Since 13 February 1996, when the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) launched their ´People´s War´ in the districts of Rolpa and Rukum in the mid-western hills of Nepal, the insurgency has spread to nearly a third of the 75 administrative units of the country. Maoist violence has come as close as to districts adjoining the capital, Kathmandu. Statistics of lives lost during this period varies between about 200 and 2000. However, neither the Maoists nor the government has been able to achieve anything to justify such high casualties. The Maoists are led by two Brahmins Pushpa Kamal Dahal alias Comrade Prachanda and Baburam Bhattarai. Not much is known about Comrade Prachanda except for his background as a student activist during the late seventies when college campuses in Nepal bristled with foreign agents of all possible hues. But Bhattarai, an alumnus of the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, was a high-profile Kathmandu academician with plum consultancy assignments before he went underground three years ago. He has his family safely tucked away in England while he enunciates his interpretation of Maoist ideology through party-funded newspapers in the capital. For a while, he even had a home page on the internet from his underground hideout when such a facility was more of a rarity. These two gentlemen of priestly class have everything to gain and nothing to lose, not even their reputations, no matter who wins the People´s War.
The government does not appear worried. Contrary to claims, no sophisticated weapons have been recovered from the Maoists from anywhere in the country. The insurgents appear to command little support and even less respect in a society mired in religious orthodoxy and an ingrained fatalism. They also appear to be resource-starved, apparent from actions like looting the wages of workers from a rural road project. On the other hand, the government has almost total control over the carrots amnesty, incentives, offices, opportunities and wields a huge stick in the form of a relatively large police force. Just as the Maoist leadership wants to prolong the confrontation, the government too can afford to wait and test its resilience.
While each side waits for the other to blink, the real losers are the people caught in the crossfire. The secretary general of the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist Leninist), a minority partner in the government, has claimed that more than 300 people were killed in a recent police operation against Maoists. Development works have come to a standstill in the affected areas. Donor agencies have withdrawn projects, and embassies have issued advisories against travelling in these areas. Even the allocated budgets have remain unused as the local government units had not been formed until recently due to Maoist threats and government employees did all they could do to stay away from their postings in the affected districts.
The money set aside for a special development programme in these impoverished districts for the current fiscal year is a paltry NPR 80 million (USD 1.2 million). But even so, the institutional arrangements to utilise the money are yet to be worked out months after the announcement of the package. The hills continue to burn even as the fire of insurgency has begun to spread to the southern Tarai plains districts adjoining India.