On Nepal and Caste Oppression

(Letter)

July 31, 2010

To the editor:

Your statement in “India: Down With Government War on Maoists, Tribal Peoples!” (WV 962) that “[b]y 2006, Maoist forces [in Nepal]...controlled up to 80 percent of the countryside, where they enacted significant social reforms including...an end to the caste system” mars an otherwise fine and important article. It gives a deeply false picture of the nature of caste oppression in South Asia and of the social process that will be required to remove it.

Comradely greetings,
Alan and Sarah

WV replies: The formulation about ending caste oppression was indeed misleading. Multiple sources describe the impact of the Maoists’ reforms in the countryside, notably for women. Maoist forces also made significant moves against the caste system, declaring that caste discrimination was banned in the zones they controlled. While the Maoists made incursions into the caste system, we understand that caste oppression is deeply intertwined with capitalist exploitation in South Asia and cannot be ended by fiat alone. It will take proletarian socialist revolution, combined with agrarian revolution in the countryside, to lay the material basis for ending the caste system, the oppression of women and all forms of social oppression, as laid out elsewhere in the article.