone are the days when New Yorkers could walk a mile north to present-day Canal Street and find themselves outside the city limits, climbing Bunker Hill, taking advantage of the “breathtaking views of both the wildlife that gathered at the Collect’s shores and the expanding city to the south” (Anbinder, p. 14). Whether it’s interstate meddling in New Jersey mayoral races or international meddling in local elections in Ticuani, Mexico, New York is bigger than New York now (Smith, ch. 4). But in a way, that’s what makes New York New York.

Even the most arbitrary things that give New Yorkers a common identity fall apart when you stare at them too hard. New York’s professional football teams, the New York Giants and Jets, play their home games across the Hudson River in New Jersey. But look deeper still, and you’ll find that any large collection of pieces in the world is sure to bear the seal of New York in one way or another. The name of the football stadium is MetLife Stadium, the same Metropolitan Life Insurance Company that owned the first segregated housing project in Stuyvesant Town, and whose corporate headquarters loom over Midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park. The players on the New York Jets and Giants are no more New Yorkers than any other professional football players, though the latest star of the Giants is a salsa-dancing Puerto Rican from one of the poorest, most distant urban outskirts of the greater New York metropolitan area: Paterson, New Jersey.

New York, however, won’t let New Jersey overshadow it. Downtown Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards sat empty for more than six decades, after the Brooklyn Dodgers opted to move to Los Angeles instead of the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues. For decades, local civil society successfully lobbied and protested against successive proposals for renewal (Osman, 226-9). In 2009, to the chagrin of groups like Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, the New York Court of Appeals allowed the city to exercise eminent domain and seize the Atlantic Yards, as well as over thirty inhabited buildings in Downtown Brooklyn.[3] The new development consists of sixteen skyscrapers and a new basketball stadium for the formerly New Jersey Nets: now the Brooklyn Nets. Brooklyn is the new Manhattan. New York is the new New York.

References

Anbinder, T., (2002). Five Points: The 19^th-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Plume.

Chauncey, G., (1994). Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books.

Currid, E., (2007). The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City. New York: Princeton University Press.

Freeman, J., (2001). Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. New York: The New Press.

Hood, C., (1993). 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Neff, G., (2005). Entrepreneurial labor among cultural producers: “Cool” jobs in “hot” industries. Social Semiotics, 15(3).

Osman, S., (2011). The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York. New York: Oxford University Press.

Smith, R., (2006). Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wirth, L., (1938). Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology, 44, 1-24. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Zipp, S., (2010). Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York. Cary, NC: Oxford University Press. 

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[1] “Newgate Prison: Greenwich Village History.” Archives and Public History Digital, New York University. Retrived on 12/18/12, from http://aphdigital.org/.

[2] In 2005, New York activist Jimmy McMillan started The Rent Is Too Damn High Party, which has contested mayoral, gubernatorial, and senatorial elections ever since. The party’s website is www.rentistoodamnhigh.org.

[3] Silverberg, S., (2009) “New York Court of Appeals Upholds “Atlantic Yards” Condemnation.” New York Zoning and Municipal Law Blog. 

The Naxalites

(This is a power-point lecture I gave at NYU in Spring 2012. It is on the origin and development of the Indian Maoist (Naxalite) movement. Because it was an oral presentation, I stupidly didn't save my sources. I will go back and cite this someday. Today, however, is not that day.)

The Naxalites

"If you cannot decipher and interpret letters and symbols, you cannot read. If you cannot access letters and symbols, you also cannot read." - Jimmy Johnson, The Secret Secret

To speak of the Naxalites, or the Maoist movement in general, is to speak of a series of armed conflicts carried out by a series of political parties.  These have mostly taken place in rural areas, from Peru, to Iran, to India, Nepal, China and the Philippines.

Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path)

Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)

Communist Party of China

Communist Party of the Philippines

There have also been some urban movements, like the Black Panther Party here in the US, and Peru’s Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, after which my second favorite rapper, Tupac Amaru Shakur is named, his mother being a Black Panther.

Black Panther Party

Movimiento Revolucionario Tùpac Amaru

Tupac Amaru Shakur

In 1848 Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto while participating in a series of Arab-Spring-like urban uprisings that covered much of Europe. Throughout his writings, Marx consistently advocates armed struggle, but never advocated vanguard parties or democratic centralism.  What Marx does say is that every human epoch will have a different set of corresponding technologies, productive processes, social structures, and ideas, and that these evolve over time.

Parisian Barricade in 1848

Vladimir Lenin, of Bolshevik fame, is known as the founder of modern communist political parties. While communist in name, these parties operate in much the same manner as bourgeois political parties like the Democrats and the Republicans.  “Democratic centralism,” for those not familiar, is the organizational structure championed by Leninists the world over.  Far from being unique, it’s actually just a deceptively populist word for strict hierarchy.  What I find most unique about Leninist parties is their belief that a communist vanguard party can revolutionize social relations using the exact same organizational structures they’re trying to overthrow: democratic centralism.

Lenin in Moscow in 1920

Trotsky with the Red Army

As time went on, Lenin seems to have recognized this contradiction to a certain degree. Leon Trotsky was possibly the single most instrumental person in the development of the Russian Soviets—the democratic general labor unions that overthrew the Tsar.  After the Bolshevik revolution, Trotsky became the commander of the highly anti-democratic, anti-dialogic Red Army, at which point his general outlook became so militarized, he oversaw the dissolution of the Soviets, and advocated the execution of workers who did not carry out commands from their bosses (a.k.a. the party leaders).

In his autobiography, Trotsky writes that Lenin began correcting him when he would refer to the Soviet Union as a “worker’s republic.” Lenin preferred to call it a “worker’s republic with bureaucratic distortions.” An under-statement, yes, but significant nonetheless coming from the man whose teachings most communist parties claim to adhere to today. According to Trotsky, neither he nor Lenin ever seemed to believe in the viability of an isolated socialist state, and saw the failure of the world revolution after WWI as the failure of the Russian revolution.  This wonderful insight from Lenin, easily accessible to much of the world, was systematically kept from Russians throughout Stalin’s reign, and ironically continues to be suppressed by people who refer to themselves as Leninists and Maoists to this very day. In some regards, humans are considered to be the only animal to possess intelligence.  While that’s debatable, what is certain is that human beings are the only animal with “counter-intelligence.”

Mao Tse-Tung

Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communist Party, aside from inspiring our radical socialist president, made several important contributions to communist history and theory.  Instead of relying on a mass base of urban workers, Mao embarked on his “protracted people’s war.”  Once in power, Mao, like Lenin, began to see the problems inherent in the party-state. Mao helped formulate the theory that the capitalist class had regenerated itself within the Communist Party, a theory that is the basis for the generally accepted idea that China, today, is not a socialist society–whatever that is–but a state-capitalist society. Mao tried to stop this trend by launching the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution against his own party.

Seen by most liberals as nothing more than a political purge, the Cultural Revolution was, well, a giant political purge on the one hand, but combined, however, with an attempt by Mao and his Red Guards to come up with completely new organizational structures. While Mao was eventually restored to power at the head of the CCP, the Cultural Revolution fell short of its more revolutionary goals.  I, for one, believe that radical, international participatory democracy was not possible in the pre-internet era, and therefore applaud these early efforts, but would not like to recreate them.

Sadly, these lessons are lost on Maoists today.  The cadre of Maoist parties are much like the foot-soldiers of any army, cult, gang or society (including our own) that can only function by keeping its members non-literate.  Maoist parties, like American society, place a high premium on literacy, and so must keep their members non-literate through censorship of “sensitive material.” For Maoists in the jungles, it’s easy to limit the amount of literature the cadres can access. In the industrial world, however, it’s a little more difficult.  Marginalization is more common than censorship. One American Maoist group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, frowns upon its members reading any literature that is not approved of by the party, which is basically everything not written by their Chairman Bob Avakian. Nevertheless, it’s estimated by the author of the quote at the beginning that approximately half the world’s new literature being is classified information compiled by the world’s intelligence agencies, chief among them the US’s intelligence and counter-intelligence networks.

Neither this poster, nor his nickname, are supposed to be ironic.

The leaders of the Maoist parties, like the leaders of our society, seem to genuinely believe their own propaganda about the need for authoritarian leadership.  Which leads me to the Naxalite movement, the events it created, the parties that sprung from it, who their leaders were, how their cadres were developed, and how they functioned both in the world, and amongst themselves.

