Terror in a Maoist model village, mid-western Nepal”. In Windows into a Revolution. Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal, A. Shah & J. Pettigrew eds., Social Science Press,

Terror in a Maoist Model Village, Mid-western Nepal 207

Deurali, a village in mid-western Nepal, was considered to be aMaoist bastion, and was declared a model village by theCommunist Party of Nepal (Maoist)1 in September 2005. It is

a village that I know well as I had resided there for several months in thelate 1980s, and visited it every year until 1996. This chapter is based onmy research during a two-week period in 2005 when I returned to thevillage after nine years, which corresponded to the intensification of thePeople’s War. I visited it again in 2006 and the situation had changedconsiderably between autumn 2005 and 2006. However, I have chosento reflect on what I observed in September 2005, in order to fuel ourlimited knowledge of the Maoist policy in the villages of western Nepal.I will focus on the climate of terror which characterized the locality atthat time.2

“Terreur” was defined by Montesquieu as the despotic government’s

TERROR IN A MAOISTMODEL VILLAGE,

MID-WESTERN NEPAL

MARIE LECOMTE-TILOUINE

1 Henceforth CPN (M).2 For a description of collectivisation and an analysis of the political changes

introduced by the Maoists in Deurali, see Lecomte-Tilouine (2010). For a detailedaccount of the People’s War by several villagers of Deurali interviewed in March 2009,see Lecomte-Tilouine forthcoming.

208 Windows into a Revolution

principle in 1748, and the term was later used to designate the regimeinitiated by Robespierre in 1793 after the French Revolution, as well asin the form of “white terror”, the royalist violent actions of 1795.

In the English-Nepali dictionary edited by P.S.J.B. Rana in 1936, theword “terror” is defined as atyanta krås or åtas, which can be translatedas “intense fear”. If I have chosen to describe the climate in Deurali as“terror”, it is precisely because this term, expressed as åtas, was used byan inhabitant of Deurali to qualify the Maoist action in his village. Hedid so in a particularly explicit manner, since at that time he was correctingmy use of the term æar, meaning fear. The villager’s subjective perceptionof the political situation in his locality finds echoes in the Nepaleseconception of some forms of politics as åta´ka.3 This notion whichfirst referred to fear, phobia and panic is now4 widely used to designatepolitical terror and/or terrorism. During the People’s War, åta´ka wasused by the authorities to qualify the revolutionary side only, while the

3 In discourses, åta!ka is often opposed to ånanda, happiness, peace of mind, delight.4 Åta!ka is not an entry in Turner’s Nepali-English dictionary published in 1931

and is not found as a definition of “terror” in Rana’s English–Nepali dictionary publishedin 1936, suggesting that its use in Nepali is posterior to the 1930s.

The fear to speak in Deurali (photo M. Lecomte-Tilouine, September 2006).


revolutionaries themselves not only described their enemies’ actions usingthis term but also their own, and thus distinguished between two formsof terror: the white one, and the red one. “White terror”, svet åta´ka,was often referred to by them with other apparently synonymousexpressions such as “royal military terror”, “fascist terror”, “state terror”,etc. In Maoist writings, it is mostly a question of this type of terror,which includes the accusation of terrorism directed at their party, theCPN (M), after September 11, 2001. As for “red terror”, writtenreferences to it by the Maoists ceased after September 11, 2001, whichcorresponded to their refusal to be classified as a terrorist group; but,prior to that event terror was commonly used during the first phase ofthe People’s War. Yet, while the Maoists officially distanced themselvesfrom the internationally reproved mode of operation known as“terrorism”, the feeling of terror within the population heightened after2001 with the declaration of the state of Emergency.

RED TERROR: A SYSTEM

A definition of the revolution by Engels, frequently quoted by theNepalese Maoists,5 states that red terror’s source of inspiration is whiteterror.6 However, if we follow the way things were presented by theNepalese Maoists, red terror was indeed viewed as a response to whiteterror, but of a quite different nature.

The first violent actions were indeed presented as a people’suncontrolled reaction to white terror. Thus a Maoist journalist describinga general strike, bandh, on April 6, 1998 as a “protest against state terror,genocide and repression” notes that two persons were killed and hundredsinjured. He comments on this result as follows: “In other words, contraryto the usual white terror, ripples of ‘red terror’ were felt …”7

5 It appears in the first two issues of The Worker: the first quotation is included inthe fundamental article announcing the programme of the People’s War: “Political Lineof the CPN (Unity Centre)”. The Worker, no. 1 February 1993; the second one appearsat the end of The Worker, no. 2, June 1996.

6 It reads as: “A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is theact whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means ofrifles …; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it mustmaintain this rule by means of terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries.” FrederickEngels, “On Authority”.

7 Anonymous. “Historic ‘Nepal Bandh’ on April 6”. (1998b).


Once the revolutionary movement became more organized, however,red terror differed from ordinary violence, and also from white terror, inits form, nature and effects. It was then no longer a reaction, but a politicaltool, which was presented by the chairman of the CPN (M) asinstrumental on various registers.

First of all, it was depicted by him as a means of provoking a kind of“open” white terror, in order to reveal the real nature of the state.

[W]hen the exploited and oppressed masses of the people hoist the revolutionaryflag against exploitation and atrocities in order to build their fortune bythemselves, then the exploiting ruling classes resort to state of terror and brutalkillings, throwing their own ‘democracy’, ‘constitutional state’ and ‘human rights’into the rubbish bin. The history of Nepal on the last three years has provedthis scientific truth. The proclamations of ‘parliamentary democracy’,‘constitutional state’ and ‘human rights’ have been converted into the mass-genocidal campaign of arresting and shooting down the starving people on thepretext of encounters.8

In the Maoist view, human rights and the parliamentary system representa mere façade used by the exploiting class to legitimize oppression. Facedwith violence, this collapses and reveals the real face of the social order.Simultaneously, red terror exposes the reactionaries as well as therevisionists among the Leftist political actors, and forces them to showtheir “true self ”, by falling in line with the government and consider thePeople’s War as terrorism.

[R]evisionists have become more terrorised by the ghost of the People’s Warthan even the old reactionaries.... They exposed their true self by lending theirvoice to the reactionary state and by trumpeting the charge of terrorism andextremism against the People’s War.9

Acts of terror are not only revelatory at a conceptual level, but also ata more down-to-earth one, for they drive away the reactionaries, who

8 The passage then reads as: “The real nature is manifested in the frantic dance oftorturing, looting and burning the shelters of thousands and lakhs of poor peasants,displayed in a series of brutal atrocities and gang rapes of labouring women, expressedin rampant arrests and opposing revolutionary conviction with torture by sword.”Prachanda (1999a).

