BARDIYA, Nepal - Until two-and-a-half years ago, Rachna Sharma and her husband lived as zamindars, or landlords, in this district in western Nepal, presiding over an ample estate just as their forebears had done.
As members of a high caste, they did not dirty their hands working their land. That was left to the Tharus, a landless and powerless ethnic group indigenous to this plain area. Until 2000, when the government, under pressure, freed them, thousands of Tharus - including 15 families on Mrs. Sharma's estate - lived as bonded laborers, equal to slaves.
But today Mrs. Sharma, an aristocratic beauty, lives as a refugee, if a cosseted one, in the town of Nepalganj. Maoist rebels are living in her former house and cooking in her kitchen. The Tharus are farming her lands - and keeping all of the crops.
When they come to see her in town, she tries, futilely, to wheedle a share, making requests where she once issued commands.
"Now we have to be polite to them," Mrs. Sharma, 36, said.
The guerrilla insurgency that the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) began against the constitutional monarchy eight years ago has wreaked great damage in this country of Himalayan scenery and epic poverty. More than 8,500 people have died, including more than 1,500 since the end of August, when a cease-fire broke down.
The insurgency has also, in parts of rural Nepal, wrought changes in the balance of power between the landed and the landless that multiparty democracy - ushered in with great expectations in the early 1990's - failed to bring.
That dynamic helps explain why a rebellion that many say has become a criminal enterprise as much as a political movement still finds support among the Tharus and other disenfranchised ethnic groups and the country's low castes.
In the villages of Bardiya, young Tharus talk happily about how the landlords have had to flee the Maoists' wrath. "All the zamindars are scared of us now," said Bal Krishna Chaudhary, an intense 18-year-old Tharu student from a family of former bonded laborers.
His eldest sister, Sita, was a Maoist supporter taken by the army more than two years ago. They said she was carrying a bomb, a charge he denies, but he does not dispute her Maoist sympathies.
"They speak for the people," he said, explaining why. "They speak for the Tharus."
Like a creeper wrapping itself around a tree, the Maoist movement has used the entrenched poverty and discrimination of this Hindu kingdom's deeply feudal society to build its insurgency. Nepal has perhaps the most rigid caste hierarchy remaining today.
This country has been, and still is, dominated by two high castes: the Brahmins - called Bahuns in Nepal - or priestly caste, of Mrs. Sharma; and Chhetris, or warrior caste, of her husband.
The two castes hold the highest positions in government, politics and business. They control the army and the press. And perhaps most crucially in a society still reliant on agriculture, they own the land.
Much of that land was once farmed by the Tharus, an aboriginal group in Nepal's lowlands. With a population of about 1.2 million, out of Nepal's 24 million, they are one of the country's largest ethnic groups.
Once self-sufficient farmers, the Tharus were gradually dispossessed as the government granted land to high castes to secure their loyalty and expand its reach. Then, the eradication of malaria - to which Tharus are believed to be immune - drew in large numbers of hill migrants to claim Tharu lands.
Tharus, little educated and ill-equipped to battle for their rights, went from being owners to landless tenants. For several generations, an estimated 20 percent or more of Tharus in western Nepal - some 20,000 families - were indentured, usually with no hope of escape.
The Maoists did little or nothing to free the Tharus from bonded labor; the pressure on the government came from domestic and international organizations.
But the Maoists have woven the uplifting of the Tharus - and of Nepal's other downtrodden groups - into their tapestry of slogans, and it has resonated among a people who believe that both royalist rule and multiparty democracy have failed them.
"We work with them because we think they can help raise our issues and get us our rights as citizens," Bal Krishna Chaudhary, the student, said. He knew seven people who had joined the Maoists, he said. Most are dead or missing.
Ekraj Chaudhary, a Tharu radio journalist based in Nepalganj, said he believed that most Tharus were involved with the Maoists, even if only passively. But even in the movement, he said, they were still relegated to low-level militants, and thus easy prey for the army.
Col. Dipak Gurung, a spokesman for the Royal Nepal Army, said the Maoists were exploiting the Tharus. "Tharus are very meek people, they normally don't resist," he said. "By nature, by culture, they are submissive."
No longer, as Mrs. Sharma could testify. At 45, Mrs. Sharma's husband is working in Nepalgunj as a computer instructor - the first job he has ever held - to support their family. "Zamindars never worked," she said. "It's very strange."
But if the undoing of nobles like Mrs. Sharma has cheered some Tharu hearts, the cost of the insurgency has troubled many others. This is a war with no winners.
As a result of the rebellion, the state is pulling out of many Maoist-controlled areas - generally the country's remote and desperately poor rural regions.
The police have been pulled back to district headquarters. Teachers and doctors, often singling out the Maoists for extortion or worse, are in some cases refusing to serve in villages. The swollen military budget, required to sustain an army now close to 80,000-strong, has crowded out development spending.
The government calls most of the dead Maoists, but human rights advocates, journalists and ordinary Nepalis say many are civilians caught in the crossfire or Maoist sympathizers mislabeled militants.
Support for the Maoists by some Tharus has placed the entire community under suspicion. The army has come down hard on the Tharus - harassing, beating, detaining and sometimes killing them, often with little or no evidence.
On a recent afternoon, four parents, faces wan and weary, sat on a bench in the front yard of a village home, clutching photographs - and in one case simply a negative - of their missing children.
Thirty-seven Tharus have disappeared into army custody from this district alone, said Mr. Chaudhary, the journalist. Across the country, 709 Nepalis have disappeared in the last eight years, 200 into Maoist control and the rest into the custody of security forces, according to the National Human Rights Commission.
Colonel Gurung disputed that the army had taken people without accounting for them. "We're not that irresponsible," he said. He said it was "very rare" that anyone would be killed in army custody.
But Phool Kesari, a Tharu and a former bonded laborer, whose husband was taken by the army a year and a half ago, is almost certain that he is dead. The army came three days after he was taken to say that he was a Maoist, which she denies. There has been no word of him since.
She has no relatives to rely on. She depends on a 15-year-old daughter still working as a bonded laborer, for about 4,000 rupees, or $60, a year.
She sat in her one-room house, the possessions inside countable on two hands. Three small children clung to her, their eyes watering from the thick, stinging smoke of a cooking fire, their noses running.
"How am I going to survive?" she asked. She had no land, no property, no education, no husband, no income and three children to feed.
Without waiting for an answer, she offered one. "Maybe I'll go back to the zamindar," she said.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/05/international/asia/05NEPA.html> -- Yoshie
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