In 1962 China went to war with India, an act that finally brought to the forefront the division in the Communist Party of India over whether to align with China or the USSR. In 1964 the Communist Party of India split into two groups. The remaining CPI maintained its role in parliament and its alliance with the Soviet Unio. The splinter group, the CPI (Marxist) was initially not recognized by the Indian state.  Thousands of the CPI (M)’s members were arrested by the Indian government, which included their former party members in the CPI.  The CPI (M) and its supporters launched urban uprisings, using tactics like general strikes (bandh in Hindi).

Charu Majumdar

As the persecution of the radical elements in the CPI (M) continued, one particularly charismatic and attractive leader, Charu Majumdar, began writing his “historic eight essays” calling for a Mao-inspired communist party.  In one essay, entitled Make the People’s Democratic Revolution Successful by Fighting Against Revisionism, he writes of the need for the revolutionary party to stop serving peasant and proletarian organizations, arguing instead that peasant and proletarian organizations must serve the revolutionary party. He also decries not just mass, democratic participation within the party, but denigrates dialog and debate within the party.

"To hold discussions on Party decisions is not called democratic centralism. This thinking is not in accordance with Marxism. And from all this thinking the conclusion has to be drawn that the Party's programme will be adopted from below. But if it is adopted from the lower level, then the correct Marxist way is not implemented; in all these activities there inevitably is bourgeois deviations. The Marxist truth of democratic centralism is that the Party directive coming from higher leadership must be carried out. Because the Party's highest leader is he who has firmly established himself as a Marxist through a long period of movements and theoretical debates. We have the right to criticise Party decisions; but once a decision has been taken, if any one criticizes it without implementing it, or obstructs work, or hesitates to implement it, he will be guilty of the serious offence of violating Party discipline." Charu Majumdar - Make the People's Democratic Revolution Successful by Fighting Against Revisioninsm

Majumdar went on to contend that “guerilla warfare [was] the only mode through which the development and advance of [the] revolution was possible.” To advance that goal, an underground cadre had to be developed to support the work of the underground party leaders, and also, I would argue, to ensure the survival of the party leaders, who took part in intellectual labor all day. This cadre consisted mostly of students, and members of peasant and workers organizations.  The cadre were to form “activist groups” that would inundate themselves with a culture of illegality by pasting illegal posters around the city. When a cadre was deemed ready by the party members, he or she was invited into the party, at which point he or she was to cut all communication with his or her semi-legal activist group, not to mention, with the rest of society, including family and friends.

An important thing to keep in mind is that vanguardists believe that change is imposed on people, not made together through co-mmunication and co-operation.  Working from that assumption, it makes perfect sense to engage in incredibly anti-social activities, like developing underground authoritarian organizations and committing illegal activities for the sake of committing illegal activities. Once committed to this path, you’re no longer able to engage in the kind of true, consistent dialog with people over the course of months and years, the kind of dialog people need to change their minds and habits. Instead of two-way communication, you resort to propagating communiqués widely in hopes of reaching that one in a million person who agrees with you, so that you can get him or her involved in your clandestine organization.  As for the people whose minds you can’t change, the “class enemies” must be “annihilated,” which one of the main programs of the early Naxalite movement.  

I myself was going down this path at a time when I had lost most of my social network by moving from one city to another too many times; luckily, I got myself out of this mode of thinking with the help of some very special people in this room, and by reestablishing myself within my community by developing strong social networks and participating in more dialogic, democratic behaviors.

Me on Park and 65th in 2008

By 1967, Majumdar had set up base in Darjeeling. Contrary to the wishes of his party’s leadership, he began working with peasants who were dissatisfied with the lack of land redistribution promised by the West Bengal government.  In May of 1967, landless laborers in the nearby village of Naxalbari started occupying the land of their landlords and mobilizing against the police, who were sent to restore order.  

Naxalbari

On multiple occasions, police fired on unarmed groups of women who were protesting the repression. Like the pepper spraying incident at UC Davis last fall, these incidents helped the Naxalbari uprisings become not just a national issue, but a sympathetic struggle in the eyes of Indians everywhere.  Tens of thousands of peasants took part in the Naxalbari uprising over the course of the summer. Though the movement was violent, the villagers organized themselves publicly, a tactic suitable for people who were willing to die for their land, as opposed to the tactics advocated by Majumdar, whose goal was state power, something which he was willing to go underground and be chased around the jungles for. A year later, Majumdar did his part to rewrite history by totally mischaracterizing the Naxalbari uprising with these words:

“This is the first time that peasants have struggled not for their political demands but for the seizure of state power. If the Naxalbari peasant struggle has any lesson for us, it is this; militant struggles must be carried on not for land, crops, etc. but for the seizure of State power.”

By the end of July, the uprising had been put down, though the Communist instigators remained at large. In November, Mao-inspired Communists from all over India convened and formed the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries. This alliance of regional communist parties led Naxalbari-like uprisings all over India, particularly in central India’s jungle regions, from Bihar to Kerala.  Though unsuccessful, thus far, in attaining state power, these guerilla struggles continue to this day.

On May Day, 1969, the inevitable split in the CPI (M) was finally announced, with Majumdar’s bloc forming the CPI (Marxist-Leninist). While the CPI (M-L) carried out their campaign of “annihilating the class enemies,” the West Bengal government set about annihilating the CPI (M-L)’s peasant and student supporters.  When I was living in India, my best friend there had been a member of the student-wing of the current incarnation of the CPI (M-L) for a couple years. The Indian government had just escalated its war on the Maoists, who’ve made a resurgence since 2003.  My friend said that everyone at her university was paranoid that things would return to the days when the CPI (M-L) first split from the CPI (M). CPI (M) cadres would discuss and argue the political situation on campus with their former comrades in the CPI (M-L) in a more or less civil manner during the day; then at night, they would walk through the dorms drawing X’s in red chalk on the doors of their fellow students, indicating who was CPI (M-L). The West Bengal police would arrive during the night and disappear the students with X’s on their doors.

In 1972, Majumdar was captured and murdered by the West Bengal government. His party splintered into many factions over the years, in ways that are hard to keep track of.  To give you an idea of how complicated the splinterings and regroupings of the Indian Communist parties are, here’s a Party tree of the Nepali communist movement, which is much simpler than the Indian communist movement.

Nepali Maoist Family Tree

For the last 45 years, the Naxalites have been pretty much confined to central India’s hills and jungles. In 2004, spurred on by the success of the Nepali Maoists—who eventually overthrew Nepal’s 250 year old monarchy—several clandestine communist parties across India, most notably the People’s War Group of Andhra Pradesh, and the Maoist Communist Centre from the West Bengal area, joined forces to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The CPI (Maoist) has as many as 10,000 full time fighters, and according to the Indian state, effects over 130 of India’s 640 districts. But these figures must contextualized.

It may seem, at first glance, that the Indian state would be loathe to admit that so many of its districts are Naxalite-infected.  In the War on Terror era, however, we know that these kinds of threats can be used to justify the increased militarization of the nation’s budget. As for the 10,000 soldiers, the most significant change in the Naxalite movement, over the last 45 years, has been the source of its cadre.  As always, universities are the prime recruiting ground for leadership positions within the party.  The mass base, however, has shifted from landless peasants to the adavasi, India’s tribal, semi-agricultural, semi-hunter-gatherer forest dwellers.

My friend from India did some of her field work for her PHD among the adavasi.  In the most remote jungles, she came across one family that had never heard of India.  They weren’t aware that they were Indian citizens, not that there was a nation-state called India.  Granted, not all adavasi are like that, but because they live so off the grid, it’s hard to determine how many there are. Estimates of the adavasi population are usually in the area of 100 million. Over the course of the Naxalite guerilla struggle, the adavasi have become the Naxalite's natural ally, for they are the most adept people in the world at shifting from place to place, subsisting on their surrounding environment, and leaving no trace of their existence.

When the Indian government declared war on the Naxalites in 2009 with Operation Greenhunt, it was unclear whether they were truly targeting the Naxalites or the adavaisi.  The Naxalites had blossomed since 2003, but were not really threatening anybody outside of the jungles and hills.  In India’s central hills, however, are trillions of dollars worth of precious minerals like cobalt and bauxite, and living on top of these hills are the adavasi, one of the only segments of the population that the Indian state has failed to control.  Thus has developed a symbiotic relationship between the adavasi and the Maoists, where the Maoists provide organized armed resistance to the state, and the adavasi provide cadre who are uneducated, have been displaced from their homes, have lost their families, and are willing to die to get their land back.  There is no reason to believe, however, that they are fighting for state power.