9 The passage then reads as: “It is not only the leadership of UML that has degeneratedinto reaction, but also the new revisionist ringleaders who claim themselves as theupholders of ‘New Democracy’ and ‘Mao Thought’…” Prachanda (1998).


are chilled by them, and bring in those whose morale is boosted by them.

Some of the actions … have sent chills down the spine of the reactionaries andhighly boosted the morale of the labouring masses all over the country. …[M]ost of the local tyrants fled to the district headquarter and a large number ofpoor peasants were attracted towards the Party. In Rolpa district about a dozenlocal goons and six police informers were punished with amputation of theirlimbs, which spread a reign of terror among the reactionaries throughout thedistrict and adjoining districts.10

The benefit of red terror is thus immediate: driving away the enemieswho take refuge in urban areas, and bringing new recruits into therevolution.

In the Maoist view, the game of terror was in fact far from beingreciprocal, as white terror was seen as the final blow by a degeneratedclass and government, whereas red terror represented the outset of centralpower’s capture by the vivid forces of the nation: hence white terror’svictims were portrayed as red devils, whereas those who spread whiteterror were, by contrast, often said to be terrified: “The reality is thatbecause of the exercise of new people’s power through the medium ofPeople’s War, the feudal and imperialist forces are terrorized...” 11

10 The full passage reads as: “Within three weeks of the initiation and appeal, about5,000 actions had taken place in about 65 districts of the country. … Some of theactions … have sent chills down the spine of the reactionaries and highly boosted themorale of the labouring masses all over the country. One such case is that of DeepBahadur Singh, a former Assistant Minister and a notorious feudal tyrant of Jajarkotdistrict, whose house was raided by the peasant and youths … After this case most ofthe local tyrants fled to the district headquarter and a large number of poor peasantswere attracted towards the Party. In Rolpa district about a dozen local goons and sixpolice informers were punished with amputation.” “The Historic Initiation and After”.Anonymous. (1996).

11 Prachanda adds in the same text: “When the fascist Girija Prasad Koirala seatedon the Prime Minister’s chair after sucking the blood of hundreds of revolutionarywarriors and mass of people had arrogantly announced the Maoist movement to beunder control through a press conference, right the very next day the reactionaries andrevisionists met with a deadly blow from hundreds of successful actions in the form ofambushes, raids, sabotages and propaganda actions planned nationwide, as special bang.This successful blow responded to the state terror with red terror ... After a few days,demonstrating another model of skill of guerrilla warfare, guerrillas ambushed acontingent of police force which was out to terrorize the people at Jhelneta in Dang,forced to surrender and seized all rifles and bullets but granted amnesty to the policeforce after educating them.” (1999b)


The instrumentation of violence legitimizes it, and makes it cease tobe considered as violence.12 It then becomes a necessary political means,and as such it has to be organized.

In effect, in contrast with white terror, which was described as frantic,red terror was not meant to be an unorganised outburst, as ChairmanPrachanda made it clear: “It should be strictly expressed in both ourpolicy and practice that red terror does not mean anarchy.”13 Violencehas to be controlled, and unnecessary destruction should be avoided, headded, because “this raises the danger of increasing people’s grievancesagainst us and the enemy’s capitalization of it.”14 There was thus noquestion of ethics, but merely of the good usage of violence in terms ofstrategy. In the same way, the chairman of the CPN (M) advised that theliquidation of class enemies and spies be practised “in a selective way”and “by informing the masses and obtaining their consent as far aspossible”, while “a system of punishing and taxing the enemy should bedeveloped.” In this formulation, the revolutionaries punish or get rid ofthe “enemy” who are not a precise category of people such as reactionariesor feudalists, thereby revealing the warlike nature of red terror, as well asthe lack of determination of the category of people who were foughtagainst into which anyone could fall notwithstanding their social positionby his or her mere animosity towards the Maoist Movement. On theother hand, I will argue, the fact that no specific group of populationwas targeted, combined with the need to obtain the consent of the masses,minimized the construction of class enemies, and hence violence directedagainst civilians. Yet, the fact that Prachanda advocated the formation ofa punitive system, of which one principle was to obtain the consent ofthe masses, manifested in practices aiming to implicate people in theparty’s violent actions.

Observations of everyday life in the village of Deurali and conversationswith its inhabitants bring some elements to explore the mechanismswhereby people were forced to participate in the revolution as well as thestrategies they used for distancing themselves. It must first be said thatto describe daily life in a revolutionary context, such as Nepal, is

12 Y. Michaud (1978): 54.13 Prachanda. “On annihilation of Class Enemies and Spies”. (2003)14 The use of “increasing” suggests the existence of people’s grievances, though the

masses were usually said to be enthusiastic about the revolution.


necessarily partial if we consider the diversity of the viewpoints that onecan adopt and the variety of the situations that prevailed, even withinquite a homogeneous region such as the hilly part of western Nepal. Inorder to balance my description, I have tried to take into account, as faras possible, the local Maoist viewpoint, but space is lacking to addressthe variety of situations in the region studied and I will merely situateDeurali in a wider context. Among the various places of this region thatI have visited since the onset of the People’s War,15 all of them wereaffected by the revolution, but the only locality in a state of terror wasDeurali. Yet, it had not witnessed intense acts of violence by the Maoistor the government side, like the village of Harjung in Rolpa Districtwhere the Maoists set fire to a house, killing nine of its occupants16 orDhaku in Achham District where armed police shot at the crowd duringa meeting, killing seven villagers and two Maoist activists.17 Deurali wasjust experiencing a very oppressive situation, which prevailed elsewhere

15 I visited the following districts: Syangja, Gulmi, Pyuthan and Rolpa in 1996;Palpa in 1997; Makvanpur in 1999; Dailekh in 2000 and in 2003; Palpa, Syangja andGulmi in 2005; and, Syangja and Gulmi in 2006.

