Thapa is not a professional writer but this isn't as bad as it initially appears. At least she's a Nepali. Skip the first chapter, which is 40-50 pages. Go read the Wikipedia article about the 2001 murder of King Birendra and other family members by the crown prince. Now flip through the rest of the book to get an impression of the Maoist insurgency of the past 20 years, though the book was published before its negotiated victory. (This is a reprint and the 2007 publishing date is misleading.) Yeah, sure, the interrogation of surviving royal family members was a a joke but there doesn't seem to be any reason to doubt that the dissolute prince did it. So Thapa's "bourgeoisie" constantly yack about the CIA and Indian conspiracies but it's just yack and you never do learn what the bourgeoisie constitutes in Nepal but since she appears to have gone to school (high school? college?) overseas, I'd say she's upper class.

Now to the interesting parts of the book. I've been to Nepal so I think many tourists must wonder about the origins of communist parties here. The author touches on that history; communist movements go back to the 1930s and 1940s and, as you'd expect, have some ties with the parties in India and West Bengal. At least there's a bibliography. so you can delve in farther. The authors all seem to be Indian and Nepali academics, who can make for very hard-going. Which is why this book might be worth skimming through.

Thapa has some detachment: she wants "democracy" but never gets around to defining what that means to her or the vast portion of villagers living Nepal's remote mountain villages. How to get there? What form would it take? Do any parties or movements have a sensible program? The combination of Nepal's geography and relatively large population (20 million!) seems to present enormous challenges. No doubt there's great corruption in the royal and upper classes but my impression is that there's just not that much wealth or potential wealth to redistribute. Given Thapa's overseas education, class, command of English and connections with foreigners through NGOs, I kept expecting she's get around to these questions. Also, how do Nepalis communicate? How can you do more than guess what's going in remote villages. Communication stations have to be few and far between. I can't say I read through the entire book but I'm pretty sure Thapa never answers these questions.

The best chapter covers a walk she did with a foreign human rights worker during a ceasefire in, I think, 2003. Events have proceeded apace since my updated edition; the communists came to power; the king abdicated; there was a coalition govt; the famous insurgent leader P stepped down; off and on violence and then. I don't know. It's still uncertain. But anyway ... the villagers fear soldiers and Maoist insurgents alike. They just want peace.

Thapa isn't particularly good at physical description and never grounds us in the religious and ethnic background of the villages but she and her partner do some telling interviews of extremely young and naive party members or followers. I've been puzzled: Nepal borders China and has accepted so many Tibetan Buddhist refugees, brothers of Nepal's own Buddhists, so you might expect that Nepalis would be aware of communism's tenets and that the economic ones have been abandoned in China. China is surging ahead economically because it has adopted capitalism. Ditto most of India, when it threw off its commitment to state enterprises and extreme regulation 20 years ago. West Bengalis, still burdened with a do-nothing Marxist govt, seem sorely aware of why the rest of India is surging ahead, producing millions more middle-class people every year. Nepali in part borders West Bengal; the same people and families straddle the mountainous border. So how can such a movement and such naive beliefs, as illustrated here, have such hold? My guess is that the geography and the ensuing difficulties in communications, information dispersal and education have something to do with it. I don't know if this even crosses Thapa's mind.

My library book, btw, was purchased recently in Kathmandu's Piligrim Books, well known to trekkers. So there's still quite a lot of freedom of the press. (But do villagers in remote mountains give a damn about that? What kind of news and information do they get, btw?) Thapa mentions in passing (just like most everything else in the book) that press freedom was ushered in 1990 when the king had to give in to pressures for real elections and political parties. ( )