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy, my favorite living author, has written extensively about the Maoists over the course of her career.  In her novel The God of Small Things, she holds them in contempt, which is not surprising, being that one of the central theses of her book is that human nature is to dominate, something communists, Hindus and liberals all have in common. For the decade after her novel won the Booker Prize, Roy took part in non-violent resistance movements against the construction of India’s mega-dams. Seeing the degree to which these movements were totally shitted on by the Indian government, however, made her change her mind about the violence, non-violence dichotomy.  When she was here at NYU last fall, somebody posed the question to her, “violence or non violence?” to which she answered that it should not be an ideological matter, but one of tactics. She was here to support Occupy Wall Street, and admired, very much, our oh-so-Gandhian struggle.  On the other hand, she’s said quite eloquently, “The Gandhian ethos is a very frightening ethos in the forest; because the Gandhian ethos [is a] performance that requires an audience... And in the forest, there’s no audience… In a society that doesn’t belong to the rest of society… how do hungry people go on a hunger strike? How do people who don’t have any money not pay their taxes or do civil disobedience?”

Shortly after Operation Greenhunt was announced, my friends at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi got a communiqué from the school’s administration that any anti-state words, either printed or spoken, could be considered a terrorist act. Shortly afterward, the student wings of the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) and the CPI (Maoist) were banned.

While I was living at JNU in Delhi, both the Marxist-Leninists and the Maoists had active student groups on campus, which was odd to me, considering they were conducting guerilla wars.  It was somewhat surreal, as an American, to see giant communist posters covering a college campus. My friend who I was staying with, her old group, the Marxist-Leninists, had recently won the student elections for the first time, and were quickly becoming unpopular. Communist parties have always been great in opposition, but have never been very good at governing, even if it’s just a university student government.

Jawaharlal Nehru University

Another communiqué given at the time of Operation Greenhunt was that any journalist attempting to enter the Maoist areas to report on the war could be shot on sight. Using her international fame, Arundhati Roy put herself on the line and very publicly went to the jungles and wrote a story on the Naxalites called Walking with the Comrades. The essay contains much legitimate praise of the Naxalites, but glosses over or doesn’t mention very important criticisms of them, like the fact that they admittedly require their female soldiers to undergo sterilization; we, of course, have no such problems regarding controlling women’s reproduction here in America.

Arundhati Roy "Walking With the Comrades"

I can definitely relate to Roy, and how and why she wrote her article, having visited Maoists myself and having been enamored by their anti-state struggles. She seems to have been given what I like to call the “Maoist tour.” I was given the Maoist tour of Nepal, literally by a tourist agency, most of which are now organized under the Maoist labor unions in Kathmandu. Luckily, I was given a more complex, inside understanding of the situation in Nepal when I met my good friend Roshan Kissoon, who had lived with the Maoist army for two years, teaching the commanders English, before falling out with the party. 

Roshan Kissoon and Fritz Tucker

Not the most important criticism, but the one that pissed him off personally was the insistence of the commanders, during the Maoist army’s mass marriage ceremonies, in having their cadre pledge allegiance to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Prachanda Path (Prachanda being the Chairman of the Nepali Maoists). He said that while he wasn’t a fan of the institution of marriage, those six hairy men shouldn’t stand between the couples on their wedding day.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao

Roshan recently has let me in on a piece of information that has been floating around; take it with a grain of salt.  There have been several killings of high profile Naxalite leaders since 2009, including Kishenji, the Naxal’s third in command. Apparently, though, all of these killings are of leaders from the Andhra Pradesh based People’s War Group faction of the CPI (Maoist), which definitely wants to continue the armed struggle; my friend Roshan thinks these leaders have been set up by the leaders of the Maoist Communist Centre faction in West Bengal, who have been more adamant about engaging the Indian government in peace talks.

I’d like to end this presentation by showing a clip from an Al-Jazeera special on the Naxalites. (13:31-15:11)

The reason I think this is important is that it gives the third side of the struggle, outside the narrow confines of the state-Naxalite dichotomy, showing the people who are caught between the two.  Now any good Maoist would watch this video and say that the ends justify the means, and go on about how the state engages in much more brutal torture and prosecution, which it does, as does its indigenous militia, the Salwa Judum, which cleared and burned over 600 adavasi villages in the state of Chhattisgarh alone, an act similar in scale to the Nazi genocide in Belarus during WWII. 

It’s hard, however, to believe that the ends will justify the means, when watching the Maoists beating the bound man with a stick while telling the crowd that “this is the people’s court. You can’t find a solution amongst yourselves.  This is the law.”  That kind of shit makes me think that the Maoists have definitely not learned the lessons given to us by the experiments in party-led, state-led communism, from Russia and China, to North Korea and Cuba, nor will they learn these lessons, given their propensity for censorship, leader-worship, and their obsession with combatting "revisionism," which is obviously a conservative, orthodox position. The Maoists are a very insular, ideologically driven group that is extremely good at surviving brutal repression in harsh environments… just like us.

Connecticut School Shootings

Today, 12/14/12, a 20 year old white man shot his mother––a school teacher––then went to her school, where he killed 26 others, including 20 kindergarteners, and then himself. There is something to be said for the fact that almost all mass murders are committed by members of the dominant race, and all seem to be carried out by men. I think that people of the privileged race and gender have a unique tendency to feel entitled to public space, and unconditional social support. When their lives don't work out the way they feel they should've, they feel that they must "make a scene," and inflict revenge on the society that refused to nurture them.

That being said, the hatred that lies behind this action lives in all of us; most of us, however, are never driven to suicide, and don't feel entitled to act out in such a destructive and public way. In Black Boy, Richard Wright writes about a black woman whose husband is lynched by white people. She goes to the site of the lynching ostensibly to grieve, but with a shotgun in her dress. Once she has arrived, considering her life already over, she starts shooting as many white people as she can before she's killed. In all of Richard Wright's writings, 

he and his characters take solace in the idea that, if they're ever going down, they'll take down as many white people as they can in the process.

I think this is the best lens through which to look at mass murders. It brings up the uncomfortable fact that American society is incredibly degrading to everybody, including those who are at the very top for a very short period in their lives. Black, brown, women, children, elderly, less-attractive, less-able, and every citizen who is subject to the whims of the state, all of us are stuck in a consumerist (as opposed to creation-oriented) society that is morbidly obsessed with movies that glorify violence and TV shows that glorify meanness. We find it so odd to uplift one another that we sometimes pretend we're being sarcastic when we do say a nice thing or two.

I'm sure most of these mass murderers have been hurt and betrayed on a daily basis by both anonymous people, and by the people they love and care about the most. Not knowing how to act any other way, they retaliate, instead of trying to reconcile, for often they don't even know how. The cycle continues until they feel that life is no longer worth living. And to strike back at the society that has made them suicidal, they decide that if they're going down, they're going to take as many people as they can down with them. It is more natural to murder the children of the people you feel bullied by, rather than to confront the bullies themselves. It also hurts more to have your child killed than to be killed yourself.

I have bullied, and have been bullied. Gun control will cut down on the collateral damage, but will not cure us of our hatred. I just want to thank everyone who has ever treated me decently. I try to do the same, though I don't always succeed.

Jana Andolan:
The People’s Movement in Nepal

By Fritz Tucker

(This piece first appeared in my school journal, Zeteo: The Journal of Interdisciplinary Writing.)

Picture accessed in November 2012 from http://kayeanddavid.blogspot.com.

Post-War Kathmandu

Every day, hundreds of European, American, Australian, and Israeli tourists walk the streets of Thamel, downtown Kathmandu. Nearby is the Narayanhiti Palace Museum, the Nepali Royal Palace that was converted into a museum after the Nepali People’s Movement of 2006 (in Nepalese, Jana Andolan II). Most of these tourists are unaware that the crowded, winding streets of Thamel were much more crowded in April 2006—filled, in fact, with millions of stone and torch-wielding Nepalis battling and defeating the automatic-rifle bearing Royal Nepal Army. With the Maoist and Royal armies confined to their barracks, Parliament’s blue-shirted police patrol the streets of Kathmandu, the village outposts, and the Indian borders.