16 According to “Harjung Massacre: Let Us Ask, What was Their Crime?”: “Oneday Maobaadi painted their slogans on the wall of a public house. The police forced aneighty three year old woman Khirmati Pun to erase their wall paint. The Maoists nextday came and broke her hands and ribs blaming her for supporting reactionary police… Thus, the situation compelled villagers to reach a realisation of the urgent need ofself-defence. They formed a Village Defence Volunteer’s Committee headed by PustePun to safeguard their place from both of the extremism … Actually the Maoists werefurious with villagers for their stand against them as they denied to accept their reign.They decided to exterminate the villagers and an attack was set for the night of 2055/11/27 (second week of March, 1999). A large number with full of cruelty attackedHarjung hunting each and every house in search of village-leaders. After midnight theyapproached the house of Kamara Rokka. The members of Volunteers committee weresheltering in this house. The house was set under fire. Villagers were burned to death inthis massacre were—Pusta Bahadur Giri, age 65, Dhante Pun, age 60, Amrit BahadurGiri, age 55, Aaiman Pun, age 50, Man Bahadur Giri, age 42, Tirkhu Giri, age 35,Begum Bahadur Pun, age 33 and Chaite Pun, age 14. Gopal Giri burnt severely passedaway after 5 months. 83-year-old Mrs. Khirmati Pun seriously injured by Maoists alsoexpired after a few months … Shiva Shankar Pun, elected chairperson of the VDC andgrass-root leader of UML was kidnapped and kept under savage torture for seven monthsfor forming volunteers committee in the village.” www.gefont.org

17 According to the villagers of Dhaku, with whom I talked when visiting Achhamin October 2007. They say that following the massacre, 45 people joined the CPN(M). A report of the events can be read at www.humanrights.de


at the fringe of the base region, where Maoism came from ‘elsewhere’,and was forcibly introduced by outsiders.18

One of the first things that was explained to me in Deurali was thatthe villagers felt constrained in their freedom of speech and action dueto fright. It is the factors that create this “paralyzing fright”, whichresembles approbation, rather than the effective violence or the absenceof laws in the perpetration of violence, which characterized the state ofterror in this village. More generally, Maoist violence created frightthroughout the country because if it was indeed “selective” as advocatedby Prachanda, it had the peculiarity of being very cruel and thus moreterrorizing than what large-scale, but less painful, brutality might be.Terror was thus not only or principally spread by physical violence butby narratives about violence, and a culture of violence which was expressedin slogans painted on buildings, which, in some places, took the form ofthe setting up of dreadful mises en scène. Thus a picture taken by sometrekkers in a village near Lukla shows a wooden wall spotted with blood,and a bloody handkerchief placed on a bench. Above the bench a flyerreads: “May the great martyrs and central members of the party Ka.Bishal (Serman Kunwar) and Ka. Kumar (Mohan Chandra Gautam),and all the great martyrs be immortal. Death to the old regime. We willtake our revenge for the murder.” As the two persons referred to in themessage were killed in Siraha, the blood was probably not theirs and thecomposition was thus clearly a mise en scène addressed to the villagersand passers-by rather than a memorial. Many other places, such as Dulluin Dailekh District had been the object of visual (and verbal) violence in2003; all the buildings had been defaced by huge black or red sloganscovering entire walls, the temples and even the medieval steles. The oldroyal palace stood in ruins after its destruction by the Maoists at theheart of the locality. It created quite a sinister framework to live in.19

By contrast, in Deurali, very few visible signs of the Maoist presencewere noticeable in 2005. But the atomisation of society, thedecomposition of institutions, and the disappearance of the former socialnorms formed a disturbing social context in which the climate of terrorand the villagers’ claimed inertia developed.

18 On the particularity of these margins during the People’s War, see Lecomte-Tilouine: “Maoists despite themselves: through the People’s war in a Maoist Modelvillage, north-western Gulmi”, forthcoming.

19 On Dullu, see Lecomte-Tilouine (2008–2009).


If we accept that violence is identified as such by individuals, andmore so by the community, only when it goes against the social norms,then perceived violence is by definition a transgression.20 Apart fromabduction, financial extortion and forced labour, cases of physical violencewere apparently rare in Deurali, and terror arose there from the processof propagating transgressive values as the new norm. This cannot happenin a passive way and therefore requires not only everyone’s laissez-faire orconsent but also their participation. This dimension was clearly expressedby the Maoist system of appointing people to various positions withintheir organization, without consideration for their willingness to playthis role. This recalls, mutatis mutandis, the French Terror’s revolutionary“Loi des suspects”, which concerned, among others, “those not havingdone anything against liberty, have not done anything for it”.

TERROR IN DEURALI AND PEOPLE’S PARTICIPATION

IN THE REVOLUTION

The fact that the villagers of Deurali lived under a reign of “terror” wasnot denied by the Maoist woman in charge of the locality in 2005. Thesituation was described by her as a regrettable, but necessary, transitionbefore people got used to new customs and stopped suffering. As aMagarni native from Rolpa, she illustrated her point by taking the exampleof the village of Gam in Rolpa District, where she claimed peace nowreigned. Indeed, in the discussion we had had just prior to that aboutthe places I knew in Rolpa, I had told her that when I visited Gam in1995, women were complaining about the daily violence among villagers.I remember them telling me that no festival ended without menbrandishing their khukuri knives. The woman explained, “Now, we haveestablished peace there,21 people are happy, they eat in groups of twenty

20 This aspect is strikingly illustrated in the Nepal People’s War by the participationof women and children in the political and warlike spheres, which were up to thenoccupied by adult males only. This transgression is said to be particularly terrorizingand energizing: “The sudden outburst of the fury of women has given a qualitative leapto the development of the People’s War … A large number of children in the rural areasare now contributing substantially in the guerrilla war by way of collection and exchangeof information, etc … [T]hese little ‘red devils’ hold immense potentials for the futureof the revolutionary People’s War.” Anonymous (1998 a).

21 As remarked by Y. Michaud: “Terror produces all the appearances of calmness.”(1978): 101.


houses, they cook together, they work together, they like it. It will belike that at some stage here too,” and as proof, she invited me to visitRolpa and see for myself.

I did not have enough time to go and see if, as she claimed,collectivization had indeed brought peace and happiness in Rolpa, andshall thus restrict my observations to the “transitional stage” in the modelvillage of Deurali on the path of the Cultural Revolution.

