Nepal: Regional and caste disparities incite terrorism
Terrorism in the Nepali Context

-Hemlata Rai, Kathmandu

In Nepal, the underground Comunist party on Nepal (Maoist) was declared "terrorist" in November 2001. The origin of the Maoist party and the bloody war it has been waging has added further complication to the attempt of defining terrorism. The Maoists initially were fighting for social change, which had support from a large spectrum of the society. From a political party fighting for a political agenda, it turned into a violent group causing terror and disturbances among the general public. The recent five-day Nepal Bandh strike organised by the Maoist, for instance, affected everyday life and compelled shops to shut down without the Maoists having to be present physically.

In the Nepali context, confrontation and coercion are generally the outcome of interest-based conflicts with its roots in the unequal distribution of resources and competition over the limited resources, also social conflict based on archaic social practice and discrimination and identity-based conflict with historical, psychological and cultural roots.

A meticulous analysis of the conflicts in Nepal reveals an underlying continuity with overlapping and inter-linkages. For instance, the Maoist insurgency may fall on the category if interest-based conflict, but violence associated with it w3as triggered by unequal distribution of resources and opportunities, caused mostly by archaic social practices and discriminations that have historical, psychological and cultural roots.

The Government’s Role in Fanning Terrorism

Calling an insurgency movement with a political aim as "terrorists" itself plays a major psychological role in fanning terrorist activities. Such official declaration is tantamount to demonise the rebels and create a sharp divide between "us" and "them". Once the government uses tactics of reprisal it further heightens the sense of victimhood among the terrorists. Further, such acts of reprisal often victimize innocent people, thus diving even more people into the terrorist camp.

World experience shows that exercising suppression against an insurgency usually given way to a resurrection of terrorism, as explained by the concept of "memory of violence" in the conflict literature. Family members and successive generations of those who are suppressed by the state with the pretext of ending "terrorism", suffer a deep-rooted memory of violence, and are traumatized. Consequently, the next generation develops a feeling of "historical revanchism", where the members of the victim group may not have a personal reason to hate the enemy image but various myths associated with the past victimization might instigate them to take up arms. In the Philippines the communist led peasant uprising of the late 1940s was quelled in 1954 by the state. The memory of violence suffered by the peasants was so strong that the insurgency resurrected in 1971 in form of the New People’s Army, which still threatens the Manila government.

The Maoist insurgency also holds a potential to resurrect in the future in the form of an ethnic movement if the state exercises suppression to end the present revolt. The majority of the militia fighting from the Maoist side and those killed belong to various ethnic minority groups and suppressed castes. The memory of violence against their groups, might one day explode in form of another violent insurgency.

The Role of Economic Disparity

Economic disparity in poor countries where a handful of people control and enjoy the country’s economic resources amid dire poverty for the majority feeds domestic terrorism. The Human Need Theorists also support this argument. Human beings have some basic material (food, shelter, job), cultural (right to language, religion etc), and social (respect, dignity and freedom from fear) needs and if these needs are not fulfilled through established social norms people will become deviant and use socially unaccepted ways such as violence to attain their needs.

There are also strong empirical findings, both cross-sectional and longitudinal, which support the hypothesis that crime and violence have a strong correlation with the level of economic disparity.

Sweden and Japan are by far the most equal societies in the developed world and have the lowest rate of homicide. While the United States, which is the most unequal society in the developed world, also has the highest rate of homicide in the developed world.

A longitudinal study of homicide and income disparity in the United State reflects an intriguingly strong correlation between the two. According to John K. Galbraith, an American economist, a study conducted between 1920 and 1992 revealed that income inequality and homicide rate moved along the same direction. Income inequality and homicide rates increased sharply in the slump of 1920-1921 and remained historically high at those levels until the great crash of 1929, when they both jumped again, literally together and suddenly, to the highest level ever observed up to that time. These record levels of economic inequality were accompanied by endemic violence; both murder rates and wage inequality remained twice as high as they had previously been, until the economic leveling effects of Roosevelt’s New Deal. From 1944 to 1968 they both remained at low levels. Again in 1969 inequality began to rise, and continued to increase sharply for fifteen years. The homicide rates soon reached levels twice as high as they had been during the previous quarter of a century, i.e. Both inequality and homicide rates remained at those relatively high levels for the next quarter of a century from 1973 to 1997.

Since crime and violence are close allies of terrorism, in the absence of stringent studies on terrorism and inequality, we can generally assume that terrorism also rises with mounting income inequality.

In the Nepali context, besides the economic disparities, glaring uneven distribution of opportunities and unequal access to natural resources can trigger violence. The official data show that in the last decade the predominance of the advantaged upper caste Hindu Bahun and Chhetri in the bureaucracy was intensified from 69 percent before the restoration of democracy to almost 88 percent, while Nepal’s political minorities like Janjatis, Dalits and Madheshis are left behind.

Instead of attempts to narrow these social and economic disparities, the government tried to suppress the Maoist insurgency with an iron hand. The infamous Kilo Sierra II operation of the police to curb the insurgency in the most Maoist affected areas in the western hill districts triggered even more violence and resistance against the establishment.

Religion and Terrorism

As long as religion remains an issue of faith, it cannot be a source of or inspiration for terrorism because all religions, without exceptions, at the fundamental level foster harmony and encourage the followers to respect the dignity of all human beings. Christianity’s belief in forgiving the enemy, Buddhist teaching of compassion, Hinduism belief in unity of all souls, and Islamic teachings for mercy and compassion are the cases in point.

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