Most of the urban rebels, party-affiliated or not, have gone back to their full-time jobs. Many of them work in one of Nepal’s largest industries, tourism. This is why a tourist doesn’t have to walk half a block to purchase a bicycle-rickshaw ride, tiger balm, hashish, a prostitute, or a trekking expedition. These victorious urban rebels are trekking guides, waiters, hotel and hostel employees, doctors, teachers, and now government employees. Nepal’s urban workers are unionizing rapidly, usually in affiliation with a political party, usually the Maoists.

Some Western tourists know this. In fact, it is why they have come to Nepal—to meet the Maoists. These comrades are whisked out of Kathmandu by the Maoist trekking companies and taken to the countryside, to Rolpa and Rukkum, the main Maoist base-area during their 13-year rural guerrilla war against Nepal’s monarchy. This tradition of Western comrades visiting the Maoist-controlled countryside is so prevalent that the Maoists have recently opened their official Guerrilla Trek in order to “capitalize on the memory of the war,” according to Prachanda, Chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).1 Given that the trauma of war is all too real for the ordinary Nepali––who also doesn’t hire trekking agencies to go hiking—it is obvious that what Prachanda means is to “capitalize on Western fantasies of the war.”

One of the greatest fantasies propagated by the Maoists is that Jana Andolan II was not as important as the 1996–2006 Maoist People’s War in the overthrow of the Nepali Shah dynasty. Not to be outdone, the non-Maoist political parties propagate fictions in which Jana Andolan II was just as antiwar, and therefore anti-Maoist, as it was anti-monarchy. My goal is to help detail the dynamic between the people of Nepal—urbanites, villagers, political parties, armies, monarchies, classes, castes—and both their geographical and political neighbors, India and China, and the United Kingdom and the United States. Using historical documents, as well as conversations I had during the three months I lived in Nepal in 2008 and 2009, I will show why, without one another, neither the rural Maoist insurgency nor the urban Nepali People’s Movement would likely have overthrown the Nepali Shah Dynasty—the last Hindu monarchy in the world.


The Land

North of India’s Ganges River lies some of the world’s most fertile land. These plains (the Terai in Nepalese) are the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, and home to cities like Varanasi, considered to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.2 North of the Indo-Nepali Terai lie the Himalayas, disabling practically all human transportation to Tibet and China from South Asia.

Map of Nepal accessed in November 2012 from http://www.discoverasia.com.au.

The Himalayas have three distinct climates, which come in three colors—green, black and white. White Mountains, such as Mount Everest (Sagarmatha in Nepalese), are covered in a glacier system that provides fresh water to over 1.3 billion people from Kazakhstan to Vietnam and Beijing.3 The Black Mountains are low enough to be glacier-free, but are too high for vegetation. According to Krishna, my guide in Gorkha, three of the only things that can survive in the Black Mountains are a black fungus that lives on the rocks, yaks that live on the black fungus, and Sherpas that live off yak milk and meat, and boiled black fungus.

The Green Mountains, covered in subtropical forests, are verdant year round. On the entire Indian subcontinent, there is only one valley deep in the Green Mountains that is sizable enough to sustain a modern city; this is Kathmandu, with an area smaller than New York City. The Kathmandu Valley was an important outpost in the Sino-Indian silk and spice trade, and sits across the Himalayas from Lhasa, the holy city of Tibetan Buddhism. The Valley’s relative flatness makes it one of the few places in Nepal suitable for farming. Much of Kathmandu, however, still requires backbreaking human and animal labor to create the beautiful terraced farms that resemble staircases in profile, and crop circles from an alien’s eye view.

Picture accessed in November 2012 from http://www.photoanswers.co.uk.

Picture on right accessed in November 2012 http://www.nepembassy.org.uk.

Nepal’s entire Green Mountain range is dotted with villages that carve terrace farms into whatever mountainside they can. The Green Mountains are unsuitable for tractors, leaving farmers completely dependent on large mammals. Cows, however, are used almost exclusively for milk; South Asians are generally careful to not abuse the animals they consume. I heard, while in Kathmandu, that the Nepal’s Hindu Kings had outlawed using cows to plough farms in the Valley. Buffalo had taken over plowing duties, and were rarely used for milk.

Nepal’s shortage of valleys makes it impossible for urban sprawl to occur. Regular earthquakes thwart upward expansion. As a result, Nepal remains one of the least urban nations on the planet, behind only Bhutan and Timor-Leste in Asia.4 Nepal’s sparse roads and electricity leave the average Nepali with little access to the capital, Kathmandu. The difficulty of traveling to Kathmandu—a multi-day trip for many—and the inability to communicate directly with those in Kathmandu makes it impractical for Nepalis to hold their government accountable. These same conditions, however, also make it difficult for the state to control rural uprisings. Even as Nepal’s army modernizes—with airplanes and helicopters provided by India, Britain, and the United States—the most rudimentary guerilla force can stay alive in Nepal’s rugged, evergreen terrain as long as they enjoy a certain degree of support from the locals.5


The Shahs

Picture accessed in November 2012 from http://foxfromzim.wordpress.com.

Nepal’s social dynamic has been dominated for over a thousand years by the caste system. Castes (known in Hindi as jatis, and in the West as clans) are extended families living in segregated villages. The caste system mandates marriage within one’s caste, limited use of  water touched by people outside one’s caste, and strict hierarchies between castes, and between members of the same caste, regarding gender, age, and occupation. Warrior castes (known in Hindi as kshatriyas) battled one another for territory, levied taxes on the people in their territories, and subdued the occasional popular rebellion. Religious, and intellectual elites (known in Hindi as brahmins) dominated popular culture, monopolized literacy, and collected tithes. Most castes engaged in manual labor and paid the taxes and tithes.

Until 1768, the Kathmandu Valley was divided into three warring city-states.6 The Shahs—a warrior caste from Gorkha, a region one hundred miles west of Kathmandu—crossed Nepal’s Green Mountains, expanding their empire wherever they went. In 1768, the Shahs entered Kathmandu, conquering and uniting the three city-states under King Prithvi Narayan Shah. They made their capital in Kathmandu, but went on to conquer everything east to Darjeeling—now part of the Indian state of West Bengal—then moved south into the Terai.7

In 1792 the Shahs went north, crossing the White Mountains into Tibet, where they finally met their match. They were defeated by China, whose army drove the Shahs back across the Himalayas, but stopped short of invading Kathmandu. Rather than having their capital occupied, sacked, or burnt, the Shahs agreed to pay tribute to China.8 In 1814, the Shahs were again defeated, this time by the new imperial power in South Asia, the British. Like China’s, Britain’s military did not invade Kathmandu. The 1814 terms of peace with Britain define Nepal’s contemporary borders with India, leaving Nepal with very little of the Terai, forcing Nepal to depend almost completely on terrace farming in the Green Mountains.9 Nevertheless, Nepal remained independent of the British, who incorporated everything else in the region—besides Bhutan—into their Indian, Afghani, and Burmese colonies.

In 1846, the Shahs were deposed in a palace massacre by another Gurkhali warrior caste—their Prime Ministers, the Ranas.10 Like the shoguns of Japan, the Ranas kept the royal family alive and under house arrest in the palace, allowing each King to produce just one son, who was kept in uneducated ignorance.11 More importantly, the Rana coup shifted Nepal’s imperial alignment toward British India, ending Nepal’s tribute to China.12 For the next century, Nepal’s status was similar to the Indian princely states of Hyderabad and Kashmir. The Ranas allowed Nepalis to be recruited by the British. These Gurkha regiments were used in Britain’s regional wars and rebellions, like India’s Great Rebellion of 1857 (known by the British as the Sepoy Mutiny).13 Unlike Hyderabad and Kashmir, however, Nepal survived the independence and consolidation of India and Pakistan and is a twentyfirst century “sovereign” nation. After Indian independence in 1947, Nepal’s own antiBritish mass movement began.


Nepal, India and Satyagraha

Until 2006, power relations in Nepal were defined primarily by traditional rural warfare and palace intrigue. The urban populace, however, was not dormant. In 1578, a rebellion in Kathmandu convinced King Sadasiva Malla to abdicate the throne to his more popular brother, Sivasimha.14 In the early eighteenth century, urban outrage at King Mahendrasimha’s appointment of a Muslim Chief Minister led to the King cancelling his appointment, and to a communal massacre of Kathmandu’s Muslims.15 

In his History of Nepal, Shew Shunker Singh says of Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana: “His word is law, and his power seems unlimited.”16 Later, however, Singh admits:

as regards throwing open the country to Europeans, I believe that he himself would not be unwilling to do so; but the measure would be so unpopular among all grades of the inhabitants, that to attempt it might endanger his position, if not his life.17

Thus the less armed and more disorganized inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley, likely numbering fewer than 100,000 in 1847, may have been a major factor in Nepal retaining a degree of economic independence from Britain.18 The monarchy’s ability to mobilize 50,000 soldiers throughout Nepal, however, makes it seem unlikely that ordinary people in Kathmandu posed an existential threat to the Nepali state.19

In 1947, India gained independence from Britain. The dominant force in this struggle was the Indian  National Congress (INC), led by Mahatma Gandhi. The INC used satyagraha—nonviolent, mass  demonstrations organized and implemented with military-like discipline and hierarchy.20 With this tactic, the INC was able to confront the crumbling, war-weary British Empire while retaining the moral high ground in the eyes of the world.

