Nepal has entered a telescoped period of self-destruction in which a perfectly worthy country has been laid to ruin by power-hungry commissars with discredited ideology who have handed guns to the youth. This is class war without an identifiable class enemy. Arrayed against the Maoists are Nepal's political parties, the intelligentsia, kingship, the police, the media – and the army at the latest instance – all of whom have watched this national disintegration with singular selfishness. It is the Nepali on the hill terrace whose world is being eroded and destroyed.
If, apart from the killings on both sides, there is a single factor that has been constant about the 'People's War' launched by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), now in its seventh year, it is its unpredictability. Unpredictable not only in what the Maoist leadership is going to do next, but also in terms of how events are going to develop in the mainstream of Nepali politics.
Take the flip-flop sequence of events of the past year. In February 2001, the Maoists held their second national conference, which announced that 'the guiding thought" of their party would henceforth become "Marxism- Leninism-Maoism and Prachanda Path". Besides confirming General Secretary Prachanda to the new "highest post" of chairman, the meeting significantly left out the long-standing demand for a constituent assembly to draw up a new constitution for Nepal. This was taken as a softening in their stance, but even as the government was readying to respond, the Maoists went on a spree of attacks, killing scores of policemen.
The next surprise came after the 1 June slaughter of King Birendra and his family. The Maoists claimed the killings to be part of a larger conspiracy since, they said, the late king had been unwilling to use the army against them. Further, they asserted that "On some national questions we and King Birendra had similar thoughts" and that they had had "an undeclared working unity" with the late king. The Maoists tried to capitalise on the fluid situation created by the civic disturbances in the wake of the royal massacre by instigating the people, and the army, to rebel against the new monarch, Gyanendra, holding him responsible for the killings along with the then prime minister, Girija Prasad Koirala, and Indian and US intelligence agencies.