…or perhaps not so paradoxical. For the conditions exist in the hills of Nepal for a Shining Path-like movement, equally sectarian and equally violent.
The London staff of the International Emergency Committee to Defend the Life of Abimael Guzman, the imprisoned leader of the Shining Path guerrillas of Peru, has been astounded by the volume of mail received from Nepal in support of him. From nowhere in the world has. such a large number of letters been sent by so many members of a national legislature, to say nothing of common citizens.
Why should a country on the tar end of the globe from Peru, known through the international press, travel brochures and anthropological monographs more for its medieval romance and mysticism than for militant political movements, suddenly gain notoriety through support for Comrade Gonzalo? He is a man who some in his own country have painted as a ruthless terrorist. Others, particularly the coalition of small Maoist parties known as the Revolutionary International Movement, regard Comrade Gonzalo as the new center of world revolutionary struggle, of Mao's "people's war".
Perhaps this support from a world away springs from ignorance of the less than complementary picture portrayed by the international press and western analysts of the Sendero Luminoso (the party's name in Spanish). Or does it derive from a naive romance of Nepal's intellectuals with the revolutionary tradition? Or could the affinity for Comrade Gonzalo's ideology have deeper underpinnings, based on similarity of certain underlying characteristics of Himalayan society with those of the Andean hinterland of Peru? If this were the case, could we then expect tendencies similarly violent to emerge in Nepal?