Nepal Maoist army denies training Indian peers

KATHMANDU - The guerrilla army of Nepal’s opposition Maoist party Tuesday denied a report in the Indian media that had claimed that “hundreds” of Indian Maoists were being trained in Nepal.

Nanda Kishore Pun, who led the Maoists’ “People’s Liberation Army” (PLA) into a 10-year war against the government before his party signed a peace agreement in 2006, issued a statement Tuesday, in an unusual gesture, refuting a report in an Indian daily that has been creating ripples in Nepal.

Pun, known as Pasang during the civil war, said the PLA condemned the report as “deliberately erroneous and imaginary”.

Pasang said at a time Nepal remained gripped by a crisis and had been unable to form a new government and the ruling parties were flouting the peace pact that had promised to assimilate the PLA into the national army, the report, which smacked of “deliberate and planned propaganda”, was a cause for serious concern.

The Maoist “general” said his party feared that the Indian government was abetting the instability in Nepal to derail the peace process and the drafting of a new constitution.

The propaganda, he said, could be an effort to create an excuse for greater Indian intervention in Nepal.

The report had said that Oct 5, India’s home minister had sent a note to the officials of eight Indian states that were the hardest hit by India’s Maoist insurgency.

These were West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh.

The report claimed that June 28, a group of six Indian Maoists had crossed over to Malangawa, the main town in Sarlahi district on the Indo-Nepal border, and joined 20 combatants who were being trained by the PLA.

It also alleged that over 200 Indian Maoists were training in Nepal under the supervision of Indian Naxalite leaders and LeT members.

Nepal’s Maoist party, which returned to mainstream politics in 2006 and fought an election two years later successfully to form a coalition government, says while as a communist party it sympathises with all communist parties worldwide, it has no links with the Indian Maoists, who have been banned as terrorist organisations in India.

Since the end of the “People’s War”, the PLA, which has a strength of over 19,000 fighters, has been confined in 28 camps supervised by a UN agency, the UN Mission in Nepal.

(Sudeshna Sarkar can be contacted at sudeshna.s@ians.in)