After independence, India quickly helped form a Nepali Congress party, which struggled violently against the British-backed Rana regime. In 1950, King Tribhuvan Shah fled his Kathmandu palace for India.21 The Nepali Congress waged a rural war against the Ranas, with the help of Gurkha soldiers trained in India.22 A subservient Nepal, however, was more important to India than a mass, democratic movement. Prime Minister Mohan Shamsher Rana stepped down under an Indian-brokered peace deal that returned power to King Tribhuvan Shah, not to the Nepali Congress. The Shahs promised the Nepali Congress and the emerging Soviet-aligned Communist Party of Nepal that they would hold elections for a constituent assembly.23 Not only did they not fulfill his promise, the Shahs repaid their  Indian backers with a series of neo-liberal treaties that ensured total freedom of movement along the Indo-Nepali border. These treaties allowed unfettered Indian corporate access to Nepali markets, and unabated streams of Nepali migrant workers into India.24

The struggle for a constituent assembly during the 1950s primarily took the form of urban satyagraha. Women’s groups carried out satyagraha in 1951, after Tribhuvan Shah failed to nominate a single woman to his thirty-five member constitutional advisory assembly.25 In 1957, a Nepali Congress satyagraha ended with King Mahendra Shah calling for a popular election.26 Nepal’s first popularly elected parliament failed, however, to put together a constitution acceptable to the Shahs, who dissolved parliament in 1960, banned all political parties, and implemented their own constitution, Nepal’s first.27

There were no urban uprisings in response to the dissolution of parliament. There are two different explanations for this, both of which are partially true. One is that, with the political parties unable to publicly organize, there was nobody to lead satyagrahas. The other explanation is that the urban populace viewed the political parties as self-interested, and was unwilling to defend them in the streets. The timing of both Nepali People’s Movements—Jana Andolan I and II––suggest that most urbanites were not willing to sacrifice themselves for the political parties.

The Nepali Congress again resorted to traditional rural warfare against the monarchy.28 India again supported the Nepali Congress, this time by enforcing an economic blockade on Nepal. Given that the Shahs had been India’s chosen leaders a decade earlier, India’s support of the democratic aspirations of its neighbors is doubtful. India promptly ended the blockade after India was invaded by China and needed Nepal to stop the Chinese army from crossing the White Mountains.29

India’s duplicitous, self-serving involvement in Nepali affairs––in the 1960s, and later during the Maoist war, as well as during Jana Andolan II––can also be understood as an effort to simply destabilize Nepal, and to be on good terms with whichever side might win any internal conflict. In his book Harvest of Empire, Juan Gonzalez argues that the political and economic destabilization of Latin America—caused by United States wars of aggression—has been a boon to the United States economy. The resulting humanitarian crises have led to increasing numbers of immigrants and refugees, who make up much of the United States workforce.30 India has an abundance of migrant laborers from within its own borders to exploit, partially because of the Maoist (Naxalite) conflict that has raged through the Indian countryside for more than forty years. Nevertheless, anywhere between one and ten million Nepalis live legally and illegally in India, where they have practically no recourse in the case of abuse by their employers, due to the Nepali government’s subservience to India.31

India blockaded Nepal again in 1988. The Shahs had dared to assert their sovereignty over Nepal by renegotiating the trade and transit treaties with India, and by buying weapons from China.32 India responded by blockading thirteen of the fifteen Indo-Nepali border crossings for more than a year, causing a two-year recession in Nepal.33 The recession, in turn, became a major catalyst for Jana Andolan I, the first Nepali People’s Movement.

Jana Andolan I seems to have been the first time Kathmandu’s urban populace represented an existential threat to the Nepali state. By 1990, Kathmandu’s population had surpassed one million, whereas the monarchy’s army and police forces numbered only 35,000.34 From February to April 1990, the streets of Kathmandu were filled by Nepalis engaging in satyagraha, organized initially by the mainstream political parties—the Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist Leninist.35 Calling for the election of a new constituent assembly, the street demonstrations gradually gained popular support from broad sectors of Nepali civil society, including student organizations, the Nepal Engineers Association, the Nepal Medical Association, Nepal’s Bar Association, and the Teacher’s Association.36

The more radical factions of Jana Andolan I began calling for the complete removal of the monarchy and for state power to be given to a new constituent assembly. These more militant elements coalesced around two new communist parties: the Communist Party of Nepal (Masal) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Mashal).37 These parties developed a distinctly Nepali version of satyagraha—nighttime torch rallies.38 In a nation with little electricity, torches (masal or mashal in Nepalese) were ostensibly lit to illuminate the streets.

On April 6, 1990, an estimated 200,000 Nepalis took part in uprisings throughout Kathmandu.39 The government still refused to cede to the crowd’s demands. That night, torches were used to raze Kathmandu’s City Hall and the Nepali Ministry of Commerce.40 The mashal rally then marched toward the Shahs’ palace. Police fired on the demonstrators, killing dozens.41 The next morning, the Shahs reinstated the political parties and called for new elections and a constituent assembly.42 This combination of massacre and appeasement ended Jana Andolan I. The unfulfilled aspirations of Jana Andolan I, however, helped ignite Jana Andolan II, sixteen years later.

Picture of Nepali torch rally accessed in November 2012 from http://www.openthemagazine.com.

The Maoists

Upset with the lack of political progress made through parliament—where the reconstituted mashal parties held a mere 4 percent of the seats—a faction split off and resorted to guerilla warfare. They renamed themselves the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), joining a collective of Maoist parties known as the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM).43 The RIM’s Third World members—in Peru, Turkey, Iran, India, and the Philippines—were engaged in rural, guerilla wars at the time, and still are as of 2012. The RIM’s First World members—in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy—sell communist literature on college campuses and hold international Maoist conferences in Europe to encourage Maoist guerrilla wars in the Third World.44

One main difference between the Maoist war and the Nepali Congress’ two previous wars against the Shahs was that the Maoist guerrillas did not aim to immediately strike at Kathmandu. Following the model developed by Mao during the Chinese People’s War of 1927-49, the Nepali Maoists took over the Nepali countryside, creating a state-within-a-state at the village level. By 2006, most of rural Nepal was affiliated with the Maoists.

In the United States, one’s parents, family, and community have an obvious effect on one’s political  orientation. In urban South Asia, where illiteracy is the norm, this effect is magnified. As a result of widespread illiteracy, electoral ballots contain each party’s emblem. Most people vote according to these pictures.45 In the months surrounding elections, the city streets are filled with party flags; party graffiti decorates the city’s walls.

Picture of graffiti in Kolkata accessed in November 2012 from www.behance.net.

In South Asian villages, party affiliation is primarily caste-based. In general, an entire village associates with one political party. In peacetime, village elders and caste leaders decide party affiliation in typical patrician fashion, according to whichever party has done most for the village. During civil wars, villages are simply affiliated with the army that controls the territory. Caste-based politics stimulates little dialog between citizens and is certainly not driven by ideology. Even if one happened upon propaganda, could read it, and was swayed by the arguments, to espouse an opposing political belief would be anathema to the entire caste order. None of this is incredibly different from politics in the United States, where the average citizen can read, but seldom does, generally doesn’t read ideologically driven political pamphlets, and is generally ostracized to the degree that his or her political beliefs differ  from that of his or her community. The main difference between rural South Asia and urban United States is the ease with which citizens of the US can leave one community and adopt another one.

In 2008 and 2009, after the war was over and the Maoists were the dominant party in the post-monarchy parliament, I visited two Maoist-affiliated villages in Gorkha and Rolpa. In Rolpa, the Maoists had created a model village, with a commune, a model school, and their model hospital nearby. The goal of these model institutions was to plant the seeds of the non-oppressive social dynamics that were to flourish under a Maoist-controlled socialist state, en route to Mao’s final goal—a stateless, communist society with no oppressive social relations, no oppressive economic relations, and no oppressive ideas.

