They also tortured him by sprinkling kerosene on his body and then setting him on fire. Gopal Prasad Sharma, a Mahasamiti member and district-level leader of the Nepali Congress in Rukkum, lost his eyesight after cadres sprinkled acid in his eyes during the insurgency. As related in an article discussing an attack upon a village political activist: To stick with innocent persons for now, the point can be illustrated by using two quite typical assaults from the period of open conflict in Nepal, 1996-2006. Gopal Prasad Sharma, Photo Courtesy: Nepal Mountain News Further, innocence extends not only to individuals but to property in most formulations of definition. Indeed, the emphasis upon “body count” above is misplaced, since in any insurgent situation, it is not deaths that dominate the statistics but assault upon the innocent for the purposes of terrorizing. It is this subject which I have addressed in several articles, most recently in Small Wars and Insurgencies, “Terrorism as Method in Nepali Maoist Insurgency, 1996-2016.” Therein, as will be discussed below, I seek to grapple with the continued use of terrorism that falls short of lethal. But in using as its foundation a straw man of vanished insurgency, particularly one measured only in deaths (themselves a rather indeterminate category in data bases driven in large part by counts derived from English-language Kathmandu dailies), the article cedes the opportunity to discuss the continuing insurgent dreams of the Maoist splinters and the considerable violence they continue to interject at the local level in what otherwise could indeed be assessed as a much-improved post-people’s war situation. This is quite accurate as far as it goes. Most salient of these is the issue of the tarai (also rendered as terai the relatively narrow flatlands bordering India), the where the Madhesi movement claims to speak for a variety of cross-cutting cleavages involving everything from communal disadvantage to geographic discrimination to gerrymandered representation not reflecting present population. The point of the title, as reflected in the content, is that while the Maoist quest for power has petered out (i.e., the “insurgency”), the roots of conflict not only remain but are driving a new round of challenges which place the very future of a unified Nepal at stake. At the peak of insurgency, Nepal had seen 4,896 fatalities in 2002 alone, including 3,992 Maoists, 666 Security Force (SF) personnel and 238 civilians. However, not a single insurgency-related fatality was recorded in 2016, and this has been the case since 2013, with not a single insurgency-related fatality on record. Though the insurgency has ended in Nepal, political violence continued through 2016. In a recent South Asia Intelligence Review (SAIR) posting, “Enduring Dilemmas,” S. Nepali Headlines,Nepal News, Nepali News, News Nepal. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.
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