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Appeal
of the CPN(M) to the People
March
Along the Path of People's War!
This historic leaflet was distributed in hundreds
of thousands of copies all over the country at the time of the great
initiation of the People's War on 13 February 1996. Here it is reprinted
from The Worker, organ of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist),
June 1996. - AWTW
March Along the Path of People's War to Smash
the Reactionary State and Establish a New Democratic State!
Dear Masses of the People,
Today Nepalese society is in a state of grave
crisis, whether economically, politically, culturally or otherwise.
Where has the present state that has been harping about development
and construction for the last fifty years landed Nepal economically?
It has landed Nepal in the position of second poorest country in
the world after Ethiopia. This state that does not manufacture even
a needle in the name of a self-reliant and national economy has
handed over the whole economy of the country to a dozen families
of the foreign comprador and bureaucrat capitalists. Whereas this
handful of plunderers have become billionaires, the real masters
of this country and the national property, the toiling masses of
Nepal, are forced to eke out a meagre existence of deprivation and
poverty. The sons and daughters of Nepalese peasants and workers
reeling under unemployment and poverty are compelled to lead a miserable
life of dishonour and neglect in India and different parts of the
world to earn their daily bread. After piling a massive foreign
debt burden even on the future generations of the Nepalese people,
the feudal and comprador and bureaucrat capitalist rulers are making
merry on it. In the name of privatization and liberalization under
the guidance and for the benefit of the foreign capitalists, the
process of mortgaging the whole country to the comprador and bureaucrat
capitalists is now in full swing.
The burden of this economic degradation has
to be basically borne by the peasantry, which constitute ninety
percent of the population. That every new government formed under
this state structure pushes and will push the country economically
into a further state of bankruptcy has been historically verified.
To maintain hegemony of one religion (Hinduism),
language (Nepalese) and nationality (Khas), this state has for centuries
exercised discrimination, exploitation and oppression against other
religions, languages and nationalities and has conspired to fragment
the force of national unity that is vital for the proper development
and security of the country. On the contrary, it has been prostrating
itself before the foreign imperialists and expansionists and repeatedly
mortgaging Nepal's national honour and sovereignty to them. The
present state has been shamelessly permitting the foreign plunderers
to grab the natural water resources of Nepal and to trample upon
our motherland. If this process is allowed to continue in the future,
the patriotic, conscious and self-esteemed Nepalese have no doubt
that the very existence of Nepal will be in jeopardy.
The present state has declared war against
the development of the national culture of the Nepalese people by
flooding the country with corrupt, licentious and distorted imperialist
culture. The feudal and imperialist forces are doing their utmost
to replace the democratic cultural values and ideals with Freudian,
nihilist and anarchic values. This is a sequel to the conspiracy
of the reactionary classes to corrupt the people culturally and
preserve their own heaven of plunder. This corrupt cultural value
is no less responsible for the burgeoning of drug-trafficking, smuggling,
thievery, black marketeering, looting, murder and rape in the society
today.
Within this moribund state structure, a coalition
government of Panchas (royalists) and Nepali Congress, defamed
in Nepalese history for their anti-national and genocidal deeds,
is ruling right now. This government has forced not only the peasants
and workers of Nepal but also the people of different categories
and professions to live in a state of scarcity, injustice and terror.
Whereas this state has been treating women as second-class citizens
for a long time, now it has intensified rape, trafficking and the
process of commoditization through advertisements against them.
The whole educational system is tuned to produce slaves for this
state and there is rampant anarchy in it. Thus, be they workers,
peasants, women, teachers, students, small traders, lower-ranking
civil servants, doctors, professors, or people of different classes
including the national bourgeoisie, all are victims of this state
of feudals and comprador and bureaucrat capitalists. Except for
radical change in all spheres, any possibility of reform has now
become a mere chimera.
Reactionary ruling classes, forever swearing
by democracy, have been repeatedly using their guns against the
political activists or the ordinary masses who hold political beliefs
counter to the interests of the rulers. This state which regards
itself as the custodian of "democracy" has been surviving on the
blood of innumerable sons and daughters of mother Nepal, ranging
from infants to the aged, whenever the people have professed and
spoken in favour of nationalism, democracy and livelihood. Hundreds
of thousands of Nepalese people fighting for justice have been subjected
to inhuman physical torture, confinement in jails and mental torture.
Not only during the partyless panchayat (absolute monarchy)
period but even in the present monarchal parliamentary period, the
fascist genocidal and repressive acts have been on the increase
rather than decreasing. This is a bitter truth experienced by the
Nepalese people in their real life. This process has now developed
into an armed repression campaign against innocent people favouring
truth and justice. The recent armed operation and state terror let
loose in Western Nepal and different parts of the country has testified
beyond doubt that the ruling classes have openly embarked upon an
unjust war against the people. The heinous game of the reactionary
state of enroling the sons and daughters of the poor peasants and
workers into the police and the army as mercenaries and forcing
them to use arms against their own parents, brothers and sisters,
is now crystal clear. With the passage of time those in the police
and the army will also come to know the realities. There is no alternative
for the people other than to raise the banner of just war against
this unjust war.
How did we reach this stage of the critical
condition of nationalism, democracy and livelihood and a situation
of open warfare of the state against the people? What is clear on
the basis of historical and scientific materialism is that the seeds
of this state of affairs were sown in Nepalese history a long time
back. With the advent of the era of imperialism and proletarian
revolution, as in almost all the oppressed nations, in Nepal too,
a semi-feudal and semi-colonial socio-economic structure based on
the alliance of feudalism and imperialism was established. This
gave rise to a process of feudalism prostrating before imperialism
and imperialism plundering the masses while protecting feudalism.