As a Westerner with no experience with the caste system, it was impossible for me to understand the caste dynamic at the commune. I was told that the commune had dalits (castes known widely throughout the West as “untouchables”). According to members of the commune, many Nepalis had been hesitant to visit the commune and experience their model way of life, due to perceived pollution of the commune’s water and other facilities by dalits. I was told that those who did visit the commune were often ostracized when they returned to their castes, having supposedly become contaminated. The commune’s immediate neighbors, however, allegedly began to accept the idea of inter-caste mingling after seeing it done day in and day out without negative consequences. Later, in Kathmandu, I spoke to the founder of a commune in Nepal’s east. He said that after a flood destroyed the commune, the neighbors believed this was because they had allowed dalits to live with them.

Having had limited experience in the Nepali countryside, it was difficult for me to gauge the changes in gender roles at the Maoist commune. One thing that I immediately noticed was the extreme deference toward men exhibited by the women of the commune. I was used to this by the time I reached the commune, but had expected something radically different, having read so much Maoist propaganda. The main difficulty at revolutionizing gender roles at the commune, however, was this: the Maoist commune was populated by widows and orphans of the war. It is impossible to act out new gender relations on a daily basis when all the men are dead. During my time at the commune I was often reminded of the words of one of America’s most popular poets, 2Pac, whose mother, Afeni Shakur, was a member of the American Maoist group, the Black Panther Party.

See, you wouldn’t ask why the rose that grew from the concrete had damaged 
petals. On the contrary, we would all celebrate its tenacity. We would all love 
its will to reach the sun. Well, we are the rose. This is the concrete. And these 
are my damaged petals. Don’t ask me why. Thank god. Ask me how.46

Picture accessed in November 2012 from http://archives.myrepublica.com.

My other trip was to a Maoist controlled village in Gorkha, home of the Shahs. As at Rolpa, there was also a noticeable shortage of men, many of who had left to find work in cities like Kathmandu, Bangalore, and Dubai. The men who were there, however, did little for themselves. The Gurkhali women did most of the farming and all the housework. I spent my nights drinking chai with the men, while the women made and served us dinner, refilled our teacups, and cleaned up after us. For the first few days, I served myself and did my own dishes. I offered to help cook, but was refused entry to the kitchen. This was likely due less to my maleness and more to my caste impurity—being outside the fold of the village’s caste. My efforts at challenging gender roles through domestic labor came to an end, however, when the 14-year-old girl of the house confronted me. She told me that it made her happy to serve me, and unhappy when I tried to do things for myself. This confrontation was upsetting in more ways than one, partially because it was one of the closest things to a feminist act I witnessed in the Nepali countryside.

I spent five days attending the local school, which was under Maoist control, but was not a Maoist model school. The teachers continued to use the Shahs’ textbook, having nothing else to educate their children with. The principal/health teacher/head of the local Maoist organization complained to me that their education was not practical. I sat in on a class where he taught his students the rules to American basketball. At one point he took me to the window and told me to look into the courtyard. I saw nothing remarkable, at which point he pointed out that there was no basketball hoop or basketball.

Rolpa’s Maoist “model textbook” certainly can’t be criticized for being irrelevant. One lesson for first- graders went like this:

By Baju river, there lived a group of farmers. Next to the river they had a road. They put bombs on the road. They waited in the Martyr’s Shade. When the police and the Royal Army arrived, the bomb blasted. Some collapsed while some fled. The farmers came down, took their guns and explosives. They gave it to the People’s Army. All were happy.

From Our Book: Grade 1, the Maoist model textbook in Thawang, Rolpa.

Friends To Play With

To write, I have a pencil and a notebook. To play with, I have friends. In the fields, we play together, and work together always. Magar, Gurung, indigenous Dalits, we all are friends. Nobody is higher or lower. We are all of one caste. And we all play together.

The text in the middle of the picture says, “Mao is a big leader for laborers. Mao is a big leader for farmers. Mao is a big leader of China. Mao is world’s big leader.”

Sunita’s Family

My name is Sunita.  
I am a student. 
I study in public school. 
I study in Class 1.

I am Sunita’s dad. 
I am Ba Jha Sa head. 
I work at Ba Jha Sa Number 1. 
My village’s name is Matel.

I am her mom. 
I am a tailor. 
I sew clothes.

I am her sister. 
I am People’s Liberation Army personnel. 
I fight for people’s freedom.


At first glance, the militarism and martyr-worship in the model textbook caught me off guard. I then remembered my elementary education included Revolutionary War and Civil War history. Upon further research, I found out that M.S. 51 William Alexander—my alma mater—was named after a martyr of the American Revolution.

The most revelatory experience I had in Nepal was in the seventh grade classroom at the Gurkhali school. The girls sat on one side of the room, the boys on the other. While gender segregation remains problematic, it deserves mentioning that the presence of girls in the schoolhouse was a very good sign. The seating arrangement in the classroom, however, was not separate but equal. The boys sat on benches, with larger benches in front of them, which they used as tables to read and write on. The girls also sat on benches, but with no larger benches in front of them. Instead, the girls read and wrote in their laps. I asked the teacher why the girls didn’t have desks. He laughed and said: “This isn’t a First World country. We don’t have enough desks for everyone.” I asked if the desk situation rotated every day. Seeing where I was going with this, he cut me off and said, “Don’t worry, everything’s equal.” When I pointed out that everything was blatantly not equal, he laughed again, saying, “Don’t worry, everything’s equal,” and escorted me out of the classroom.

During my last day at the school I was asked to fill out a survey. One question was: “What would you like to see done differently?” I wrote, “More attention paid to gender roles.” One of the village’s three female teachers was observing me. Upon seeing this, she snatched the paper off the desk and walked around the room, putting my answer under the noses of her male colleagues, saying, “See! See!” I wondered if she’d been saying this for the past decade, or if she’d started before the war. When she showed my answer to the principal, he came over to me, somewhat annoyed, and said: “Don’t worry, everything’s equal.”

I found it almost surreal that the male teachers seemed to genuinely believe that the girls and boys were treated equally. Even more surreal was their repetition of the same refrain: “everything’s equal.” It wasn’t until I was back in Kathmandu that I more fully understood my experience, thanks to Amrita Thapa Magar, a commander of a women’s battalion during the war and General Secretary of the Maoist feminist organization, the All Nepal Women’s Association (Revolutionary), when I interviewed her in 2008. (In 2012, she is a member of the Constituent Assembly.)

When I told her what I’d seen, Thapa Magar wasn’t surprised. She told me that when she joined the war her male comrades treated the female comrades poorly. The Maoist propaganda that all the soldiers were educated with had implanted an idea of equality in the men’s heads, but for the most part hadn’t affected their behavior. Instead, like many Western liberals, the men continued treating the women poorly, while claiming that everything was equal.

Things, however, according to Thapa Magar, did slowly improve as the years went on. Because the armies were segregated by sex, the men had to do everything for themselves, including tasks traditionally considered women’s work. Experiencing how much hard work cooking, cleaning, and other domestic tasks entailed gave the men greater respect for women. Likewise, the women had to do what was traditionally thought of as men’s work, which in this extreme case involved a life or death struggle with the Royal Army. The women proved themselves both on the front lines and in the generals’ headquarters. Because this approach to consciousness raising was largely limited to the army, Thapa Magar claimed that some of the most radical feminists in the world—in thought, feeling and action—were members of the Maoist People’s Liberation Army.

Picture accessed in November 2012 from www.mtholyoke.edu.

This is the most optimistic view of the Maoist People’s War that I am comfortable presenting. While in Kathmandu, I became good friends with Roshan Kissoon and Chandan Boju—both of whom had lived with the Maoist army for two years, teaching English to the commanders. They had a different take on the political and social awareness of the average Maoist soldier. They said that the women and men’s brigades seldom interacted. Their days were consumed by cooking and cleaning, their military training on top of that, and their literacy classes. Some of the few co-ed events the soldiers attended were  speeches by Prachanda—the Maoists leader—at which the men and women sat separately and generally didn’t communicate. Kissoon and Boju said that while the literature used to educate the soldiers certainly espoused anti-sexist, anti-caste ideology, overwhelmingly it was militaristic, hierarchal leader-worship towards Prachanda. Far from being ideologically driven, most soldiers simply wanted peace so that they could go home and start a traditional family. According to Boju and Kissoon, it was the Maoist leaders—mostly Brahmins educated in India—who were the most conscientious and intelligent, which is to say that they were generally about as politically advanced as any sloganeering, sectarian Western intellectual.

