IN a stunning result Nepal’s Maoist Communist Party has swept to power in an election landslide.
The irony of the CPN (M), which has waged a classic Maoist guerrilla struggle with an insurgency in the countryside, liberated areas and land reform, winning in a multi-party election will no doubt add to its impact.
As we are daily told of the wonders of market economics sweeping China and India, the Maoist victory spotlights the reality that, for millions, the pressing issues of food and education outweigh the hollow gloss of supposed capitalist progress.

Presence
In Nepal, communists have been an active presence since the formation of the Communist Party of Nepal in 1949, with the later divergance between those supporting the Maoist Chinese approach and the backers of the Soviet Union producing a series of splits, reunifications and further splits.
Broadly there are now two parties claiming the Communist name.
The UML (Unified Marxist Leninist) adopted a parliamentary approach, and following a limited democratic reform in the early 90s the UML formed a government in 1994.
However faced with the feudal power of the monarchy backed by a powerful elite this government failed to deliver promised reforms such as land reform and was removed by the King in 1994.
In the countryside the CPN (M) Maoists waged a classic struggle with liberated zones carrying out land reform and peoples courts dispensing justice.
The US has designated the CPN as a terrorist organisation and its sweeping victory in the election in the midst of what is fast developing as a new capitalist heartland poses real policy dilemmas for imperialism.
Probably the greatest fear in the US State Department and the British Foreign Office is that which has seen them intervene in country after country - the fear of a country posing an alternative model to capitalism.
There is deep concern in the already beleaguered US military and diplomatic circles about what they see impact of instability in Nepal on the Indian subcontinent as a whole.
In particular the imperialist powers will be concerned that India, which is repeatedly advertised as the model for a capitalist road of development, has a burgeoning Maoist insurgency that will draw strength from the Nepalese events.
The US poured aid into the now defeated monarchy and the Royal Nepalese Army as part of its post cold war military arrangements with countries bordering China.
These stretch from its new bases in the former Soviet Central Asian republics through South-East Asia to its formal allies in north-east Asia: Japan and South Korea.
In this configuration Nepal had a key strategic position. Groundwork The groundwork for a possible US intervention was already being laid as the Pentagon stepped up military aide with statements suggesting that it would prevent the world’s only Hindu state becoming a haven for Al Qaeda’s extremists.
Whatever the outcome of this confrontation the fact is that Nepal now stands out as a state embarked on a path which is diametrically opposed to the current capitalist market economic sweeping China and India.