Spotlight on Nepal

By New Worker correspondent

COMRADES gathered in central London for a New Worker meeting last week to hear a report from writer and journalist Peter Tobin, who has recently returned after six months in Nepal.
Tobin covered the current political situation there and the prospects for the UN-backed peace process, three-and-a-half years after the end of the civil war that brought about the fall of the feudal monarchy. He described the complex balance of internal and external forces, and how the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) – the largest party in the Constituent Assembly – has consolidated its organisation in Nepal’s cities and towns and is resisting attempts to disarm and neutralise its armed wing: the People’s Liberation Army.
Tobin summarised the position of the pro-Indian Nepal Congress Party and the “constitutional” Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist), the current state of the bourgeois and feudal forces in Nepal and the role played by the Indian government and US imperialism in backing them.
Both Tobin and Kumar Sarkar, of Second Wave Publications, who also visited Nepal recently, discussed the emerging divisions within the UCPN(M) over strategy in the coming period and the advancement of the Nepali peoples’ revolutionary gains, and plans to hold the UCPN(Maoist)’s second party congress in the near future to resolve these questions.