Undoubtedly, the Maoists were unsuccessful in developing model communities and model people. They did, however, fight one of the most successful rural guerilla wars of the twentieth century. From 1996–2001, the local police forces were unable to control the Maoists, who eventually established Maoist People’s Governments in over twenty districts.47 These People’s Governments assumed most of the core functions of the Shahs’ state, including collecting taxes, holding elections, conducting judicial arbitrations, conscripting an army, and undertaking public works projects with conscripted laborers and their children.48

King Birendra Shah, however, refused to mobilize the Royal Nepal Army. In 2001, he and most of the royal nuclear family were murdered. The official story—which lacks verifying evidence—is that Crown Prince Dipendra shot his father, mother, brothers, sister, some of the extended family, and then himself, less than a half hour after being too drunk to stand.49 King Birendra’s brother, Gyanendra Shah—who many Nepalis blame for the massacre—inherited the crown amid riots in Kathmandu.50

If Gyanendra Shah was truly behind the palace massacre, it was only his first in a series of violent, tactless, and culturally insensitive moves. Much to the delight of India and the United States, Gyanendra Shah mobilized the army against the Maoists.51 When this failed to diminish the Maoists’ influence, Gyanendra Shah dissolved parliament and declared a state of emergency, in which civil liberties were severely restricted and the Royal Nepal Army was deployed on the streets of Kathmandu.52 Having simultaneously attacked the Maoist state-within-a-state, and having disenfranchised every political party and every member of civil society, King Gyanendra Shah had set the stage for Jana Andolan II, one of only a few urban uprisings in history to succeed in overthrowing the state.


Occupy Kathmandu

Street demonstrations and clashes with the police began immediately after the emergency was declared, and continued on a daily basis for over a year.53 The non-Maoist political parties formed the Seven Party Alliance. Journalists, teachers, artists, and lawyers formed the Citizens Movement for Peace and Democracy, which discouraged party politics.54 Somewhat peaceful protests occurred during daylight. At night urban rebels battled the police with torches and stones. The uprising spread to every major city in Nepal. Demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people occurred in cities with populations in the tens of thousands, indicating that people in rural areas recognized the importance of taking over cities, and the Royal Nepal Army’s failure to prevent the people’s literal movement throughout the country.55 Solidarity demonstrations were held in New Delhi, London, and Tokyo.56

On April 6, 2006, the sixteenth anniversary of the massacre on the final day of Jana Andolan I, major parliamentary parties and the Maoists called for a four-day general strike (bandh in Nepalese).57 In Spring 2009, I got to witness two incredibly thorough bandhs in Kathmandu. Everything was shut down—international banks included—save for one or two restaurants to keep the tourists alive. On April 9, 2006, what was to be the bandh’s final day, the parties extended it indefinitely.58 On April 21, hundreds of thousands of dissidents took over most of Kathmandu.59 The Maoists began attacking police posts inside Kathmandu for the first time.60 On April 24, a 2-million person march past the King’s palace was announced—in a valley with a population of 1.5 million.61 Wisely, Gyanendra Shah restored parliament and abdicated the throne, thus ending the 238-year Shah dynasty.

Picture accessed in November 2012 from www.pjreview.info.
Jana Andolan II is perhaps the only revolution in history to end without an army restoring order, as was the case in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and Egypt’s Tahrir Square uprising in 2011. To this day, both the (no longer Royal) Nepal Army and the Maoist People’s Liberation Army are confined to their
barracks. The people of Kathmandu regularly demonstrate their control over the Valley with mashal rallies and bandhs, while castes in the Terai display their power by shutting down Nepal’s major east-west highway for days.

The geography of Nepal leaves it susceptible to economic domination by India, but has also enabled the Nepali people to enjoy a unique amount of freedom from military domination. With subtropical forests and the most mountainous land in the world, Nepal has become one of the only nations whose capital has not been invaded by foreign forces since 1768, when the Gurkhali Shahs first entered Kathmandu. The monarchy, however, was itself a foreign occupation for most Nepalis, the majority of whom do not speak Nepalese. The Shahs were Gurkhali, and based their state on the creation and maintenance of caste privilege, mandating all education be in Nepalese. One of the main reforms currently demanded by the Maoists is a federal restructuring of Nepal that would ensure education in the native tongues of all forty-plus major linguistic communities in Nepal.62

Almost no major political reforms have taken place since 2006, however, due to a lack of consensus by the Maoist and non-Maoist political parties, and meddling by India. The Maoists hold nearly forty percent of the seats in the Constituent Assembly, leaving them with too few seats to pass their own constitution, but enough seats to veto any non-Maoist constitution. The constant reshuffling of alliances has left Nepal with four ruling coalitions and five Prime Ministers in the last five years. When I was in Nepal, the United Marxists Leninists led parliament; Kathmandu experienced two planned four-hour blackouts every afternoon and night. Later, when the Maoists led parliament, India cut Nepal’s electricity supplies in half in an effort to undermine the Maoists’ popularity, leading to sixteen hours of
blackouts a day.

Two cables published by Wikileaks in 2010 helped to further uncover India’s disruptive influence in Nepali politics. One quotes India’s Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao warning a United States delegate against funding the Taliban in Afghanistan, based on how badly India’s funding of the Nepali Maoists had backfired—this coming from a government that was selling the monarchy most of its weapons.63 Another cable shows that India and the United States refused to sell ammunition to the Royal Nepal Army after March 2006, a fact that is certainly a major component in the relative lack of state repression during Jana Andolan II.64 If one shooting could have stopped the demonstrations, however, as happened during Jana Andolan I, this shortage of ammunition would not have been a problem for the Shahs. Furthermore, if Nepal had its own weapons factories, they would have been primary targets for Maoist attacks and worker takeovers, which could have exacerbated the situation for the Shahs.

The Maoists’ ability to overrun army barracks and air bases throughout Nepal and police posts in Kathmandu with their People’s Liberation Army suggests they too can take some credit for protecting the urban revolution from the kind of state repression happening in Syria now, and which occurred in Libya before NATO’s intervention. Maoist control of the countryside also ensured that villagers—who make up around eighty percent of Nepal’s population—could converge on the cities. The Maoists claim to have sent over 90,000 people to Kathmandu from nearby Kavre District alone. During the Egyptian revolution of 2011, the Mubarak regime’s virtual monopoly on violence in Egypt’s less densely populated areas stymied movement to and between cities. With more than forty percent of the Egyptian population urbanized this lack of mobility mattered less, and simply caused the Egyptian revolution to spread to cities other than Cairo.

As far as political parties were responsible for mobilizing people during Jana Andolan II, the Maoists were easily the most popular, as is indicated by their winning nearly twice as many seats as any other party during the 2008 elections. The disproportionately high  percentage of seats won by the Maoists in the Kathmandu Valley’s three districts suggests that they were not merely a force in rural warfare, but in urban civil society as well.65 These facts help falsify the claim made by the non-Maoist parties that Jana Andolan II was an antiwar, anti-Maoist movement.

The Maoists’ success highlights the importance of having a revolutionary army to match the government’s army. The Maoist efforts in the countryside during the war, as well as their current efforts in Kathmandu, however, highlight the dangers of a hierarchal, militaristic organization eventually becoming the very government that it is trying to get rid of. For all the Maoists’ accomplishments, their rural guerrilla war—one of the most successful in modern times—resulted in approximately 13,000 deaths and failed to capture a single city for more than a few hours. In less than a year the practically unarmed urban populace took over every Nepali city in a relatively bloodless revolution.

Nepal’s geographic, economic, and political climates stymied Nepal’s urbanization, but not the ability of Nepal’s urbanites to rebel. Distinctly urban forms of anti-state struggle flourished in Nepal not in spite of its lack of urbanization, but because of it. Nepal’s strong rural communities and hostile terrain allowed a semi-traditional rural army to conquer vast territories, weaken the monarchy, and the stage for Nepal’s flourishing civil society to enact Jana Andolan II, one of the greatest urban revolutions in world history.


