There was a time when the rebellion of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) used to be compared to the predecessor insurgency of the Sendero Luminso (Shining Path) in Peru, and its leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal (Chairman 'Prachanda') to Abimael Guzman (Presidente 'Gonzalo'). But times have changed.
Guzman's 'outing' was when he was captured in a Lima safehouse in 1992 and publicly paraded about in a cage by then-President Alberto Fujimori. On 13 October this year, he was again sentenced to life in prison, following a year-long retrial. In the case of Dahal, on the other hand, on 16 June this year the home minister went to fetch him in a helicopter from a village redoubt in central Nepal, and brought him to Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala's residence in a flag-mounted vehicle. In a crowded and hastily organised conference under a naked light bulb, in the presence of the entire political leadership of Nepal, Dahal held forth for nearly an hour. It was an extemporaneous tour de force, a far cry from the rantings of Gonzalo from his Lima cage.
The 12-year rebellion in Peru started in 1980 and ultimately cost nearly 70,000 lives; the decade-long conflict in Nepal began in 1996 and notched up a little over 13,000 deaths. It was not until the Shining Path decided to stop killing campasinos in the altiplano and to take the war into Lima that the Peruvian state became particularly concerned. In the Nepali instance, the Maoists decided to pull back just before their spiral into anti-political mayhem began.
The turning point could be said to be the Maadi blast of 5 June 2005, in which a bomb blew up a crowded bus in the Maadi Valley of Chitwan District, killing 35 villagers. Nepal's active media and civil society were suddenly able to turn the mirror on the Maoists, and a process of introspection seems to have begun in an organisation that still retained a political core amidst the militarised cadre. The Maobaadi response turned out to be quite the opposite from the bloodletting that continued in Peru even after the massacre of 69 peasants in the Andean village of Lucanamarca in 1983