Prachanda: “If the mandate of the CA election is further ridiculed we will declare war”
Prachanda gave a speech at a book launching ceremony yesterday which from all accounts was pretty damn fiery. According to Telegraph Nepal, he stressed that the “The Constituent Assembly and the Peace Process are the offspring of the decade long revolt undertaken by the Maoists’ Party”, and stated that “if the constitution drafting process and the peace process were blocked, there will be yet another fierce revolt.”
The TN article was entitled “Fresh Nepal revolt may take toll of One Million”, a rather suspect move on their part. They obviously lifted a single line from his speech (quoted in the article) in which he noted that a revolutionary seizure of power by the masses would result in many deaths. The way the title is worded implies that Prachanda is callously playing with the lives of people and indeed delights in their possible deaths, but his actual words tell a different story.
What he actually said was “If there is another revolt at least one million people may lose their precious lives”, and therefore “we need to be very careful at this juncture, to stop the casualties”. However, this should not be read as displaying an unwillingness to go ahead with a people’s revolt in the future – he went on to say, according to Telegraph Nepal, that “people want peace not war however, there is the limit to everything, people go at war when their limit of tolerance is broken… when the people revolt they obliterate everything” and that “if the mandate of the Constituent Assembly election is further ridiculed we will declare war”.
Interestingly, TN claims that he also said “this time the war will be a peaceful one.” A strange remark considering how he supposedly also mentioned that the revolt could easily result in a million deaths. Most likely this remark was made with the intention of stressing the Maoist’s commitment to the peace process, and trying to make it harder for the reactionary forces to make out that the UCPN (M) forced their hand if they move against the revolutionaries.
Kantipur Online reported on the same speech, saying that Prachanda blamed current President Yadav and his actions past and present for the “precarious situation”. Apparently he stated that “a land mine from the President’s office has already ambushed the constitution drafting and peace process”.
According to this report, Prachanda said that only under the leadership of him and the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) can a constitution be written and the peace process taken to it’s conclusion. He charged the government with “trying to invite a war”, and reminded them that “peace-seeking people will not tolerate any oppression” and “none can prevent people from revolting.”
Some pretty heavy rhetoric! The past few weeks have been red hot in Nepal, and it just keeps getting hotter.
