Few dare to fight elections in Nepal as Maoists threaten to kill

Fear of far-Left groups, who have threatened to kill contestants, has created an unprecedented political situation in Nepal, in the run-up to local government elections later this month.

Not a single nomination has been filed in 38 of the 147 villages in Rolpa, Rukum, Salyan and Jajarkot districts in western Nepal. Elsewhere in the Himalayan kingdom, party candidates did not file their nominations even on the last day for entries to the race.

Staggered elections to more than 4,000 village councils, 40 town municipalities and 75 district committees across this mountain country are scheduled to start on May 17. The local elections, Nepal's second after the kingdom reverted to multi-party democracy and constitutional monarchy in 1990, are scheduled to be held in three stages.

But campaigning is likely to be lacklustre as political parties are in disarray ever since Maoist groups distributed leaflets warning that ''contesting the elections (would be) like inviting death. We know how to vacate all seats that are contested.''

''It is because of the threat of violence that local politicians are refusing to contest the election,'' asserts Surendra Kamal, a law-maker who represents the violence-hit hill district of Rolpa. ''The government ought to provide full security to all contestants.''

Authorities in Kathmandu have promised to beef up security during the polls. ''We have made plans to mount a four-ring security operation mobilising 20,000 policemen for the polls,'' says Krishna Mohan Shrestha, the police officer in charge of poll security.

He, however, was not able to pacify politicians, particularly in Rolpa, Rukum, Salyan and Jajarkot districts, where the Maoist groups are not active.

It was in western Nepal in 1995 that the Maoists armed with guns and home-made weapons first declared war on the government and attacked police posts in the remote villages. Most people in these districts are poor, and were easily influenced by the incendiary ideology of the Maoist revolutionaries. The Maoists are backed by two political groups which openly profess solidarity with the Shining Path movement in Peru and are members of a worldwide coalition of Maoist parties.

The Nepal Communist Party-Maoist wants to abolish the kingdom's constitutional monarchy and establish a republican state. Initially, though, it wants to eliminate the influence of ''feudalism and imperialism''.

The threat of violence by Maoist groups has caught the government by surprise. It was widely claimed that the movement had been crushed through police action. At least a 100 people, civilians, police and rebels, have been killed since the first outbreak of armed clashes, according to rights groups.

Leading what he calls is a ''people's war'' is Baburam Bhattarai of the NCPM, a hard-line ultra-left group which has claimed responsibility for most of the Maoist-led attacks.

Decades of official neglect, immense poverty and a skewed system of land distribution which favours the rich have made the Maoists very popular in the poorest of Nepal's villages, say political observers in Kathmandu.

Four decades of development policies have failed to meet the basic needs of much of Nepal's population, and regional disparities are sharp. Life expectancy in Kathmandu, the capital city, is 71 years, while in the remote districts it is 50 per cent lower. The World Bank's statistics say that 71 per cent of the country's population lives below the poverty line.

None of Nepal's main political parties has any sympathy for the Maoists, even though the country has a long history of violent struggle against feudalism. Nepal's United Communist Party, a powerful partner in the ruling coalition, and the main opposition Nepali Congress gave up armed revolution with the establishment of multi-party democracy seven years ago.

Only last September the government acknowledged in Parliament that the armed revolt was a ''political problem''. The then home minister also announced that his Nepali Congress government was willing to talk to the Maoist parties.

Soon after, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba asked one of his cabinet colleagues to prepare a development package for the poorest districts where the Maoists were very strong. However, nothing concrete emerged as the Deuba government was preoccupied with trying to stay in power.

It was the new left-right alliance led by Prime Minister Lokendra Bahadur Chand that came to power in March that took up the Maoist problem with fresh vigour. Chand called the Maoists for a dialogue to the applause of even Amnesty International.

But nothing more has happened since then. Bhattarai in a statement released to the media on Tuesday rejected the dialogue as a ploy by the government to discredit the ''people's war''.