Deurali was considered to be a Maoist bastion both by its neighboursand its inhabitants, as well as by the Maoists who selected it to play therole model on the northern fringe of a district which was otherwise notunder full Maoist control.22 This clustering was very striking and led toambivalent and contradictory feelings among villagers, and sometimesfrom the same person. Most commonly, the contrasted situation wasviewed as a form of injustice: “It is only here, down to the south they livein peace, ånanda” but there was also the idea that the Maoist presencemight be beneficial to the village in the future. Although it is one of theremotest and the poorest ones in the district, the villagers explained,“The Maobadis say that our village will become like the districtheadquarters (i.e. the small city of Tamghas).” They often compared itto this city, which was at the other extreme, the only clear seat ofgovernment power: a place where “the Maoists” could not openly enter,and where they themselves had difficulty in going, since they wereperceived as Maoist villagers.

The inhabitants of Deurali described the process which led to theestablishment of a People’s Government or janasakår in their village in2003. For several years, and especially after 2001, Maoists coming “fromthe west”, i.e. northern Pyuthan and north-eastern Rolpa, used to holdmeetings at Deurali at which at least one member from each householdwas required to attend. A few young educated men, grouped around alocal schoolteacher, were sympathetic to their movement. They helpedwith the appointment of the first janasakår. The major role played bythe schoolteachers and pupils led to transforming the school as the mostmanifest seat of political power. As in most villages in the hills, all theadministrative buildings had been destroyed in Deurali, and only the

22 On my return from Deurali, several persons from the district expressed surpriseat my description of Deurali, especially the restriction of religious activities and thefrequency of child abduction, which were not prevalent elsewhere.


school was left; it became a political meeting place, with the pupils asthe prime audience for the revolutionaries. During the meetings theywere seated in the front rows, and even asked to take part and deliverspeeches using the megaphone. Parallel to the empowering of the teenagerswas the disempowering of the elders, and the Maoist rule clearly tookthe form of a generational war. Thus during the ceremony to inaugurateDeurali as a model village (namuna gajasa), the respected elders, the so-called »hulo månche or “big men” who in the 1980s regularly discussedvillage affairs seated in a circle in the headman’s courtyard, despite thefact that the latter had officially lost his position several years before,were now scattered here and there among the crowd, at the back. Therelegation and dispersal of those who represented the “old regime”, purånosattå, manifested the fact that their authority was based on principlesthat had to be eliminated by the revolutionaries. They themselvesapparently withdrew from the political scene without being brutalized,as happened elsewhere. Indeed, most of them were “protected” by havingyounger relatives in the Maoist Party, and they were treated just as oldpersons whose opinions were “rotten”, as in the saying I heard severaltimes, “uhileko kurå kuhile”, i.e. things/discourses of the past are rotten.The family situation of some local political leaders from the Panchayatera was extremely complicated. One of them had a son whose father-in-law had been brutally killed by the Maoists in a nearby village and wastherefore living in the district headquarters with his wife as a refugee.Another of his sons was in the police, and for this reason the headmanhad to pay the Maoists an annual fine of ten thousand rupees. But twoof his daughters living in the village had husbands who were members ofthe CPN (M). Next to his house, the Maoist flag flew on the roof of hiselder daughter’s house. This type of situation was common and madethe construction of class enemies very complicated, which contributedto tempering violence.

The most important reform introduced by the Maoists in local politicallife was the systematic attribution of positions of power by appointmentand not by election or free will. I have no detail about who exactly decidedon the appointments, but when talking with some persons who hadbeen appointed, I realized that many of them were not particularlyinterested in politics or sympathetic to the CPN (M). They keptrepeating: åphno khu›ðle hoina, i.e., “It was not our wish,” and explainedthat once appointed, to refuse the position would make them susceptible


to being considered a class enemy. Class enemies were judged in thevillage itself by a People’s Tribunal, so the villagers said. Although, I didnot witness any during my stay, I was told that the Dalits were active intrying to have their neighbours judged for ostracizing them. However,the only serious case of a People’s Tribunal reported to me involved thatof a Dalit who was accused of immorality. He was sentenced to six monthsforced labour and required to carry stones for the school. This punishmentwas meted out just because he flirted with a married (and upper caste)woman.

Forced appointment to an official position was apparently a generalizedstrategy aimed at involving people in the Maoist organization. It wasreported in several places. Thus in Dullu in Dailekh District, westernNepal, where no one agreed to stand as a candidate in the district-wideelections organized by the CPN (M) to fill the position of the head ofthe People’s Government, a man was subsequently appointed against hiswill to the head of a ward and then killed by the armed forces.23 A diarywritten in English by a schoolteacher living in Khotang District “specialbase area” in eastern Nepal provides a clear outline of the pervasivedimension of the “Maoist appointment system” in this region and theanguish it created. Entitled, “The Ground Reality of Khotang District”and written in October 2005,24 a passage reads:

Now, the committee making programme is being highlighted. Farmers, teachers,government personals [personnel], students, each and every person has to beincluded their [there]. No one can escape from it. Perhaps our name [was] alsoselected respectively. One [once] the process of making the committee[completed] the related group i.e. teachers, students, farmers, etc. [are] calledin a certain safe place and are requested to stay in a certain position. If they areready it is O.K. If not they become very strict and anyone must stay [say?] whatthey want. And the name is written under the position like president, secretary,members, etc … If it is taken by the Royal Nepal Army, it kills us without asingle question, so we are the persons between two guns. Because of this fear the

23 On the subject, see for instance K. Nepal, “‘We Couldn’t Take It Anymore’,Dailekh’s Defiant Mothers Rise Up Against the Maoists.” Nepali Times, 223, 26November–2 December 2004. www.nepalitimes.com, Lecomte-Tilouine (2008–2009).

24 i.e. At the same period as my observations. Interestingly this diary was given to aforeign visitor at the time of his departure by a person who introduced himself as aMaoist during his stay. It is another example of the need to inform evoked at the end ofthis chapter.


young people are leaving the village nowadays. The persons like me here isalways full of fear and anxiety … Nowadays there is not a single person who isnot inside the Maoist union here.

Forced appointment supposed a context constraining enough to beuncircumventable. The case of Deurali displays a double impetus to theauthoritative setting up of the People’s Government, janasakår: a smallcore of sympathizers within the village on the one hand, and the existenceof a powerful and frightening organization, which supports them, butwhich location was not defined, on the other hand. In fact, once a climateof terror settled in a given place, a local core of sympathizers no longerseemed necessary for implementing other People’s Governments aroundit. They were then likely to be propagated by “capture”, kabjå. Thus, inone of the neighbouring villages of Deurali which I visited, people toldme that their locality had been captured in such a way by “Maoists fromDeurali”, who came with weapons, gathered the entire population andappointed some persons as members of the janasakår. In the same manner,the Red Army and the People’s Tribunal did not have to be present inorder to be effective.

