Interview with Basanta, Politburo Member, Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
Q. You said there is class struggle in the making of the new constitution. Can you elaborate which classes are aligned in to Nepal to backwards from the marching forward and how it is reflected in the expression of the new constitution. How they are placed in different parties? Which are the parties totally retrograde?
A. Constitution is a political document that guides the state power of the given country to drive forward. Like the state power, constitution is also relative to a certain class, oppressor or the oppressed. At one point of the people’s war, the Constituent Assembly came into being as a political tactic to drive forward the unfinished task of new democratic revolution in Nepal. The classes, which were fighting militarily during people’s war, are now clashing ideologically and politically in the Constituent Assembly. The front of class struggle has definitely changed but not the objective.
With the demolition of monarchy, feudalism has become weak in Nepal. The comprador bourgeois has acquired upper hand in the state power. However, the characteristic of the state power has not changed yet. The contradiction formed of the entire people of oppressed class, nation, region and sex on the one side and the comprador and bureaucratic bourgeoisie, which is leading the reactionary state power, on the other, is the principal contradiction. It is manifested now in the Constituent Assembly too. To write a constitution that paves the way forward to resolving the basic contradictions emerged out of semi-feudal and semi-colonial condition of Nepal and restructuring the state power accordingly is the task our party is trying to accomplish from the Constituent Assembly. However, two-line struggle seems to be sharp on the content of the constitution.
It is principally the class not a party, we are confronting with, in the Constituent Assembly. However, the ideological and political line of a party represents the interest of a certain class. In this sense, we have to struggle with the parties too. The Nepali Congress, a section of UML and some parties from Madhesh represent the interest of comprador and bureaucratic bourgeoisie and feudalism in Nepal. So we have sharp contention with them in the Constituent Assembly. Continue reading
Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle 