Posted by Harry Sims on August 6, 2011
The following came from Winter Has Its End site. We highly recommend this site to our readers.“But everyone in Nepal is political. They worry about politics more than they worry about their own bread. They fight all the time. I couldn’t ignore this.”
A member of Nepal's Young Communist League
From Monarchist to Maoist Revolutionary: It’s Right to Rebel
The following memories came from a young Maoist student, Abhik. Abhik rebelled against his father and his whole upbringing to rush off and join the Maoist revolution. This is his story.My story began where I grew up, in the Terai [the flat plains at the south of Nepal]. Ethnically, I’m not Madeshi. My family came down from mountains when my father inherited property there and became a landlord. He hated communists, would shout slurs condemning them, and would tell me I could never spend time with leftists.
But everyone in Nepal is political. They worry about politics more than they worry about their own bread. They fight all the time. I couldn’t ignore this.
My mother was from the UML [a status-quo party that once waged armed struggle before settling for a constitutional monarchy system], and she took part in the uprisings of 1990 [a widespread uprising of hundreds of thousands that forced the monarchy to implement a constitutional monarchy system with a parliament]. My uncles were also members of the UML, but now they have left the UML to join the Maoists.
When I was a young child, my mother would come and sing a song to me:
“The life you get,
You can’t have again,
Life after death… we don’t need,
We don’t need heaven,
Life under this sky is all we need.”
This song attacked many of the backward ideas in Nepali society. I still keep a recording of my mom singing it on my phone. But today my mom has changed… she supports the ousted king Gyanendrah. As things developed, it was hard for her to continue to be a communist in a country like Nepal.
After the Maoists formed and initiated the People’s War, my family hated them. My father was a landlord, after all. And even me, I hated when the Maoists would come and ask us to contribute money for the revolution.
I would follow the news, and every day learn that more and more Maoists were being killed. But at the same time, I would see that every day the Maoists were getting larger.
When I was only 13 years old, there were events happening in my village to celebrate the birthday and history of Mao Tse-tung. The students were marching through the marketplace at night, after they had bombed a police post. I wanted to see the program they were putting on but my father would not allow me to go.
I fought with him, and I shouted “They will do nothing to me!” My mother even spoke in support of me going, but then dropped it when she became afraid of my father.
I left my house anyway, and found a member of the People’s Liberation Army who was standing around in the village. He gave me directions on how to get there, and I ran off to go see it. When I got there, it changed everything for me. It was the most amazing program I have ever seen in my life.
Everyone from the village was dancing together in a circle, and the program was explaining the theories of Maoism. Why was the media so against these people? I couldn’t understand. Then, abruptly, everyone disappeared from the program all at once.
When I got home, my father was furious with me, but I still didn’t back down. I kept listening to radio reports, but now when I would hear them, I wouldn’t believe them anymore. Instead, I started getting books and studying communist ideology.
When I came to Kathmandu to study at the university, the Maoists were hard to find. They were here, but they were operating underground. I finally found them, and I joined the party.
My mother would insist that the Maoists would turn out like the UML did. I ignored her, but kept her songs in my mind. The Maoists would bring me illegal publications, and I studied these to finally understand what was happening.
These days, if I visit home, it is only to visit my mother. My father has learned that I have joined the Maoists, and he greets me with insults and anti-communist slurs. He doesn’t want me in his home.
My brothers and sisters would never go against my father, until now. They decided they would vote for the Maoists in the Constituent Assembly elections, against his demand. I grew up a monarchist because of my father, but now I’m with the Maoists.