In the village itself, physical violence was hard to document in 2005.Older people often expressed their anger towards those who have cometo power by calling them “those who beat”, pi»ne månche, while thisaspect was not mentioned by the younger people. Even the elders wouldelude any question asking to be more precise. Only one “informant” hadbeen killed by the Maoists in the next hamlet, “in a horrible way”, I wastold, but with no eyewitness. “They did not even return his body,”villagers told me. Thus the fear of punishment did not only stem fromdirect experience, but also from imagination, and was perhaps amplifiedbecause of this. Once when I was invited for dinner, my host who was aMaoist target for being the father of an army man explained: “We haveheld a council, and we were planning to revolt (against the Maoists). Butthere is no way, for if we say something, the Red Army will come and cutout our tongues.” This type of event never happened anywhere, but therepeated attacks on police posts and army camps had demonstrated theparty’s destructive capacity to the villagers who imagined that it mightbe used against them. Thus in the people’s imagination, the limits of theMaoists’ possible actions were boundless.

The fear of refusing a position was much greater than that of being alikely target for the security forces on accepting it, which has been reported


in other areas (such as Khotang, in the diary quoted above). Indeed, thedistrict headquarters is located at ten hours’ walk away from the village,and in 2005 the nearest army camp was six hours’ walk away south ofDeurali. And, except for one helicopter attack against a group of People’sLiberation Army25 fighters in 2003, during which “bombs fell inDeurali”, the army has rarely ventured into this area. Deurali was thusnot really in the situation which has so often been reported by the media,i.e., suffering both at the hands of government security forces and therevolutionaries.26

However, the villagers’ perception, as well as their rare experiencesoutside the village, was marked by this dual oppression. It concerned allvillagers equally. For instance, when Dor, a very respectable andconservative man from Deurali, went to the district headquarters, heforgot his Identity Documentation card. He told me how the policementhreatened to make him drink two litres of petrol. His daughter, whohad recently become overweight, recounted a similar experience on herway back from the city: “‘They (the policemen) made me walk very fast,I almost fainted.’ ‘Why?’, ‘Just like that (tyesai)’.” The opposition of thetwo conflicting political forces thus attributed everyone with a clear-cutpolitical colour and stamped the Maoist label on all villagers comingfrom a so-called Maoist village.

When talking to a member of the Maoist District Committee on avisit to Deurali, I raised the point that a people’s democracy cannot beimplemented by appointing people against their wishes. This cadreacknowledged it, but appointment was a necessary transition towardselections according to him. The future thus had a determining dimensionmotivating the idealist Maobadis in their present authoritative actionsand the hopeful villagers in their acceptance of it. In this context, hopejustified the unjustifiable, both for the revolutionaries and the people.

Interestingly, paralyzing fright was much more developed in Deurali,where almost no actual physical violence took place than in Dullu inwestern Nepal, though brutal killings have happened there. During mystay there in 2003, I was already struck by the fact that the villagersopenly denounced Maoist violence. They later organized a major

25 Henceforth PLA.26 Interestingly the role of the army and of the police became much more important

in the villagers’ narratives in March 2009, see Lecomte-Tilouine, forthcoming.


demonstration against it. The two situations suggest that the proximityof physical violence is not more constraining than induced participationin the violent organization.

WATCHING THE VICTIMS

Soon after my arrival in Deurali, I went to the forest for a walk where Imet an old acquaintance who was grazing her cattle. As soon as she sawme, she burst into tears: “They took my girl away two months ago, andI cry and cry all day long. In the morning I don’t feel like waking up. Iwant to flee, but no one will even buy my buffaloes.” My friend’s daughterwas among a group of seven schoolchildren from Deurali who had beenabducted two months earlier and had not returned. Among them wasanother girl whom I knew well and whose father was now a member ofthe janasakår, but who told me about this: “What can I do? The Maobadistook her away,” as if he was not part of their movement. During mytwo-week stay in 2005, three other teenagers were taken away by theMaoists and the abduction of children was clearly the most painful andfearful event for the population. They did not hesitate to send theirchildren to a distant location at an early age, without any guarantee ofwhat their fate there would be, or in marrying their daughters off asearly as possible to the few older males still living in the village.27 Yet, atthe same time, a small “cultural group” was stationed in the village forfive or six days during my stay. It was formed by three musicians playingthe harmonium and drums, and one dance teacher, all of them very

27 The teenagers, according to the local people, were susceptible to be taken awayfrom class seven on (they are then 13 years old or more) and were designated by theheadmaster, a native from the village who spent his youth in India and was said to beMaoist. Like most of the schoolteachers, he raised his fist during the meetings, but if Ican judge from my conversations with some of his colleagues, it was above all a matterof conformism. Other teachers who delivered revolutionary speeches at the meetings Iattended, came to tell me that their situation was hopeless, that they had to give aquarter of their salary to the party, and that they dreamed of finding a way to escapefrom their village. Nevertheless, all teachers were paid by the government, but thevillagers said that the headmaster could not go to the district headquarters, even to pickup the results of the national exams, because of his political engagement. Once married,girls are no longer abducted and one of the most striking consequences of this rule wasthe increasing frequency of early weddings arranged by their frightened parents. Thesame was not true for the boys, who were sent around the age of sixteen to the Terai orto India.


young. They were teaching revolutionary songs and dance to threeteenagers: they were three schoolchildren from elsewhere who had beenabducted to be trained by the party and brought there. Although thevillagers of Deurali knew that their own children were in the samesituation, no one tried to approach these youngsters, or to find out fromwhere and when they had been abducted. They were always accompaniedby the cultural team, none of whose members were from the village,which made access to these youngsters difficult. Gathered on the fieldabove the ex-headman’s courtyard where the training was taking place,people just watched in silence, as I did myself. After two days, we learnedthat the abducted teenagers had been brought to Deurali to perform adance during the ceremony to declare it a model village, which was totake place shortly. Like all the villagers, I attended this ceremony andnoted that the dance formed its climax, the only moment when all theschoolchildren who had gathered for the occasion stood up and stoppedchatting or reading their textbooks to watch. They watched with interestand pleasure the spectacle of three terrified teenagers offering a glimpseinto their possible fate. The fact that they related to the scene is not myown interpretation, as within the tightly-knit group of children whosurrounded me, one boy whispered: “‘Last year they came to our house,and took my elder brother. It was at night and they blindfolded him.’‘And then what?’ ‘He did not know where he went, but he came backone week later and my parents sent him to India the next morning’.”