Endnotes
                                                     
1 Mark Johanson, Forget Everest, Nepal Maoist Leader Unveils New ‘Guerrilla Trek’ (The International Business Times, 10/3/12). Accessed in November 2012 via http://www.ibtimes.com.
2 Purna Chandra Mukherji, A Report on a Tour of Exploration of the Antiquities of Kapilavastu, Tarai of Nepal During February and March, 1899 (New Delhi: Indological Book House, 1969) 8.
3 Nina Behrman, ed., The Waters of the Third Pole: Sources of Threat, Sources of Survival (London: University College London, 2010) 7.
4 Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, Reducing Disparities: Balanced Development of Urban and Rural Areas and Regions Within the Countries of Asia and the Pacific (New York: United Nations Publication, 2001) 58-60.
5 Navin Singh Khadka, “Present Arms,” in Nepali Times, Issue 175 (Kathmandu: Himalmedia Private Limited, December 2003). Accessed in November 2012 via http://www.nepalitimes.com.
6 John Whelpton, A History of Nepal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 35.
7 Perceval Landon, Nepal: Volume 1 (London: Constable and Co., 1928) 66-67.
8 James Talboys Wheeler, A Short History of India and the Frontier States of Afghanistan, Nipal, and Burma (London: Macmillan and Co., 1899) 466.
9 Shew Shunker Singh, History of Nepal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1877) 53.
10 Ibid., 57-58.
11 Ibid., 59.
12 Ibid., 61.
13 Lionel Caplan, “‘Bravest of the Brave’: Representations of ‘The Gurkha’ in British Military Writings,” in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 588.
14 Rishikesh Shaha, Ancient and Medieval Nepal (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001) 62.
15 Ibid., 67.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 68.
18 Amod Mani Dixit, Laura Dwelly-Samant, The Kathmandu Valley Earthquake Risk Management Action Plan (Kathmandu: National Society for Earthquake Technology-Nepal, 1999) 8.
19 Singh, History of Nepal, 48.
20 Anurag Gangal, The Gandhian Concept of Human Security and Peace: Quest for Amity Amidst Globalisation and Weapons of Mass Destruction (Jammu and Kashmir: University of Jammu) 11.
21 Leo E. Rose, Nepal: A Strategy for Survival (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) 91.
22 Asia Watch Committee (U.S.), Human Rights Violations in Nepal (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1989) 17.
23 Rose, Nepal: A Strategy for Survival, 193.
24 Treaty of Trade and Commerce Between the Government of India and Nepal, India-Nepal, July 31, 1950.
Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the Government of India and the Government of Nepal, 1950, India-Nepal, July 31, 1950.
25 Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1984) 459.
26 Siddhi Ranjitkar, “Remembering December 15, 1960,” in Kathmandu Metro, Issue 51. (December 2010) 17. Accessed in November 2012 via http://66.7.193.115/newspapers/issue51-2010.
27 Ranjitkar, 15-6.
28 Whelpton, A History of Nepal, 99.
29 Ibid.
30 Amy Goodman (Host) & Juan Gonzalez (Guest), Democracy Now: “Harvest of Empire”: New Book Exposes Latino History in America as Obama Campaigns for Latino Vote [Video file] (May 25, 2011). Accessed in November 2012 via http://www.democracynow.org.
31 Susan Thieme & Raju Bhattrai, “Addressing the Needs of Nepalese Migrant Workers in Nepal and in Delhi, India,” in Mountain Research and Development, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Bern: University of Bern, Centre for Development and Environment, 2005) 109.
Refugee Review Tribunal, RRT Research Response (Australia: Research Response Tribunal, 2006) 1-3.
The author worked for The Campaign for Human Rights and Social Transformation in 2009, a Kathmandu based, Maoist human rights organization that advocated for Nepali migrant workers in
other countries.
32 Surya Subedi, “Transit agreements between Nepal and India: A study in international law,” in Geopolitics and International Boundaries, 2:1. (London: Frank Cass and Co., 2007) 178, 185. doi: 10.1080/13629379708407583
33 Ibid., 188.
34 Dixit, The Kathmandu Valley Earthquake, 8.
Padjama Murthy, “Understanding Nepal Maoists’ Demands: Revisiting Events of 1990” in Strategic Analysis, Vol. 27, No. 1 (New Delhi: Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, 2003) 46.
35 Tone Bleie, “The Decade of Violent Destabilization in Nepal: An Analysis of its Historical Background and Trajectory,” Occasional Papers in Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 10 (Kathmandu: Central Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tribhuvan University, 2007) 68.
36 Krishna Bhattachan, “Development Issues Raised During the ‘People’s Movement’ of 1990,” in Occasional Papers in Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 4 (Kathmandu: Central Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tribhuvan University, 1994) 39-40.
Bishnu Raj Upreti, Maoists in Nepal: From Insurgency to Political Mainstream (New Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2008) 31.
37 Bhattachan, “Development Issues,” 37.
38 This knowledge was ascertained from the author’s interviews with Nepali Maoists in 2008-2009.
39 Whelpton, A History of Nepal, 115.
40 “Troops Kill Scores of Demonstrators in Nepal,” in Sarasota Herald-Tribune (Florida, April 7, 1990) 4a.
41 Whelpton, A History of Nepal, 115.
42 Ibid., 115-16.
43 Deepak Thapa, “Radicalism and the Emergence of the Maoists,” in Himalayan People’s War: Nepal’s Maoist Rebellion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) 36.
44 This knowledge was ascertained from the author’s associations with members of the Revolutionary
Communist Party USA in Chicago in 2006-2008.
45 Current Election: Rewrite the Constitution of Nepal (Nepal Vista). Accessed in November 2012 via
http://www.nepalvista.com.
46 Tupac Shakur, “Mama’s Just a Little Girl,” in Better Dayz (Amaru Entertainment, 2002).
47 Magunus Hatlebakk, CMI Working Paper: LSMS Data Quality in Maoist Influenced Areas of Nepal (Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute, 2007) 3-4.
48 Amnesty International, Nepal: A Spiraling Human Rights Crisis (London: Amnesty International, 2002) 6.
Yurendra Basnett, From Politicization of Grievances to Political Violence: An Analysis of the Maoist Movement in Nepal (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2009) 23. Information ascertained from the author’s interviews with Roshan Kissoon and Chandan Boju, who worked on the Martyr’s Road alongside conscripted laborers, including children.
49 Timeline: The Royal Nepal Massacre (ABC News, June 15, 2001). Accessed in November 2012 via http://abcnews.go.com.
50 Alex Spillius, “Kathmandu Under New Curfew As Riots Go On,” in The Telegraph (London, Telegraph Media Group Ltd, June 6, 2001). Accessed in February 2012 via www.telegraph.uk.
51 Kiyoko Ogura, Seeking State Power: The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (Berlin: Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, 2008) 18.
52 Ibid., 26.
53 Asian Centre for Human Rights, 100 Days of Tyranny (Janakpuri: Asian Centre for Human Rights, 2005) 14.
54 Reuters, Poets, Singers, Teachers Rally For Nepal Democracy (Red Orbit, August 5, 2005).
http://www.redorbit.com.
55 Over 300,000 Stage Peaceful Democracy Rally in Mid-West Nepal (Kathmandu, Annapurna Post, April 24, 2006).
56 International Transport Workers’ Federation, Unions Protest Suspension of Democracy in Nepal (Scoop Media, February 11, 2005). Accessed in November 2012 via http://www.scoop.co.nz.
57 Saubhagya Shah, Civil Society in Uncivil Places: Soft State and Regime Change in Nepal (Washington DC: East West Center, 2008) 21.
58 Ibid., 23-24.
59 Ibid., 16.
60 Pawan Acharya, “Maoist Attack Kills up to 11 Police in Nepal,” in Ohmy News International (Ohmy News, January 16, 2006). Accessed in February 2012 via http://english.ohmynews.com.
61 Shaha, Ancient and Medieval Nepal, 16-17.
62 Knowledge the author ascertained while working on the Campaign for Human Rights and Social
Transformation’s federalism campaign.
63 “US Embassy Cables: No Power Sharing With the Taliban, Holbrooke Pledges,” in The Guardian (London, Guardian News and Media Limited, December 2, 2010). Accessed in February 2012 via www.guardian.co.uk.
64 Indian, UK Envoys on State of Army, Talks Between Parties, Maoists (Wikileaks). Retrieved on February 27, 2012 from http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/03/06KATHMANDU689.html#.
65 Nepal Election Commission’s Report on Result of Constituent Assembly Election Held on April 2008 With a List of Elected Candidates (Nepal Vista). Accessed in February 2012 via http://www.nepalvista.com.