3 - Becoming Maoist in a Time of Insurgency

Summary

‘How did your son become a Maoist?’ I asked the father of one of the Maoist ex-combatants. Looking at me, the elder noted, ‘It was the times (jamana) that turned him into a Maoist.’ Not necessarily negating the agency of young people who joined the Maoist movement, the elder's comment pointed out the futility of discussing the ‘choices’ people make without referring to the conditions of possibility and historical times that make some choices more viable than others. As though reiterating the elder's point, one of the young people explained to me, ‘We had no option but to become a Maoist during the war. One could either join the People's Liberation Army, or live under the fear of sai-sena [police and the Royal Nepalese Army]’. So strong was the pressure to join the Maoists that, as the next chapter shows, some girls decided to get married in order to avoid Maoist recruitment, while many male youths fled abroad, joining the underpaid global workforce in the Gulf states. Starting their journeys at night, the soon-to-be migrants hid from Maoists cadres, who tried to ban outmigration from the base area, and attempted to pass discreetly through both the revolutionary and the police checkpoints. For those young people who stayed in Thabang, there was little other option but to support the Maoist movement, either by becoming a whole-timer or by being loosely affiliated to one of the multiple Maoist unions in the village, which were part of the Maoist economy of war.

A high proportion of young people and women within the Maoist movement—according to various estimates, women constituted up to 40 per cent of the guerrilla force—became one of the most popular themes in the international media and the international development discourse on Nepal's conflict. There has been a lot of emphasis on forced recruitment, on children having been ‘abducted’ from schools, on young people having been ‘brainwashed’ by the Maoists, and on child-soldiers having been systematically used by the Maoists (Human Rights Watch 2007; Watchlist 2005)—claims which I have shown elsewhere to be partial at best (Zharkevich 2009b). Whereas the international development community was concerned about children's rights, many people in Nepal were concerned about the social upheaval caused by the reversal of inter-generational power (see Lecomte-Tilouine 2009c).