What is a Maoist rebellion and how many countries have them?

Don’t Panic ... Your War Questions Answered

By the time you read this, Nepal’s King Gyanendra may have been overthrown.

“Oh, no,” you’re thinking. “Gyanendra’s family, the Shah dynasty, has ruled all or part of that small Himalayan kingdom for the better part of five centuries. What sort of government will replace it?”

Well, it’s possible that Nepal could become a parliamentary democracy.

Democracy-lust is one of the main reasons for the current anti-monarchy protests. Nepal had a parliament and prime minister for 15 years, until 2005. That’s when Gyanendra suspended the parliament and prime minister and declared a state of emergency.

But if Gyanendra and Co. take an extended vacation, there’s no guarantee that parliamentary democracy will replace them. In fact, it’s entirely likely that Nepal will be taken over by Maoists.

You read that correctly. Nepal could very well be controlled by Maoists, as in Mao Zedong, as in Little Red Book, as in “Hey, 1976 called. It wants its failed political philosophies back.”

Since 1996, a Maoist insurgency has raged throughout Nepal. There are somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 active Maoist rebels in Nepal, and they control the bulk of Nepal outside the cities. Battles between the Maoists and forces loyal to Nepal’s monarchy have left more than 10,000 Nepalese dead.

Nepal’s Maoists were part of the mass movement that pressured Nepal’s then-King Birendra to allow the formation of a parliament and prime minister-ship in 1990. But they quit that movement and went all rebellion-style after becoming frustrated with the parliamentary movement’s inability to get anything done for the rural poor.

That bit about rural poor — that’s at the heart of what makes a communist movement Maoist instead of Marxist-Leninist. The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 at the height of Europe’s Industrial Revolution, was authored by two Germans, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The book is about a worker takeover of industrial production. Its setting is urban. And the book has the famous final sentence, “Working men of all countries, unite.”

Maoism is a retooling of communist philosophy for a rural setting. It emphasizes rural development and the improvement of peasants’ lives rather than the lives of factory workers. (“Subsistence farmers of the all countries, unite.”)

Maoism grew out of practical political need. China in the 1930s (the era of Mao’s rise to power) was predominantly rural.

Nepal’s Maoists not only are able to tap into the economic resentment felt by poor, rural Nepalese, but also the class resentment they feel. Nepalese society has an oppressive caste system, and Nepal’s lower castes resent feeling like lesser citizens.

Nepal isn’t the only country with a Maoist rebel movement. Nepal’s southern neighbor, India, is home to a widespread and armed Maoist rebellion movement known as Naxalites.

The Naxalite movement takes its name from the city Naxalbari, the town in northeastern India where the rebellion started 38 years ago. Indian police estimate that 20,000 Naxalites are active in India, in a swath of territory stretching from Nepal in the north to India’s southern tip.

Like their fellow Maoists in Nepal, the Naxalites thrive by exploiting rural economic and class resentment. India’s urban economy is booming, but its rural economy is not. The more that rural Indians feel left behind, the more resentment there is to tap into. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently called the Naxalite movement the greatest threat to India’s internal security since the country’s independence.

Maoism isn’t just an Asian thing. There were violent Maoist movements in this here hemisphere through the 1980s. Sendero Luminoso (in English: Shining Path) tried to force a rural communist takeover of Peru. The movement fizzled in the 1990s after the capture of its leader, but not until thousands of Peruvians were killed in the crossfire.

Something important to remember: Don’t confuse the legitimacy of the Maoists’ stated grievances with the legitimacy or goodness of their movements. Yes, Nepal is poor and undemocratic. Yes, rural Indians get shortchanged. But these movements are about power, not about helping people. Nepal’s Maoists kill indiscriminately. Their victims are by and large the rural people they claim to want to help. And both Nepal’s and India’s Maoists recruit children as soldiers.

None of that should surprise you. After all, both groups did pick the most prolific non-mustached mass murderer of the 20th century as their philosophical godfather.