[lbo-talk] Nepal

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sun Apr 23 07:23:27 PDT 2006


On 4/23/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> uvj at vsnl.com wrote:
>
> >Fidel Castro supports Nepal king
>
> Weird. Is this out of solidarity with another old guy in power
> threatened by popular unrest, or is it more political than that?
>
> Doug

That's Havana's courtesy to Beijing and New Delhi. Havana isn't interested in Nepal per se, but it has to be interested in what Beijing and New Delhi think of what's going on there.

Beijing and New Delhi have opposed Maoists in Nepal. Both China and India have huge numbers of the impoverished in their own countryside. Worse, urban areas of China and India have gone through dramatic capitalist development in the recent years, the development that came at the expense of the rural poor (uneven and combined development, which is a more politically favorable situation for revolutionaries than absolute immiseration). So, Beijing and New Delhi fear that the people's war thingy might catch on, especially if it made progress in its neighbor (Nepal is situated between China and India: <http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/nepal_pol90.jpg>).

That's not a paranoid fear, considering that India has its own homegrown Maoist insurgency ("One senior Indian intelligence official estimated that Maoists exert varying degrees of influence over a quarter of India's 600 districts.," <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/world/asia/13maoists.html?ex=1302580800&en=b397a84735c2f9cb&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss> and <http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/12/news/maoist.php>) and that there are thousands of rural as well as urban revolts against corrupt bureaucratic capitalism in China every year (the latter of which are well reported in the New York Times, my favorite newspaper).

-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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