In Nepal, this process was initiated in concrete form after the
conclusion of the Sugauli Treaty of 1815-16 with British India.
The inevitable consequence of this process was that it obstructed
the development of national capitalism and instead opened the path
to the development of bureaucrat capital in the interests of both
landlords and imperialism. This long historical period has in fact
been the period of the process of the birth, rise and demise of
the same bureaucrat capital.
In Nepalese society, the 104 year period of
Rana autocracy (between 1846-1950) existed under the same formation
as the later partyless panchayat autocracy (between 1960-1990),
and the current so-called monarchical multi-party system (since
1990) also continued and continues under the same dispensation.
As a result of the struggle of the Nepalese people against this
socio-economic structure, principally, and due to the changes in
the international political situation, secondarily, the names of
the system and the government have been changing, sometimes liberal
and at other times conservative, to make a redistribution of the
spoils of power. But the basic structure of the state has remained
unchanged. The political developments of 1951, 1960, 1979 and 1990
can only be understood in this way. Looking at history just since
1951, it is amply evident that an ever greater crisis for the country
and the people has been sprouting from within the womb of the petty
reforms carried out within the reactionary state.
The Nepalese people have been constantly struggling
against this state of affairs. In the process of such struggles,
the Nepalese people have been a victim of not only the repeated
repression and intrigues of the reactionaries but also of the betrayal
and treachery of the reformists. Today the biggest traitors of the
people have been those so-called communists, the revisionists, who
have gone after crumbs of reactionary state power by licking the
boots of feudalism and imperialism. The Nepalese people and Nepalese
history will never forgive those traitors who have sat on the chairs
of the reactionaries by betraying the people's faith in radical
change and the Communist Party and by stepping on the blood of thousands
of martyrs. Again if one talks of limiting oneself to the reformist
struggle within the reactionary state, that will be merely another
process of treachery. This has now been a historically verified
truth.
The other aspect which should not be forgotten
at this point is that the negative recurrence of the reactionary
repression and intrigue and reformist betrayal and treachery has
given rise to the positive conditions of enhancing the political
consciousness of the general masses of the people and of their attaining
the sole revolutionary ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism for their
liberation, amidst the people's class struggle and a long and intense
ideological struggle against such reformism. Today, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
Party guided by this all-powerful revolutionary ideology has developed
like a beautiful and blossoming flower, through the long struggle
of the labouring masses of Nepal, irrigated by the blood of thousands
of martyrs. Whereas all kinds of reactionaries and revisionists
are madly after it to nip it in the bud, the revolutionary masses
are taking care of its preservation and development.
Dear Masses of the People,
What is clear from the above historical and
current facts is that the present crisis-ridden condition of the
country is the result of the development of contradictions between
the exploitation and oppression of the people by the state power
of the feudals and comprador and bureaucrat capitalist classes,
on the one hand, and the relentless struggle carried out by the
people against it, on the other. To defend their moribund and crisis-ridden
reactionary state, feudalism and imperialism have openly imposed
an unjust war on the Nepalese people. If the Nepalese people cannot
raise the banner of a just people's war against this unjust war
and become victorious in it, the Nepalese people and the Nepalese
nation will be doomed to a prolonged darkness.
Conscious of one's duty towards this historical
necessity, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), the proletarian
party of the sons and daughters of the masses of the people, has
resolved to initiate the process of forcibly smashing this reactionary
state and establishing a New Democratic state. This resolve of ours
is based on the feeling of service and devotion toward the people,
on the commitment to the lofty ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism
to free humanity forever from the yoke of class exploitation, and
on the study of the history of Nepalese society in that light. We
are fully conscious that this war to break the shackles of thousands
of years of slavery and to establish a New Democratic state will
be quite uphill, full of twists and turns and of a protracted nature.
But this and this alone is the path of people's liberation and a
great and bright future. This path will unfold by making use of
all forms of struggle in keeping with the historical stage of development
of Nepal and principally, as we have been saying all along, according
to the strategy of encircling the city from the countryside, with
agrarian revolution as the axis and from the midst of and in conjunction
with the rural class struggle. This process of people's war in the
context of the present balance of forces will move forward through
the process of people's guerilla war within the stage of strategic
defence. We are confident that the masses of the people of all classes
and categories will extend active support and help to this revolutionary
process and that it will be victorious. Besides this, we are conscious
and confident that this struggle will win support and help from
the communist revolutionaries and struggling masses the world over,
and that this will in turn assist all those revolutionaries. Because
this struggle of ours will be part and parcel of the world proletarian
revolution undertaken with a view to ending exploitation and oppression
of man by man and to ending war itself forever. In this context
we would like to make special mention of the ongoing people's revolution
in Peru based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the Revolutionary Internationalist
Movement (RIM) and revolutionary movements the world over based
on the same.
Finally, we appeal to the workers, peasants,
women, students, teachers, intellectuals and the masses of the people
of all categories and trades to march along in the process of people's
war for establishing a people's New Democratic state and to extend
to it all forms of support and help.
It is Right to Rebel!
Long Live the People's War!
Down With the Reactionary State!
Long Live the New Democratic Revolution!
Glory to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!
With revolutionary greetings,
Central
Committee
Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)
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