Tourist brochures proclaim Nepal as a peaceful haven where there is communal harmony and (in subscript) none of the violence that racks different parts of the Subcontinent. But those who know better understand that such an idyll exists only in the mind. Peaceful societies often have bottled-up pressures waiting for release—ask Sri Lanka and Cambodia, two countries which, at one time, had an image somewhat akin to Nepal´s.
On 12 February, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) launched a "people´s war" with the goal of "overthrowing reactionary state power and establishing a new people´s state". In what was clearly a planned operation, cadres from one of the three factions of the CPN adhering to the Chinese Cultural Revolution ideology of the Revolutionary International Movement (RIM), started a terror campaign in the hills of west Nepal.
The opening salvo of the "people´s war" was fired four months back with action against political opponenets and some perceived feudals. This was subdued easily enough by the police in an operation code-named "Romeo". In February, the Maosists came back with a vengeance. There were a series of simultaneous attacks on police stations in the western districts of Rolpa and Rukum and in Sindhuli, southeast of Kathmandu. Masked activists chanting Maoist slogans moved about mountain villages, killing village heads, beating up of "class enemies", looting, and, in one instance, blowing up the house of a former minister.
The police retaliated with fury. Six peasant activists were killed in one encounter alone, which is a heart-stopping number in a country where political killings are relatively rare. This, by the way, is the same country where even accidental individual deaths have been exploited by the parties to bring down governments. Kathmandu´s blase attitude towards these deaths showed that the mainstream political parties want this problem "dealt with".