Free Republic

An astonishing feature of India's bumpy ride to great power status is the near-total absence of public discourse on the country's foreign policy. There may be occasional bouts of interest in matters relating to Pakistan and, maybe, China, but these are linked to internal security concerns and questions of territory. In eastern India, Bangladesh, too, features on the mental horizon, but again as a part of the ongoing debate on demographic changes. However, larger questions are invariably subsumed under a grand foreign policy consensus forged by South Block. It is simply not done for either the political parties or the...

Kathmandu : Nepal's Maoist guerrillas took advantage of the ceasefire called by them in September to buy arms from India, the official media here reported Friday. The Rising Nepal daily, the mouthpiece of the government headed by King Gyanendra, said the information was given to the Royal Nepalese Army by an ex-Maoist "combatant". The informer, the daily said, was a 13-year-old girl from Ilam district in eastern Nepal. Ishwara Neupane aka Richa, who reportedly surrendered to security forces and was presented at a press conference at the district administration office in Jhapa, also in eastern Nepal, was quoted as saying...

NEW DELHI, July 8: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers as they are commonly known, are providing military training to the Maoist rebels of Nepal in Bihar near the Nepalese borders. Some French trainers have also been hired, a Maoist rebel leader revealed to the South Asia Tribune.

JALPAIGURI (Indo-Nepal-Bhutan-Bangladesh Border), July 24: Over 165 Maoist cadres are being trained in Bhutan at present, as Bhutan has been included in the future Maoist country, ‘Dandkaranya Desam’. The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and Kamtapur Liberation Organization (KLO) are imparting the training. A senior leader of the Standing Committee of a Maoist outfit confirmed this to the South Asia Tribune.

Rejecting allegations of having links with Maoists, Nepal's seven-party alliance agitating against King Gyanendra's direct rule has said it was instead trying to bring the rebels into the democratic fold. "We don't have any plans to forge an alliance with the Maoist rebels," Nepali Congress central member and former Foreign Minister Ramsharan Mahat said. "The purpose of all our efforts is to motivate them to come to multi-party democracy," Mahat told PTI. The minister was responding to the US government's statement issued yesterday warning pro-democracy political parties against any possible alliance with the Maoists waging insurgency for the past ten...

Kathmandu, Nepal's rebels may be teaming up with Maoist guerrillas in the Indian state of Bihar for joint attacks on security forces. The People's Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) says it is a joint force comprising Maoists from Nepal and the outlawed Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) of Bihar. The outfit was reportedly behind the attack on an Indian police post Tuesday night. Around 250 to 300 people attacked the Simraini police picket in Bagaha district, about 8-10 metres from the India-Nepal border, around midnight, heavily outnumbering the 13 policemen posted there at that time. The attackers, using loudspeakers, described themselves as...

In Nepal's eight-year war with Maoist guerrillas, no group has been harder hit than the police. They have lost more than 1,200 of their number. The police consistently suffer more casualties than the army, who were not used at all against the Maoists for the first five years of the conflict. To find out more about what the police have been through, I travelled to the isolated town of Beni, where memories of a recent bloody ordeal are raw. This district headquarters in west-central Nepal stands in rugged country at the bottom of a gorge. Less than six months ago,...

KATHMANDU - There are a number of ways to break a person's legs. Maoist guerrillas in Nepal often use rocks. They lay the person down and smash the thighbones and shins. There is no need to describe the pain felt by the victim. Or the devastating effect crippling a person has in a mountainous country where walking is often the only way to get around. Breaking legs is a primitive but effective way of sowing terror into the population. How then do these Nepalese communists treat well-off "decadent" Westerners trekking in Nepal's mountain trails? In a strange irony, these insurgents...

The international police agency, Interpol, has issued arrest warrants for 11 top Nepalese rebels. They include the Maoist rebel leader, Prachanda, his second-in-command, Baburam Bhattarai, and spokesman Krishna Bahadur Mahara. More than 8,000 people have died in the Maoists' eight-year insurrection aimed at replacing the Himalayan kingdom's monarchy with a communist republic. The Interpol move comes after peace talks collapsed in Nepal in August. This is the second time Interpol has sought the arrests of top rebels. Security officials in Nepal say that the Interpol arrest warrants - known as Red Notices - will help police forces in the...

The series of claymore mine blasts triggered by the outlawed People's War that nearly killed Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu in October has provoked the central government to set up a special security unit to check the Naxalites. The decision followed a Union home ministry report that said Left-wing extremist groups are responsible for the second largest number of violent incidents and killings in India. Terrorism in Kashmir takes the top slot. A senior government official told rediff.com that the special security unit will be raised out of the Central Reserve Police Force. "We will give special training...

During the last year, Communist terrorist organisations have registered an unusual increase of 36 per cent in their activities. The precision with which mines were blasted with the intention to take Chandrababu Naidu’s life speaks a lot about the preparedness of the People’s War Group (PWG). Since the 1917 October revolution, violence has been an inseparable part of the Communist ‘practical party line’. From Stalin and Mao to EMS and Jyoti Basu, violence has always been the hallmark of Communist parties’ growth even as banners inscribed with the words ‘Peace, Harmony, People’s power, Condemn the Bourgeois, Long Live the Revolution’...

Kathmandu, July 25 (UNI): The Maoists are planning to launch an FM radio station in Western Nepal, the Nepalese news agency, Rashtriya Samachar Samiti, today said quoting the Kathmandu Post. "The people of far western region would be able to listen to the programme aired by the Maoists Peoples radio," an unnamed Maoist leader said. The radio station would be situated in an undisclosed location somewhere between Dadeldhura and Baitadi the paper quoted the leader as saying. "Our party has successfully installed an FM radio station in a secured location," he said without giving any details of the plan. This...

Close co-operation and exchange of information between Nepal and India was the need of the hour to tackle the Maoist threat, Indian Ambassador in Nepal Shyam Saran has said. Underlining India's stand against terrorism, Saran said India will not allow any activity directed against Nepal in its soil and admitted that the Nepalese Maoists were establishing links with terrorist groups, including PWG and MCC, which are operating in India. "We have evidence to prove that the Maoists were involved in drawing action plans with terror organisations in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa," the envoy was quoted by The Himalayan Times...

Nestled in the rugged Himalayas, the little known mountain kingdom of Nepal could not seem to be more removed from current geopolitical concerns. Yet on its frozen mountains a revolutionary battle rages. For seven years, Maoist rebels have sought to establish a second totalitarian state in central Asia, at the price of thousands killed and an entire nation left ravaged by its violence. Beginning in February 1996, Marxist-Leninist-Maoists led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) -- CPN(M) -- and its leader “Comrade Prachanda” (his real name is Pushpan Kamal Dahal) launched an ongoing effort to overthrow the Kingdom of...