In the early morning of April 24, 2006, the ring road in Kathmandu was filled with cold mist. The tea stall on the corner of the street just started to fire, but dense and rapid slogans came from the distance. Thousands of demonstrators surrounded the palace's main entrance, demanding an end to King Janandra's autocratic attempt. An old worker looked up at the palace flagpole and suddenly felt that the pole was shaking - he didn't know that Prachanda, who was hiding in the mountains at this moment, was paying attention to the city situation through the secret line, and a confluence that determined the fate of Nepal was approaching.
The lens is pushed back for twenty years. In 1986, 30-year-old Prachanda hurriedly rode his bike to another secret meeting after talking about crop diseases and pests in a dilapidated classroom in Chitwan. Under the caste system, he was a Brahmin, but he wore a patched khaki shirt. The old people in the village often say that the Brahmins are lucky, but when Prachanda stared at the rice fields of his poor neighbors, he only saw the shadow of exploitation. That year, the Nepal Communist Party once again blushed over the struggle for "whether to cooperate with bourgeois parties", and Prachanda simply pulled up the "torch majority" and pointed the way to Chairman Mao's people's war.
Semi-feudal and semi-colonial were the labels he put on Nepal. Mountains, river valleys, different languages and more than 110 dialects cut 30 million people into pieces. In the fragments, Brahmins and Kshatriya are above the top, and the untouchables can only carry luggage. To the bottom, the parliamentary speech is like the snow at the top of the Himalaya - visible, intangible. So Prachanda decided to move the center of the revolution into the dense forests of Roulpa County and write his own roadmap from there.
On the night of February 13, 1996, the mountain wind blew and made the torches crackle. There were less than one hundred and twenty guerrillas, only two old short guns. He raised the map and compared the terrain of Nepal with Chairman Mao’s thoughts in Jinggangshan. “Comrades, power comes from the barrel of a gun!” A low voice was heard. The dialogue was short, but it ignited all the enthusiasm of the young people present.
In just half a year, five thousand small-scale attacks broke out in Roulpa County, and the police posts became "weapon supply stations." The guerrillas established the "People's Government" with the help of seized rifles, tried to refine explosives, open schools, issue their own temporary currency, and distribute road strips at intersections. The outside world mocked that it was "the utopia of the mountain king", but the poor peasants had a court of speaking for the first time, so they took the initiative to keep watch and provide food for the team. The number of farmers and students quickly exceeded 10,000, and by 2000 it had affected half of Nepal.
The government began to "encircle and suppress". The US even allocated 20 million US dollars of military aid. In the dense forest of the plateau, M16 and Lee Enfield aimed at homemade earth guns; satellite positioning but could not find the command center, because Prachanda never camped in the same place for two nights, and each leader limited a dedicated line to only connect to one specific contact person. The enemy cannot catch the shadow, so they can only search the shells repeatedly in the valley.
In 2001, the Crown Prince of Nepal created a bloody palace crime and the royal family's credibility collapsed. Janandra then announced the dissolution of the parliament in an attempt to return to dictatorship. Only then does the anger of the city and the fire in the mountains truly converge. The Seven-Party Alliance sent a secret letter to the jungle, asking for joint opposition to the royal family. Prachanda held a meeting in the dense forest and proposed the Prachanda Road, which combines "gun, votes, and streets". Externally, he agreed to a ceasefire negotiation; internally, the guerrilla area still trains new recruits and is ready to start another war at any time.
In April 2006, a joint movement between the Seven-Party Alliance and Maoists pushed Kathmandu to a boiling point. The government tried to martial law, but found that the military and police did not dare to shoot at will because some soldiers' hometowns were already in the area controlled by the "People's Government". The king was forced to give up power. In November, the two sides officially signed a comprehensive peace agreement. The Ten Years War ended with about 15,000 casualties, but it also brought about the end of the monarchy.
In April 2008, the Constitutional Convention was elected, and the Communist Party of Neptune (Maoism) won the largest party seat. Prachanda entered the Prime Minister's Office, and there was a bronze statue of Chairman Mao on his desk, and a red scarf that had long been white on his neck - that was the only "private property" he left behind during the Rolpah period. Through the window, he could overlook the entire mountain city, but the new problem was higher than the mountains. The economy is backward, the faction is numerous, and the old bureaucratic system is intricate, and the ruling test papers are more difficult than jungle struggle. Two years later, he was in a stalemate with other political parties on military reform and resigned hastily.
For more than ten years since then, the Communist Party of Neptune (Maoism), the Communist Party of Neptune (United Marxism-Leninism) and many small left-wing parties have been continuously separated and merged. Maoists retreated from the helm to the "key minority", and Nepal politics fell into a long tug-of-war. Some people ridiculed Prachanda for "abandoning the revolution halfway", while others insisted that without that ten years of people's war, Nepal was still breathing in the shadow of the royal family.
Interestingly, the tactical class of the Nepal Military Academy still needs to study Mao Zedong's guerrilla warfare principle--mountain countries have no choice. Government documents also retain the provisions of land reform and caste equality, but the implementation speed is much lower than expected.
Prachanda admitted in his recent public speech that Nepal’s reforms are like a cable bridge across a cliff, “It is better to walk slowly than to fall.” The sentences are not inspiring, but in Roulpa, 300 kilometers away from the capital, you can still see the primary school built during the "People's Government". The earth walls are already mottled, but the blackboard contains bilingual spellings in English and Nepali.
Imagine if there was no team with only two broken guns back then, today's Rolpah might still be a collapsed corner on the map. Prachanda, a Brahman-born, used Chairman Mao's thoughts to copy a modern guerrilla war in the southern foothills of the Himalayas and caused cracks to appear in the barriers of the caste system. This crack may not be enough to push down the old wall immediately, but it is enough to let light penetrate.
Nepal's future is still under variables. The mountain wind will continue to blow through the forests of Rohlpa and through the parliamentary domes in Kathmandu. The "The road to the pass is as iron as iron" in Chairman Mao's poem was translated into Nepali by Prachanda and posted on the wall of his study; the next sentence "I am now taking a step back and forth" is still waiting for him and his colleagues to give real annotations.
