Its present chief, Nanda Kishore Pun Pasang, is battling with the government headed by his former supreme commander Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda.
He has announced that the PLA will hire nearly 12,000 new combatants even though it violates the peace pact the Maoists signed in 2006.The agreement said neither PLA nor the Nepalese Army (NA) would make any new recruitment.
“The ruling five parties have violated the pact and the Nepal Army (NA) has violated it,” Pasang says by way of justification.
The row started last year after the over 90,000-strong NA moved to recruit personnel to ‘lower levels’. It is its third recruitment drive in three years.
Army spokesman Brigadier Ramindra Chhetri asserts that the army did not hire additional men. It only sought to fill the positions left vacant due to retirements, resignations and casualties in accordance with constitutional provisions.
With a Maoist government now the NA’s third recruitment bid has ran into trouble.
Both the PLA and Defence Minister Ram Bahadur Thapa Badal are stoutly opposing the Army plans. In fact, Thapa has threatened to sack the NA chief if the recruitment continued.
Prachanda has reportedly reached an agreement with the NA and announced that the state army will stop additional recruitment but keep the new appointments it has already made. The move did not go down well with the PLA, which said it has opened its own fresh recruitment, seeking able-bodied men and women above 18 years.
Observers see in the belligerent PLA mood, a threat to Prachanda, who had survived a challenge to his leadership in the party last year. There is frustration in PLA ranks who are housed in makeshift for three years now with the promise that they would find a berth in the NA.
There is no unanimity in the Constituent Assembly on the integration of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) into Army and other security organisations. There are sharp divisions within the ruling coalition as well as in the opposition parties on how to proceed with this integration process.
While one camp is for full integration of the PLA into the Army the opposing view is that the former guerrillas should be sent to the para-military forces. On its part the Army Establishment has put up a unity of purpose to resist the integration.
The ruling Maoists may like to adopt the Chinese model where the ideologically-charged Peoples Liberation Army is the sole defender of the country’s communist ideologies and the party’s foreign policy postures.
The other example before the Maoists is of Pakistan Army’s Islamisation by Zia-ul-Haq and his successors. Nearer home, in Bangladesh, Jamaat-e-Islami sympathisers were recruited into the army and para-military forces like Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) on a large scale during the seven-year rule of Begum Zia-led BNP-Jamaat government.
At one stage, the Jamaat leaders themselves have boasted that more than 40% of Army and para-military forces are the group’s sympathisers. The result was increasing Islamisation of the society and ability of the Jamaat to instigate a ‘mutiny’ within the BDR to carry out a massive killing of senior Army officers on February 25 – 26.
Whatever example, Nepal Maoists follow, it is bound create problems for the government in Kathmandu.