This example displays some of the mechanisms used locally to ensurecollective participation in terror. Any child from the school was susceptibleto be abducted, from class seven onwards and even the children of thosewho represented the party, at the village level at least were not spared.Terror was maintained permanently by the principle of uncertainty: noone knew who was going to be abducted, when, where, for how long,what for, or to be sent where. It happened regularly enough to keep thefear permanently alive.

On the other hand, the village was host to such children abductedfrom elsewhere, and nothing in its inhabitants’ behaviour could leadthem to think that the latter disapproved of what was happening tothem. The most respectable courtyard was chosen for the training sessions,that of the headman, thus involving the traditional representative ofauthority and conferring some legality to the abduction. A crowd ofsilent watchers surrounded the place. No interaction took place.


What puzzled me when I learned that the abducted children hadbeen brought here for the performance was: why choose to show themduring the meeting and not dance teachers or other activists?

The setting of the inaugural meeting provided me with the answer.In the village where all religious festivals had been banned, the Maoistmeeting reminded me vividly of the sacrificial assembly during the Dasainfestival, the celebration of royal power, which had been forbidden by theMaoists. Both were staged at the same place, gathering the same multi-coloured crowd under their umbrella. The long revolutionary speecheswere comparable to the preliminary Brahmanic rituals in preparationfor the sacrifice. In the Maoist mise en scène, the abducted children’sdance occupied the space filled by the decapitation of the buffaloes inthe past. Both were accompanied by the same sudden intensity: music,attention, people standing around, moving nearer. The choice of “victims”to perform the dance reinforces this comparison. Whereas in the royalbloody sacrifice of Dasain, the sovereign’s expression of power wassymbolized by the sword and the execution of a human being’s substitute(an animal), in the dance of the abducted teenagers, the victims werereal human beings, but the expression of the power over them was asubstitute for death. Abduction indeed turns the subject into an objectthat one can manipulate according to one’s own will –with making themdance its clearest manifestation28—and it thus forms an expression ofsupreme power over a human being.

The two forms of collective sacrifice strikingly express the kind ofpower it celebrated: the animal victim belongs to a specific category ofnegative beings, and is thus born a victim. This is how, in Deurali, as inmost places in Nepal, all male buffaloes without exception used to endtheir days by being sacrificed during Dasain. Interestingly, the demonizedmale buffaloes were often presented as a social metaphor as they weresupposed to be the lower castes’ substitute in their opposition to purecastes. The existence of evil animals, born-to-be victims, linked toindividuals born impure and to serve others was part of the social normand hence not clearly identified as violence, but as fate.29 The new form

28 Let us recall that in Nepal itself, shamans used to make witches dance in public toreveal their identity before the custom became illegal in the code and that in seventeenth-century France, villagers revolted against the obligation to dance on certain occasions,which was imposed by some landlords; see M. Grinberg (2006).

29 In some localities, such as Dullu in western Nepal, impure castes used to cry


of ritual celebration of power was sacrificial in the way that it expressedthe same absolute power of the CPN (M) over the individual with thedifference that it applied to everyone, and was thus democratic ortotalitarian. The “victims” could be chosen from any family, at any time,for no apparent reason. Their selection was set up in a sort of ritual miseen scène evoking the void, by taking place at night, and using blindfolding.The victims then lose all their familiar bearings: not only their family,clan or village ties, but also their sense of orientation and more importantlythe control over their own destiny. Some were released a few days later,others months later, and a few never returned. They were turned intopuppets for the party, simply doing what they were told to do. Thispower over the individual was then orchestrated during meetings andformed their climax, the most exciting part in the eyes of villagers. Infact, the dance performed by the victims, and more generally childabduction, was not fully perceived as violence by the Maoist activists.They pointed out that children return “safe and sound”. Like sacrificingbuffaloes, training children seemed natural and could legitimately includesome trauma. Though the practice was extremely widespread, it was oftentreated without much concern by the Nepalese media too.30

THE VILLAGE’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Dispossession of the individual was expressed in several other spheres,such as the obligation to follow the party’s edicts, which was describedby the villagers as very time-consuming. “Meetings, and meetings, theyorganize meetings every day. We don’t have enough time to work. If youdon’t attend, then they send you to a meeting very far away, two days’walk from here.” More importantly, the festival calendar followed theparty and its history, which thus formed the temporal framework for

during the buffalo’s sacrifice, whereas pure castes rejoiced and laughed. Violence wasthus perceived in a stereotyped way, in a mise en scène of the social order.

30 In the French penal code, the abduction of an under-aged person is punishable bylife-term imprisonment. In Nepal by contrast, the seriousness of child abduction wasminimized. Instance in a Human Rights Watch’s report (http.hrw.org), which reads:“Govinda’s story, and accounts of similar kidnappings, are the stuff of many persistentrumors in Nepal.” It is surprising to call “rumours” thousands of direct testimonies—ncluding the few published in the report.


rejoicings and celebration instead of collective rituals, which were mainlybased on the agricultural calendar. The latter disappeared or becameclandestine. Rituals which included animal sacrifice were forbidden, andgiven that most of them included such sacrifices, collective religious lifeceased to be. Temples remained closed for the most important ritual ofthe year, Dasain, but some people celebrated it at home and I was toldthat an old man went to sacrifice his goat in front of the closed temple.No rituals or dances were allowed on the fifth day of Tij, the women’scollective festival, though it does not include sacrifices, because itcelebrates “polygamous Rishis (sages).” The Sraddha, rituals addressedto ancestors, were also forbidden, “because it is superstitious,” and evendeath rituals were limited to three days instead of the thirteen usuallyrequired. As a consequence, and also because several people in theneighbourhood had been killed in a violent manner, people had thefeeling that there were more dead spirits, Bhut, wandering around. Amongthem, fifteen PLA fighters said to be buried in a pasture near Deuralihave the specific form of soldier ghosts, Lahure Bhut.31 For this reason,and also because the night was associated with the displacement of theRed fighters, doors were locked at night and nocturnal visits to neighboursstopped. Isolation was thus not limited to the village in its relation to thesouth, but concerned every household, as evenings were a privilegedtime for socializing with neighbours. Forbidding ancestor worshipcontributed to social atomization as it loosened lineage solidarity whichis consolidated on these occasions.

