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If the idea of a Hindu god-king at war with a Maoist revolutionary seems like a time warp, that's because life in Nepal often is. When Gyanendra was born in 1947, the country was still a forbidden kingdom, closed to outsiders and ruled by feudal lords who toured their estates in Rolls-Royces. Nepal opened up to foreigners in 1951, but outside Kathmandu it remains a primitive land where many people live without electricity, telephones or roads. Even the cities feel out of step. Kathmandu's main tourist drag is called "Freak Street," a leading city newspaper is the Space Time Today, and the government uses a calendar by whose reckoning this is the year 2062. Politics is still a new experience—parties became legal only since 1990, and whole swaths of the country exist in an ungoverned vacuum. One Western diplomat says the war might seem "truly bizarre" and "historic," but adds: "Remember, much of the country is still in the Middle Ages."
Which explains why, to a boy growing up half a century ago in the dirt-poor eastern flatlands, the 19th century theories of Marx and Engels might have promised progression and modernity. Prachanda's 76-year-old father Muktiram Dahal says his son—then named Pushpa Kamal Dahal—was a "kind-hearted boy" spurred by injustice: "He really cared for the poor people in the village. He used to share his food with them and tell us we shouldn't exploit them." Prachanda—a nom de guerre meaning the "Fierce One"—says he grew up in a "peasant family," surrounded by deprivation. "From my childhood, I came to feel the meaning of poverty and inhuman exploitation." By the time he graduated from high school, he was a communist.
Prachanda was part of a national movement. But while revolution swept the world from China to Cuba, it missed Nepal. Then, after Gyanendra's brother King Birendra ceded power to an elected government in 1990, the Nepalis watched with further frustration as their new democracy was consumed by infighting, corruption and venal ambition. By last summer, the country had endured 14 governments in 14 years and the parties had split so many times that Prachanda's Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) was one of 40 left-wing groups, including 10 Communist Parties of Nepal. Meanwhile, the only evidence that democracy brought prosperity were the rows of ministerial residences and chauffeur-driven cars that were bestowed on politicians. By February 1996, Prachanda had had enough. Adopting Mao Zedong's 1938 maxim that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," he took to the hills.
At first, Prachanda commanded only a few hundred men, who were armed with axes, hoes and World War II rifles. In the ensuing conflict, casualties were light and the Maoists themselves accounted for two-thirds of all deaths. The outside world paid scant attention to these ahistorical curios. All that changed on Nov. 23, 2001, when the Maoists launched 48 simultaneous attacks on the police and army, killing hundreds. In the months that followed, the Maoists staged a series of massive assaults. Inspired by Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, they sought to wipe out all trace of previous authority by torturing and executing bureaucrats, teachers and doctors, assassinating public figures, and bombing schools, bridges, government offices and power stations. They skinned one Nepali Congress Party worker alive and decapitated their own fallen comrades rather than leave them identifiable.
The Maoists gradually extended their influence over rural Nepal, and they are now able to attack anywhere, even carrying out assassinations and bombings inside Kathmandu. While the Maoists portray themselves as saviors of the common folk, many people have fled from them in terror. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, 350,000-400,000 Nepalis have left for the cities, with Kathmandu now home to 60,000 fugitives. Washington reacted by adding the Maoists to its list of terrorist groups in 2003, and it began to train and equip the Nepalese army with help from India and Britain.
But the Maoists have proved to be formidable foes, and the possibility of a rebel takeover looms ever larger. The rebels have pasted posters across their territory, asking for donations for the "final push." And Prachanda warns: "We have already pushed the R.N.A. into a defensive position and confined them to the capital, district headquarters and their barracks. Our strategy for this last stage will be the fusion of some tactics of urban insurrection to the strategy of protracted People's War."
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