Quiz: What is CCOMPOSA? Led by Nepal's Maobaadi, violent communism is picking up steam in South Asia even as it disappears from the rest of the world, and it is happening without help from Mao.
The gun battles over Siachen and Kargil, and the long-lasting identity-related conflicts of Kashmir and the Indian Northeast, have diverted attention from some of the long-lasting Maoist insurgencies in the heartland of India. Even the six-year-old 'People's War' in the midhills of Nepal has come to attention of the larger region only after the declaration of the state of emergency by the Nepali government in late 2001. There is today a north-south band of insurgency inspired by the ideology of class warfare that stretches from large parts of midhill-Nepal to the Dandakaranya region of India, which encompasses India's communist heartland in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra states.
The red rebellion is thus a growth phenomenon in South Asia, inspired by the inability of democratic institutions all over to deliver social and economic progress and attracting the under-educated rural youth with gun-wielding romanticism. Like the mighty leaders of SAARC, the leftist 'ultras' too seem to be tantalised by the thought of a South Asian coming together. Though it is not clear whether such cross-border or regional alliances can really work, under the initiation of the Nepali Maoists, the violence-espousing reds of South Asia have even set up a regional network called the Coordination Committee of Maoist Parties and Organisations of South Asia (CCOMPOSA).
Many of today's Maoist cadres would not even know of the Naxalite movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but they are inspired by the same model of rural overthrow of local feudals that was fashioned by Charu Mazumdar. Back then, Mao Zedong was the hero and the helmsman for Maoists everywhere, but today's Maoists have to survive with little 'external' support. China cannot be considered even remotely an ally at a time when the Beijing government has gone out of its way to assure Kathmandu's rulers that they have no truck with the Nepali Maobaadi. Perhaps it is this lack of support from any international quarter – and the possibility dwindles even further with George W. Bush's worldwide 'war on terrorism' – that the Maoists of South Asia have decided that there is at least some safety in banding together in CCOMPOSA.