The feelings of the Communist Party of Nepal towards India fluctuate, though the tendency of Maoist leaders and literature to bracket India as an ally of the US makes it a natural enemy of the ‘revolutionaries’. It’s a strange relationship: India has been home to most Maoist leaders for the past 11 years of insurgency, and last November the Indian establishment brought the Maoists and the seven-party alliance together after the rebels pledged to join competitive parliamentary politics.

That saw the Maoists toning down their rabidly anti-Indian stance, so it was a surprise to hear Maoist supreme Prachanda proclaim, in an interview to BBC’s Nepali service, that he was in favour of the people of Kashmir being given the right to self-determination to resolve the problem. Prachanda also said the same right should be given to people in India’s north-east states.

New Delhi’s reactions aren’t yet known but the statements will certainly not go unnoticed, and Prachanda’s main interest also seems to be to generate some kind of reaction. But why did he choose to comment on something which Nepal has long considered an ‘internal matter’ of India?

One explanation is that Prachanda, faced with doubts over his party’s anti-imperialist and anti-feudal credentials after pursuing ‘politics of compromise’ with Indian assistance, felt the need to dispel the impression effectively. What could be a better way of doing things than what he did?

Prachanda’s statements came, no doubt, as justification of the CPN-M policy that Nepal should have about nine ethnic provinces with all of them enjoying the right to self-determination. Does this stretch to the right to secede? Not always, was what Prachanda hinted. In fact, West Bengal’s very anti-Maoist (Nepali) policy is dictated, of course, by the state’s history or behavior of intolerance towards naxalites in the early 70s. Large-scale presence of the Nepali Maoists there, especially after 2001, and their instigating the Nepali speaking hill people to assert the right to self-determination, gave fresh evidence to the state government to treat the Nepali Maoists almost at par with the Naxalites of the past. SitaramYechury’s encouraging the Nepali Maoists to join the political mainstream ostensibly in the hope that this could set an example for Indian Maoists to follow may not have full concurrence of the CPM Government in West Bengal. In fact, it would be for the CPM in general and Yechury in particular to react to what Prachanda has said.

... contd.