The party’s draconian management of religion surprised me, since itwas not reported elsewhere at the time and it did not follow the officialparty line on this issue. I was thus curious to know who dictated all theserules and ensured that they were followed.

According to the villagers, they all emanated from the lady who wasin charge of the area, whom they called the “in-charge”, and the village’sjanasakår had almost no decisional role. She was a Maoist political activistfrom Rolpa sent there to control five localities, including Deurali, which

31 The nine persons who were killed by Armed Police at the primary school ofDhaku, Achham District, also turned into bad spirits. When I visited the place inOctober 2007, the villagers had organized a costly Brahmanic ceremony to pacify theirsouls which tormented the school children. A Brahman from the holy place of Vaijanathconducted it.


constituted an area. A number of new socio-religious rules concernedcaste-related practices: limiting sharing of food or banning entry to privatehouses became forbidden. It was said that in such cases a report to the“in-charge” was sufficient to alter people’s behaviour, since they werefrightened of being taken to the People’s Tribunal. In the villagers’discourses, the “in-charge” was described as omnipotent. Rather thanthe militia, who were elderly men appointed to this job, it was she whowent from house to house and made inquiries about reactionary practices.I was at a house when she came for this particular purpose; she asked alady whose husband had married a second time and had been in thearmy some years before:

“People say that your husband is in the army…”“No, no it was long before, he quit.”“Where is he now?” “See, he left me when my second daughter was just born, he does not

send us any money or any news.”“Bring him to us then.”“How can I bring him?”

The “in-charge” left, and the woman told me: “I don’t want them todo him any harm, I just want him back, but he cannot return even if hewants to.” In her mind, her husband would leave his second wife andreturn to her if the Maoists were not in the village. I wondered why the“in charge” came to enquire when I was there at the house of a lady whoin many respects supported the revolution. Suddenly seized by the samesuspicion as the other villagers, I wondered if the “in-charge” knew thatI was still in contact with this person, and was thus indirectly sendingme a signal.

Among village youngsters, matrimonial alliances between pure andimpure castes were encouraged and practised. Parents were forced tounconditionally accept the new in-laws and the party organized the(wedding) party.

Although I do not know how it happened so fast, or if it reallyhappened on that scale, but I was told that most of the artisan castes andthe Magar families now ate beef and that even the high castes did thesame. Locally, no one was forced to do this publicly as happened elsewhereand the few Magars who referred to this subject laughed when they said:“Look, I cooked cow in this pot,” and almost cried, explaining that given


their present situation, nothing mattered anyhow. In this most sacrilegioussphere, the principle of hope was again perceivable: “See, you don’t havea caste, you eat cow, now we are becoming like you,” was a frequentlyheard phrase, sometimes accompanied by the idea that economicimprovement will go hand in hand with such “westernization”.

A striking effect of institutionalized transgression was that it also madepeople transgressive towards each other. Thus the women of the housewhere I was staying, and who had no beer left for dinner, served largeglasses of beer to me and the previous headman of the village whom theyhad invited. Once the headman had left, being curious by nature, I askedthem where they actually got this beer. They confessed with a laugh thatit was from their Dalit Damai neighbours, but that the headman, whowas the last member of his clan to still secretly follow Hindu laws ofpurity, should not be told. These women apparently no longer caredabout his purity and his anger if this came to his knowledge. The samewomen, accompanied by others from the neighbourhood, showed theirtransgressive disposition on another occasion when they started to dancein an obscene way in their courtyard, in the middle of the day, just tomake me laugh. Normally this type of dance is restricted to a very specificoccasion, the wedding of a son, råtauli, and is performed at night withno male witness. They explained that as they were not allowed to dancefor Tij, they would now perform råtauli whenever it pleases them… Inthis completely new context, resistance was thus displayed throughderision, which was already the women’s way of criticizing male politicalaction and discourse in the 1980s. It was also displayed by dance, whichexpresses one’s freedom of action. The Dullu villagers also used dance asan act of resistance against the Maoists before organizing their famousmass protest. But it acquired a more important dimension there, for thesimple reason that dance is collective in far western Nepal, while it isusually individual or performed by a couple in the rest of the country.

In many ways, as the most frequently quoted example of dialecticsattributed to Chairman Prachanda says, the villagers of Deurali wereindeed “laughing while crying and crying while laughing,” although thequotation is usually cited to express the feelings of the Red soldiers atwar. The villagers’ ambivalent attitude was due to the impossibility ofopenly transgressing the new laws and their need to express their feelingof oppression. This situation was possible because they did not fear thelocal militia or the members of the janasakår who were in the same


position as them. Of course, anthropological observations are alwaysbiased by the foreign observer’s presence, and in this case, I clearly hadthe feeling that my presence provoked and made possible the expressionof grievance against the new values. Both were true because my presenceprobably guaranteed a kind of impunity and I was associated with theperiod of the ancient regime when I resided in Deurali. Thus, on myarrival, as is the custom, my “family” killed a goat. Several neighbourscame to join this welcome party, and sat down to a meal of meat andalcohol. Among them were some members of the janasakår, though atthe time I was not aware that they were. What struck me then was thatin the midst of the very tense atmosphere, as I perceived it, the former“big man” of the village who gave me my share of meat said loudly,“Take little sister, take your prasåd.” It was unusual how he insisted onthe word prasåd, meaning “sacrificial offering”, obviously so that theothers would hear him. I immediately understood that it was a form ofprovocation, though I did not yet know that animal sacrifices wereforbidden. As I started to enquire in a very diplomatic way about thechanges in the village, the same man started to recall the time when“even the little sister knew that eating buffalo was degrading.” In thepresence of the assembled men of the janasakår, he reminded me light-heartedly: “You remember when we went to the hamlet of Bukicaurtogether and visited those Magars who eat buffalo meat, you commentedthen, ‘So they are a little below you’.” Embarrassed, but also amused bythis role reversal (since I clearly remembered how he frequently madesure that I respected the local rules, especially towards the impure castes),I realized that I was now the sole representative of past social rules hecould refer to in his need to reiterate these rules publicly. Frequently, mypresence was also used to make insinuations at the Maoist activists. Thus,one evening when I was invited for a drink by a good friend of mine, ayoung man suddenly entered her house and immediately asked for beerand food. Then, seeing me in the dark corner of the room, he felt itnecessary to justify his presence (and manners?), by saying that he wasthe son of my hostess’ maternal aunt. I raised my eyebrows because Iknew that she had no maternal aunt, and he then corrected this byexplaining that to be more precise his mother was her mother’s ritualfriend, mit. I just said, you mean her såino, since the word for ritualfriendship between women is not the same as between men. My hostess


32 Hernos, sab thåhå cha.

then smiled, and addressed the youth saying: “You see, she knowseverything,”32 a sentence which provoked his swift departure, for it wasclearly a way of telling him “Don’t make a thing of it, she knows whoyou are.”

