CPN (Maoist)

[For more coverage of the struggle in Nepal, please click HERE.]

Story and photos by Jed Brandt

May 3, 2010 -- jedbrandt.net -- From here in Kathmandu the monarchy ruled this diverse mountain nation for 200 years. This is where the national elite live, with its political parties, banks and walled compounds. But the streets now belong to the people, and it is this "people's power" movement that they fear.

Kathmandu is chaotic on a normal day, but for May 1 the Maoists mobilised at least 500,000 people to the steets with both discipline and revelry. The Janandolan III, or popular uprising, they promised is here.

The Kalinki gathering

We positioned ourselves by one of the 18 gathering points for the May 1 events. Each of the gathered marches then moved through the streets to Martyrs' Field in the Kathmandu city centre.

Photo by Jed Brandt.

By Jed Brandt, Kathmandu

May 1, 2010 -- Late into the night, after a long May 1 in Kathmandu: I just left the Radisson Hotel where negotiations had been going on. Dr Baburam Bhattarai, a top leader of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and its negotiating team, came out the doors to say that the three negotiating parties have not reached an agreement. The general strike is on.

Others in attendance at the negotiations included the Congress party and the [pro-capitalist] Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist Leninist). The hated, isolated current prime minister M.K. Nepal will not resign.

Bhattarai was sharp and direct. Since they will not make way for a national unity government, the agitation will increase tomorrow with a national general strike to topple the unpopular and unelected government.

A city filled for May 1 and for struggle

The May 1 rally today was well over 500,000.

By Jed Brandt, Kathmandu

April 21, 2010 — JedBrandt.net — There are moments when Kathmandu does not feel like a city on the edge of revolution. People go about all the normal business of life. Venders sell vegetables, nail clippers and bootleg Bollywood films from the dirt, cramping the already crowded streets. Uniformed kids tumble out of schools with neat ties in the hot weather. Municipal police loiter at the intersections while traffic ignores them, their armed counterparts patrol in platoons through the city with wood-stocked rifles and dust masks as they have for years. New slogans are painted over the old, almost all in Maoist red. Daily blackouts and dry-season water shortages are normal for Nepal’s primitive infrastructure, not the sign of crisis. Revolutions don’t happen outside of life, like an asteroid from space – but from right up the middle, out of the people themselves.

On May 28, 2008, an elected constituent assembly declared Nepal’s centuries-old semi-feudal monarchy finished. As Nepalese people celebrated in the streets, the Himalayan country was declared a republic.

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The Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of the United States-based Marxist journal Monthly Review.

By Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation

May 14, 2009 -- The Partido Lakas ng Masa of the Philippines has attempted to follow the developments in Nepal over the recent period. We welcomed the ouster of the monarchy achieved by the people’s struggle and the mass movement, the unity of the main left forces, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist Leninist), and the elections which gave the left control of the government. We welcomed as a victory for the left and progressive movement worldwide the election of a left government led by the UCPN (M), along with the CPN (UML).

We therefore consider the forced resignation of this government as a result of the refusal of the pro-elite Nepalese military hierarchy and the president, backed by the country’s elite, to follow the directives of a democratically elected government carrying out the platform that it was elected upon, as detrimental to the people’s interest and only serving the interests of the Nepalese elite.