NepalInternal Security Considerations
Royal Nepal Army soldier at the gate of the old royal palace,
Kathmandu
Courtesy Harvey Follender
Nepalese police, backed from time to time by the army,
combat
routine crimes in addition to monitoring numerous
political strikes
and demonstrations. The incidence of organized political
violence
was low, however. Nepal was not a fertile breeding ground
for
international terrorism because most political violence
was
committed by Nepalese dissidents to further their own
domestic
political agendas.
In the mid-1980s, small antimonarchist and communist
groups
conducted a series of bombings in the Kathmandu Valley to
dramatize
their opposition to Birendra's rule. In June 1984,
clandestine
Maoist bands such as the Samyuktha Mukti Bahini (Socialist
Liberation Army), the Democratic Front, and the United
Liberation
Torch Bearers mounted a campaign of bombings and
assassinations
intended to spark a revolution. Their actions had the
opposite
effect, however, as moderate opposition politicians
condemned the
violence and rallied around the king. The opposition civil
disobedience campaign was called off, and the Rashtriya
Panchayat
passed a stringent antiterrorist ordinance to put down the
threat.
By August 1984, over 1,000 suspected terrorists and
sympathizers
were imprisoned under provisions of antiterrorist
legislation
promulgated by the king.
The following year, another bombing in downtown
Kathmandu
killed eight persons and wounded twenty-two others. The
sensational
crime was perpetrated by the Jan Morcha (People's Front),
a Taraibased antimonarchist group with ties to political thugs in
the
Indian border states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Several
Jan Morcha
leaders who fled to India were convicted of the bombing in
absentia. In June 1991, following the installation of the
Nepali
Congress Party government, King Birendra pardoned the
exiled
terrorists as a gesture of political goodwill.
The ethnic tensions that spilled across Nepal's
international
boundaries also posed security and foreign policy
problems. In 1987
the Nepalese minority residing in the mountainous northern
districts of the Indian state of West Bengal mounted a
violent
agitation demanding statehood within the Indian union for
Indian
citizens of Nepalese origins. The standard bearer of the
campaign
was the Gorkha National Liberation Front led by Subhas
Ghising, a
former noncommissioned officer in an Indian Gurkha
regiment. The
communist state government of West Bengal complained of
Nepalese
collusion with the agitators after Ghising openly
solicited
Kathmandu's support and called on Gurkhas in the Indian
Army to
back the demand for a separate "Gorkhaland." The situation
worsened
when Indian police crossed the Nepalese border while
pursuing
Gurkha militants. Although Kathmandu probably was
sympathetic to
the plight of the Nepalese minority, any appearance of
support for
the statehood agitation was scrupulously avoided for fear
of
angering New Delhi. Official Nepalese support for the
movement
never was proven. By 1991 the Gorkhaland agitation had
subsided
after New Delhi, West Bengal, and Gurkha militants
negotiated a
political settlement that fell short of statehood.
In the 1980s, some of the young, militant Nepalese
population
residing in the southern part of Bhutan began to complain
of
systematic discrimination at the hands of the Bhutanese
government.
As many as 6,000 ethnic Nepalese refugees fled to Nepal.
Because
there were another 16,000 Nepalese refugees who had fled
from
Bhutan to India, the ethnic dispute in Bhutan threatened
to become
a transregional security problem involving all three
states
(see Political Dynamics
, ch. 6).
The strong communist showing in the 1991 election was a
disturbing development from the perspective of Birendra
and the
army. The Nepali Congress Party, a longtime political and
ideological foe of the communists, also harbored deep
misgivings
over communist political intentions. Many observers feared
that the
relatively open political environment would allow
disciplined
communist cadres to mount street protests, paralyze the
government,
and force a showdown with the king and the army. Army
officers,
most of whom rejected the antimonarchist platform of the
communists, invariably regarded the communists as a
potential
security menace and a threat to the throne. There was no
evidence
in late 1991 that the some twenty Nepalese communist
factions then
in existence commanded any appreciable support within the
army
rank-and-file.
Data as of September 1991
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