The new complicated communication strategy was, it must be said,often based on lies. The same question had to be put to at least three orfour different people to get some idea of the true situation, and not onlywith regard to politics like the first day when I tried to find out who thehead of the Village People’s Government was and received all types ofanswers until the head came to introduce himself to me but also on veryordinary issues as well. It was as if the revolution had entirely blurredcommunication, since at the opposite extreme, a complete stranger youmet on the path would directly address you with important informationsuch as: “Our village has just been captured by the Maoists of Deurali,”and then suddenly disappear. In Deurali itself it was only at night or inthe forest that people started to open up, to express their deepest anguishabout the two opposing dangers hanging over them. “One day, armyhelicopters will throw bombs over our village, because we have ajanasakår,” a Damai lady told me. Or as in this conversation with aMagar elder, who commented: “How will it end? One day ‘they’ willcome and take us all as their human shield. You know, ‘they’ don’t havebulletproof jackets…” He used the English terms, which I was notexpecting, and I asked him to explain. He went on: “I met people fromBaglung who were used as human shields. They place one person infront of each soldier to protect them, because they don’t have these jacketslike the army. Then these people are used to carry the corpses, becausethey kill their wounded friends, i.e. comrades.” He stopped for a while,and added a typical counter-balancing remark: “In the army, they shootthose who try to escape. It happened once in Wami (a nearby locality)…”Those excerpts provide a good illustration of the culture of terror thathad spread through Nepal in the form of anecdotes or second-handinformation. Of course, the foreigner was perhaps more likely to beassigned the role of listener than anyone else, for the splitting of societyinto comrades and enemies had as a consequence created a climate ofsuspicion. This is why one would hear of horrible stories from complete


strangers, whereas my best friends in the village would answer many ofmy queries with lies. People feared that their close relations would passon “reports” to the Maoists and denounce them as “informants” as mypresence was naturally suspect. At the same time, there was also anextremely strong need to inform the foreigner of the local situation, as Irealised when some of my friends took the risk of sending me clandestinepublications or even of recording Maoist commanders in secret. InDeurali, like in many other places I visited in western Nepal, villagerswere hoping to receive help from outside and complained that no onecame to report on what was going on. Indeed, apart from numerousMaoist activists, only two strangers visited Deurali during the wholeperiod of the People’s War: both of them were Mormon missionarieswho left some booklets, and then left the next day.

At the end of this brief description, one is tempted to ask how asingle person could manage five localities or a population of ten to fifteenthousand persons. We have seen that the “in-charge” had local relays inthe members of the janasakår and the militia, though she could not puttotal trust in those who had been forcibly appointed to their positions.Two other factors came across as being central. First, the “in-charge” wasnot from the area or even from the district she governed. Her externalityprotected her against traditional pressure groups formed by kinship orfriendship ties. Secondly, she was symbolically backed by a powerful andfrightening organization that she represented, and in fact received moresupport from the party than suggested by local discourses, which allsimply focussed on her. Thus, on my second day, I was led to the tea-shop where, I was told, a “big leader”, »hulo netå, was waiting for me. Iam still not quite sure if he was the head of the district or just a memberof the district committee, but his presence, as short as it was (he left thenext day), was a clear sign that the “in-charge” was not an isolated elementbut a part of a wider, hierarchical organization. In addition, many peoplecame and went. For villagers, Deurali became a kind of refuge for youngMaoist activists who wandered from house to house, eating freely hereand there, because, as they said, they cannot go back to their houses,being originally from villages not under Maoist control. During my stay,in addition to the cultural team which had come for the inauguralmeeting, I spoke to at least five of them and the villagers did not knowtheir exact occupation. In their interaction with the villagers thesestrangers would ask questions, while in the past it was usually the strangers


33 I had a similar experience when visiting Achham District in 2007 with a largecamera tripod on the top of my bag that people mistook for an automatic weapon andthought that I was a Maoist. I clearly felt their mixture of fear and excessive politenessuntil I said that it was just a tripod in every place I went through.

who were questioned.33 In addition to the loss of control over themselvesas individuals (who could be abducted or appointed anytime) and overtheir houses (where Maoist activists could enter, eat and sleep), thevillagers had also lost control over their political territory: they weremanaged by outsiders and had little knowledge of the administrativenetwork into which they were incorporated. Some believed they werepart of the Magarant Autonomous Region, while others denied it. Atthe same time, they permanently received snippets of information provingthe existence of a parallel “new government”, to employ an expressionused by the CPN (M), which officially governed them, but of whichthey had almost no knowledge and in which they were made toparticipate, in spite of themselves.

This combination of a maintained ignorance about the actors of theparallel government and its operating rules, forced participation in theapplication of transgressive rules, dispossession of one’s fate throughabduction and forced appointments as well as encouraging denunciationcreated a climate of terror. Those who dared to manifest (timidly) theirdiscontent were the less-exposed members of the community: the eldersand women who could not be enrolled in the PLA and whom it wouldhave been quite unpopular to punish. Collective action thus becameunthinkable and under the circumstances approbation was the only wayto avoid trouble. However, it was impossible to remain neutral forever asone would be one day or another appointed to a position within theMaoist organization, be it the People’s Government, the militia or aMaoist committee; appointment acted as a test to check people’s leaningsand played an important part in involving the population in therevolutionary movement. Deprived of any alternative structure, peopledid not resist but placed their hopes in the future, while the present wasconceived as a mere transition both by Maoist activists and villagers: atransition towards victory and the end of oppression for the former, atunnel towards the unknown for the latter. This came to an end with theApril 2006 Movement and the active participation of the Maoist Partyin its success. In autumn 2006, a third of the houses in Deurali were


flying the Maoist flag including the woman who had cried in the forest.Her abducted daughter had joined the CPN (M) and her mother wasquite happy.

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