On this subject, the article says, “Also, the process of army integration is a complicated process. What is certainly not happening is the wholesale dismantling of the PLA to be placed within the NA as it now stands. Instead the Maoists emphasise the need to create a new national army which is anti-feudal and anti-colonial in character, taking into account the concrete conditions of Nepal.”

“In the cantonments however the PLA soldiers we held discussions with, and the acting division commander Comrade Jeevan, all explained to us that this period in the cantonments is “one of waiting”. That they will be needed in the future is self-evident to the soldiers. But that will only come about if they are once again compelled by the reactionary nature of the bourgeois parties or by imperialist or expansionist influence to take up arms in defence of the revolution.”

Note the contradiction here. How will the PLA be able to go into action, both militarily and politically in the future, as Jeevan explains, if it is integrated into the NA? And how can a new anti-feudal and anti-colonial national army be created, short of overthrowing the current bourgeois state and defeating the NA? The reactionaries leading the army, with India and the US standing behind them, have made it clear that they will not give up their control of the NA peacefully.

The article continues: “Nevertheless, in the concrete conditions of Nepal, taking part in the reactionary state has allowed the UCPN(M) to massively increase their influence and support in urban areas especially. It has allowed them unprecedented opportunities to gain access to the organs of state power, especially the Nepalese Army and the judiciary. This line of politics is obviously very dangerous, and there have been many concerns that in doing this the UCPN(M) has shown reformist tendencies of the worst kind…. Crucially, the Maoists are also inducing splits within the Nepalese Army, with the party especially intent on winning over a large number of the normal soldiers, who are themselves from proletarian backgrounds.”

I have not seen any evidence of splits within the NA, nor of significant advances in winning over large numbers of the rank and file soldiers. In past revolutionary struggles, defeats on the battlefield have been the precondition for demoralization of the reactionary army and winning over its soldiers/cannon fodder.

The article continues: “…they are calling for a third People’s Movement and there is increasing talk of insurrection.” Yes, there was such talk several months ago, but all of the UCPN (Maoist) leaders have been calling for the formation of a new Maoist-led government and writing a new Constitution. This falls far short of the kind of political work that would pave the way for completing the new democratic revolution.

The Maoists are thus confronted with some tough, closely related questions: What to do about the Nepalese Army, and how to build towards a revolutionary seizure of power.

Please allow me use to the historical experience of the revolutionary armed struggle led by the communist party in China to perhaps provide some concrete historical basis for some internationalist line struggle. The PLA in China had its beginning in an insurrection spearheaded under the urban-oriented line of the then communist party leadership of Chen Duxiu. Mao took part in this failed insurrectionist attempt to seize the central Chinese city of Nanchang in August 1927 and had to organize a tactical withdrawal of the survivors of this insurrection to regroup and recoup in rural areas of Jinggang Mountains to continue their revolutionary armed struggle. There they were able to build their first revolutionary base areas which they named the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet Regime.

Mao and many of his Red Army commanders struggled vigorously against the so-called “28 Bolsheviks” Chinese returned students and their military advisor, Otto Von Braun aka Li De, who were sent from the USSR to implement the insurrectionist line of the Commintern which resulted in the party and the Red Army having to abandon their painstakingly gained base areas to do the famous 6,000 km Long March covering 18 provinces from the lush and green mountains of Jiangxi province in southern China across the snow-capped mountains of Tibet-Qinghai provinces to rebuild their revolutionary base areas in the parch dry loess plains surrounding Yenan in the northwestern province of Shaanxi.

Mao summed up this bitter and blood-soaked lessons learned from struggling against the insurrectionist line in the new democratic armed revolution with his now famous thesis — On Protracted Warfare — which became standard text even for senior officer training school in Chiang Kaishek’s Guomindang Army during the 8-year war of resistance against Japan imperialism.