In 1974, the group known as the Nepal Communist Party (NCP) adopted the Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought ideology. It boycotted the 1980 referendum called by the king to decide whether the country should return to an elected government. In 1978, Normal Lama was elected Secretary-General of the NCP, but by 1983 a controversy had developed between him and the majority of the party leadership. He was expelled from the NCP, which took the name Nepal Communist Party (Nashal). The next year that party joined the new Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, formed by parties and groups that preached orthodox Maoism and support for the Gang of Four.
In 1986 a new split developed within the NCP (Nashal) between factions headed by the Central Organizing Committee (COC) and the Central Committee (CC), again over issues of Maoist doctrine. By 1991, the CC group joined with a part of the COC faction, the followers of Normal Lama, and a faction called the Proletarian Labor Organization, to form the Nepal Communist Party (Unity Center), which also joined the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.
Meanwhile, what their opponents called the “revisionist” groups among the Nepalese Communists joined to form the United Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), which became one of the country’s principal political parties, rivaling the Nepal Congress Party. In 1994, it won the general election and formed the government.
In that same year the Unity Center group held a congress at which it expelled Normal Lama, and gave itself a new name, Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (CPN [M]). It claimed, “This was not just a name change, but represented the culmination of a long struggle to unite the Party around a correct Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line.”[843]
The CPN (M) was much influenced by the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso Maoist party, with which it had become associated in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.[844] In October 1990, copying an action of Sendero Luminoso a dozen years earlier, they put up a fifty-meter-long political slogan on the walls of the tourist Himalayan Hotel, proclaiming its condemnation of the Nepalese and Indian regimes as well as “Russian social imperialism” and “Chinese revisionism.”[845]
At the plenum of the CPN (M) in September 1995, the decision was taken to put Maoist theory into practice by launching a “people’s war.”[846] This it finally did in February 1996 when, according to a friendly source, “coordinated raids and attacks occurred in three main regions as well as in many other places across the length of Nepal. These armed actions involving thousands of men and women opened a new glorious chapter in the history of that country—the launching of the People’s War, aimed at sweeping away imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism.”[847]
The periodical of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) noted the first activities of its “popular war.” It said, “Following the historic initiation and general appeal of the Party, different types of militant & armed actions sprang up in lightening [sic] speed almost all over the country. Within three weeks of the initiation… about 5,000 actions had taken place in about 65 district [sic] of the country. Of these actions about 65 percent constituted propaganda actions including torch-light processions, painting of slogans, distribution of leaflets and posters in favour of people’s war, about 12 percent of sabotage actions including destruction & seizure of properties of notorious feudals and comprador & bureaucratic capitalists, and about 3 percent guerrilla actions.”[848]
The same periodical added, “The initiation of the people’s war was historic; but now the grave question of whether we are able or not to continue, defend and develop it is looming large before the Party. At the moment, the attention of the politically conscious masses, intellectual community and all others is centered on what would be the next plan of the Party and whether or not we would be able to preserve and develop what has been newly given birth to.”[849]
As this is being written, more than a year later, there are no answers available to the questions the Nepalese journal raised.
Pakistani Maoism
In Pakistan, formed in 1946-1947 by the splitting away from India of large, predominantly Muslim areas in both the east and the West, the small Communist Party long sought to avoid taking a stand on the Sino-Soviet split. A U.S. State Department source reported in 1969, “The Communist Party has not taken an official stand on the Sino-Soviet split, though members of both factions can be found in both wings.” The main difference separating the two communist factions concern the pro-Soviet group’s willingness to cooperate with other parties in front groups, while the pro-Chinese faction insists on acting independently. Similarly, no public party position has been taken on Czechoslovakia.”[850]
In 1971, an uprising in East Pakistan led to the establishment of Bangladesh. A discussion of the influence of Maoism in that state is found elsewhere in this volume. With regard to what remained of Pakistan, Richard F. Nyrop reported in 1979, “Despite Pakistan’s official relations with the People’s Republic of China, most adherents of communist ideology were believed to be proSoviet.”[851] In 1988, the only Communist group in Pakistan dealt with by the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs was the pro-Soviet party; there was no mention of a Maoist faction.[852]
Maoism in the Philippines
The Communist movement in the Philippines has had a long history of resort to guerrilla war. Although the efforts of the original Communist Party of the Philippines (PKP) to come to power by armed force in the years right after World War II were largely defeated by 1954, a second guerrilla campaign was launched in 1968 by a new Communist Party, usually referred to by its English initials as the CPP. This new party gave its allegiance to Peking, instead of to Moscow, with which the PKP had been, and continued to be, associated.
Evolution of the PKP
The Communist Party of the Philippines (PKP) was originally established in August 1930, under the leadership of Cristiano Evangelista, one of the country’s earliest trade union figures. Later in the decade, following Comintern policy, it launched a “Popular Front” with the small Socialist Party, headed by Abad Santos. Finally, in October 1938 the two parties merged to establish the Communist Party of the Philippines, with Evangelista as Chairman, Santos as Vice Chairman, and Guillermo Capadocia as Secretary-General.
The Communists remained a very secondary element in national politics until World War II. With the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the PKP offered its support, in case of a Japanese attack, to High Commissioner Francis Sayre, the ranking U.S. official in what was still the Philippine Commonwealth, a U.S. possession. When the Japanese did attack after Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and captured Manila on January 2, 1942, the three chief leaders of the PKP stayed in the Philippine capital to help organize resistance to the invaders.
However, in a little more than three weeks, Evangelista, Santos and Capadocia were arrested by the Japanese. Leadership of the PKP was taken by three brothers, Vicente, José and Jesús Lava, and by Pedro Castro.
844
R. Andrew Rickson, “Democratization and the Growth of Communism in Nepaclass="underline" A Peruvian Scenario in the Making?,”
850
851
Richard F. Nyrop, in
852
Walter K. Anderson, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1988, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., 1988, pages 208—210.