Early Nepal Vote Results = Maoists in 3rd

[ColdBlooded]

Nepal's Maoist party has come third in the first constituency results to be declared after Thursday's elections.

In Kathmandu's constituency number one, the Maoist candidate polled under 4,000 votes. The Nepali Congress candidate won, securing more than 14,000 votes.

Analysts say that although this is an early first result, it offers an insight into the popularity of Maoists.

Former US President Jimmy Carter, who is an election observer, has said Washington must deal with the Maoists.

Speaking to the BBC's Charles Haviland in Kathmandu, Mr Carter said: "It's been somewhat embarrassing to me and frustrating to see the United States refuse among all the other nations in the world, including the United Nations, to deal with the Maoists, when they did make major steps away from combat and away from subversion into an attempt at least to play an equal role in a political society".

Significance

Mr Carter also talked about the significance of the elections:

"It's the end, I hope, of armed conflict, of revolutionary war in fact", he said.

"Secondly, it's a total transformation in the form of government from a 240-year-old Hindu monarchy to a democratic republic.

"Third, there's a transformational involvement in the future of marginalised groups. "

Nepal held its first polls since 1999 following the Maoists' decision to quit their armed struggle in 2006.

The polls are for an assembly that is expected to re-write Nepal's constitution and abolish its monarchy.

Results for Kathmandu constituency one were declared quickly because it was the only constituency which used electronic voting machines.

Election official Prakash Man Singh said that the Maoists trailed behind the Nepali Congress candidate and the UML, a centre-left party which polled more than 6,000 votes.

Surprised

The popularity of the Maoist party is being tested at the ballot for the first time in this election.

Results for all the 240 constituencies are expected over the next 10 days. Officials say that polling has been postponed in 10 constituencies.

Many Nepalis and international observers have been surprised that Thursday's nationwide elections, just two years after the end of the Maoist insurgency, took place considerably more peacefully than past votes of the 1990s.

There were four election-related deaths in the troubled south-eastern region.

The Election Commission said there was a turnout of 60%, with polling cancelled due to malpractice in just 33 polling stations out of 21,000.

King Gyanendra seized absolute power in 2005 but was forced to give up his authoritarian rule the following year after weeks of pro-democracy protests.

He has since lost all his powers and his command of the army.

It is hoped the election will consolidate the end of the Maoist insurgency, which stopped two years ago, says the BBC's Charles Haviland in Kathmandu.

 

[ColdBlooded]

Maoists take the lead
Apr 14th 2008 | KATMANDHU
From Economist.com

Early election results from Nepal show a shocking success for former insurgents

NEPAL'S Maoists, who until two years ago were a vicious rebel party to a decade-long civil war, look likely to have won a general election. Of 186 seats declared on Monday April 14th the Maoists had won 103. A complicated electoral system mixing direct elections with proportional representation makes the overall complexion of the impending 601-seat assembly still hard to predict. But the Maoists may have won an outright majority.

At the least, they will have a big say in the writing of a new constitution—the next government’s main task. By contrast, before the vote, foreign observers and local pundits had predicted that the Maoists would be embarrassed at the polls. Some feared this might lead them to derail Nepal’s frail peace process, by organising countrywide strikes, or even by returning to war.

The Maoists’ tentative triumph certainly owes something to their former tactics. The election campaign was bloody. Two candidates and a score of other people were killed in clashes between hoodlums loyal to the three main political parties. And the Maoists’ thugs were by far the most active. But, in a country well-used to political violence, voter intimidation alone cannot explain the Maoists’ fledgling success. At least as important was a deep sense of disenchantment among voters with the other main options: the Nepali Congress party and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), known as the UML.

Though tarnished by a spell of corrupt and unstable democracy in the 1990s, both parties had blithely predicted victory for themselves with a landslide. While the Maoists campaigned for the poll vigorously—led by their charismatic leader, Pushpal Kamal Dahal, or Prachanda (“awesome&#8221—Nepal’s two biggest parties ran lackadaisical campaigns. They have so far won 56 seats between them. The UML’s leader, Madhav Kumar Nepal, has resigned.

Indeed, Nepali voters—including many voting for the first time—have much to be disenchanted with. They are among the poorest Asians. Their war-eroded—and always weak—state affords most of them little. And it is increasingly seething with ethnic, regional and caste-based unrest.

In the mountainous Kaski region, in central Nepal, villagers with practically no state services said they had voted for the Maoists for two main reasons. Some, especially members of low-caste or outcast Hindu groups, said that the Maoists would bring electricity and equality. High-caste Hindus were more likely to say that they had voted to bring the Maoists to power because they feared they would otherwise return to the local forests and their former ways: extorting money and kidnapping children.

The Maoists have indeed promised to end caste-based discrimination, and they probably mean to try. During the war, their leaders, including many high-caste Brahmins, were always willing to stay at the houses of low-caste Dalits—whether invited or not.

How they would respond to Nepal’s many other problems is hard to judge. Yet it seems that they are not intent on wrecking the means of production. Promising a “bourgeois democratic revolution”, Prachanda said he would dismantle Nepal’s vestiges of feudalism, not capitalism.

How Nepal’s allies, especially India, would respond to a Maoist-dominated government is almost as important. Foreign aid accounts for most government spending on development, including health-care and education. Moreover India, Nepal’s biggest trading partner by far, has a stranglehold on its economy. And with an eye to China, it’s traditional rival for influence in Nepal, India jealously guards its sway over the country.

An outright victory for the Maoists would be a nightmare for India. Plagued by a Maoist insurgency of its own, India until recently backed Nepal’s blundering King Gyanendra, who tried to crush the Maoists in the field. India forsook the king after he seized power in 2005. And it played an important part in brokering the peace process after his withdrawal from power following street protests the next year.

In February, for example, it persuaded autonomy-seeking southerners, of the Terai plain, not to boycott and derail the election as they were threatening to do. India said then that the election was a crucial part of the peace process—no matter the result. But it certainly did not predict these results.