Communist Taliban
Upon reading Kanak Mani Dixit's article (June, "A tryst with Nepali destiny"), I was struck by the writer's optimism about 22 November elections for the Constituent Assembly. I wish I could share that optimism, particularly after the Maoist supremo Prachanda's recent interview, where he seemed to infer that the Maoists are not interested in an election they are likely to lose badly. It seems to me the Maoist strategy is now to disrupt the election, and attempt to take over state power through a putsch. The argument in the article as to why the Maoists want elections reminded me of B P Koirala's argument that if the monarchy goes, the king has nowhere to go. Since monarchy cannot survive without the support of the people, and the king has nowhere to go, the king will have to concede power, was B P's argument. It was predicated on the assumption that King Mahendra was as rational as B P himself; it turned out he was wrong.
Like B P, Dixit seems to have an underlying assumption that the Maoists have no choice but to join the mainstream. But Prachanda's pronouncements seem to suggest that the CPM (Maoist) suffers from the same ideological blindness that all fundamentalists do. He and his flock are convinced of the righteousness of their cause, and their method to usurp power.
In my view, they are merely a communist form of the Taliban: the opinion of the world and the survival of the country is not important to them.
Naresh Koirala
Vancouver
Caste manages sports
Thanks for your recent coverage on sport in the region, particularly S Anand's look at caste and sport (July, "Caste and the sporting status quo"). Indeed, only games like football and volleyball seem to 'belong' to reserved categories like Schedule Castes and Scheduled Tribes, a finding echoed in the report of the Thorat Committee earlier this year. The report quotes Dalit students saying that they have often been excluded from basketball and cricket. Interestingly, football and volleyball have never really attracted a mass appeal in India, including the attention of the media, while games such as cricket and tennis are elite sports that easily make headlines.