December 21, 2004 ☼ Foreign Affairs
Last month the brave women from Dullu in Nepal’s Dailekh region decided that they had had enough of the Maoists and their peoples’ revolution and rose in protest. And when South Asian women decide that they’ve had enough, then it is not a very smart idea to try persuading them otherwise.
The Maoist leadership floundered and is still grasping for a ‘political response’, but its thuggish cadres continue to indulge in what they do best — throwing explosive things at unarmed people.
The spontaneous outrage has spread even to outlying VDCs and the rebels have either been chased out or caught and handed over to the army. The Maoist western command in-charge, Diwakar, has been in damage-control mode after issuing a self-critical statement. But his district-level leaders have taken the uprising as an affront to their prestige and retaliated against unarmed civilians wherever they could.
In the latest incident on Sunday, a group of armed Maoists surrounded the village of Khadkawada, beat up locals and abducted four of the women leaders who had been leading the anti-Maoist movement. [Nepali Times]Here’s to the brave aunties of Nepal — may their tribe increase !
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