Add group to favorites
Back to post list
Send new message to group Search:
Post Subject:
Maoists win Nepal election
Maoists win Nepal election
Maoists win Nepal election
>>"Daniel Hannan writes in The Daily Telegraph:
Nepal’s Maoists are keen to tell anyone who’ll listen that they
will respect property rights and market principles. The
bourgeois-capitalist phase of Nepal’s development, one of them told me
this morning, will be a long one; but, he added, it’ll still be an
improvement on feudalism.
Even so, it’s not often that Maoists win elections. Final results
are still coming in, and some constituencies need to be re-polled, but it
is already clear that the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has confounded
all the pundits and trounced its rivals.
How did they do it? The answer is partly demographic. Two thirds of
Nepalese are under 35, and most of these have never voted before. They are
sick of the elderly high-caste gents who have run the system so far, and
want something different. Conservative and monarchist sympathisers have
done themselves few favours over the years. And the Maoists' majority may
have been artificially inflated: there are credible reports of
irregularities in the rural constituencies where the militias are
strongest. (Foreign election observers, who rarely like to stray too far
from five-star hotels, have none the less endorsed the poll.) Still,
irregularities or no, the Maoists plainly won colossal support.
It’s a funny thing: the other country which has experienced a major
Maoist insurgency in modern times is my native Peru. Visiting Nepal for
the first time, I am struck by the similarity of the people to indigenous
Peruvians. Their physiognomy is virtually identical, their music akin,
their temperament comparable. And something in their common character
evidently answers the essentially Millenarian call of rural Maoism.
Peruvian Indians, like Nepalese, are a contemplative, spiritual
people. Yet one day, without warning, they gave themselves over to a
decade of abominable violence, which stopped as suddenly as it had started
following the capture of the Shining Path leader. In Nepal, the end has
come through victory rather than defeat, but the appeal of the creed was
essentially the same: the promise of total transformation, of a new era,
of redemption through violence.
Is it, I wonder, a case of parallel evolution – two civilisations
evenly suited to high mountains – or did some offshoot of the Himalayan
peoples cross the Pacific in pre-Columbian times?
The population of Nepal is now almost 30,000,000, with a high growth rate.
Four-fifths are Hindus and only one-tenth are Buddhists. Racially, they are
a complicated mixture of East Asian (like the Tibetans) and Caucasian (like
Northwest Indians). In general, the higher the altitude, the more Tibetan
they tend to be. The East Asian-looking ones often don't like to venture
below 4,000 feet altitude, which is considered the malaria line.
My assumption has been that the recent successes of Maoism in Nepal aren't
driven by a new-found enthusiasm for backyard steel furnaces but are
instead a proxy for some identity politics struggle within Nepal such as
ethnicity. The Maoist uprising in Peru , for example, was more of a
flare-up of the ancient Inca vs. Spaniard struggle, just with a few white
intellectual leaders to provide it with a 20th century ideology.
But Nepal is a complicated place, so I don't know what's going on."<<
* isteve.blogspot . com /2008/04/maoists-win-nepal-election.html
--
Message posted using * w w w .talkaboutaudio . com /group/rec.audio.opinion/
More information at * w w w .talkaboutaudio . com /faq.html
Maoists win Nepal election
>>"Daniel Hannan writes in The Daily Telegraph:
Nepal’s Maoists are keen to tell anyone who’ll listen that they
will respect property rights and market principles. The
bourgeois-capitalist phase of Nepal’s development, one of them told me
this morning, will be a long one; but, he added, it’ll still be an
improvement on feudalism.
Even so, it’s not often that Maoists win elections. Final results
are still coming in, and some constituencies need to be re-polled, but it
is already clear that the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has confounded
all the pundits and trounced its rivals.
How did they do it? The answer is partly demographic. Two thirds of
Nepalese are under 35, and most of these have never voted before. They are
sick of the elderly high-caste gents who have run the system so far, and
want something different. Conservative and monarchist sympathisers have
done themselves few favours over the years. And the Maoists' majority may
have been artificially inflated: there are credible reports of
irregularities in the rural constituencies where the militias are
strongest. (Foreign election observers, who rarely like to stray too far
from five-star hotels, have none the less endorsed the poll.) Still,
irregularities or no, the Maoists plainly won colossal support.
It’s a funny thing: the other country which has experienced a major
Maoist insurgency in modern times is my native Peru. Visiting Nepal for
the first time, I am struck by the similarity of the people to indigenous
Peruvians. Their physiognomy is virtually identical, their music akin,
their temperament comparable. And something in their common character
evidently answers the essentially Millenarian call of rural Maoism.
Peruvian Indians, like Nepalese, are a contemplative, spiritual
people. Yet one day, without warning, they gave themselves over to a
decade of abominable violence, which stopped as suddenly as it had started
following the capture of the Shining Path leader. In Nepal, the end has
come through victory rather than defeat, but the appeal of the creed was
essentially the same: the promise of total transformation, of a new era,
of redemption through violence.
Is it, I wonder, a case of parallel evolution – two civilisations
evenly suited to high mountains – or did some offshoot of the Himalayan
peoples cross the Pacific in pre-Columbian times?
The population of Nepal is now almost 30,000,000, with a high growth rate.
Four-fifths are Hindus and only one-tenth are Buddhists. Racially, they are
a complicated mixture of East Asian (like the Tibetans) and Caucasian (like
Northwest Indians). In general, the higher the altitude, the more Tibetan
they tend to be. The East Asian-looking ones often don't like to venture
below 4,000 feet altitude, which is considered the malaria line.
My assumption has been that the recent successes of Maoism in Nepal aren't
driven by a new-found enthusiasm for backyard steel furnaces but are
instead a proxy for some identity politics struggle within Nepal such as
ethnicity. The Maoist uprising in Peru , for example, was more of a
flare-up of the ancient Inca vs. Spaniard struggle, just with a few white
intellectual leaders to provide it with a 20th century ideology.
But Nepal is a complicated place, so I don't know what's going on."<<
* isteve.blogspot . com /2008/04/maoists-win-nepal-election.html
--
Message posted using * w w w .talkaboutaudio . com /group/rec.audio.opinion/
More information at * w w w .talkaboutaudio . com /faq.html
