In 1996 the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) launched its ‘People’s War’, waged against the government and what its instigators saw as over 200 years of feudal exploitation. The Maoist campaign lasted for a decade and was aimed at overthrowing the Hindu monarchy and the existing unresponsive political system and replacing it with a new democratic platform. The war left a legacy of some 16, 000 dead¹ and around 1,400 people unaccounted for.² Initially dismissed by the political centre as a peripheral phenomenon, confined mainly to a few areas in the far-western region, the Maoist movement started to grow at a staggering speed. By 2006 when the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed between the CPN-M and the government of Nepal, the CPN-M was in control of approximately 70 per cent of Nepal’s countryside. 

As the strategy of the CPN-M was to wage the war through politicising Nepal’s rural population, the movement instantiated complex changes in social and cultural structures (de Sales, 2003; Zharkevich, 2019). The CPN-M established ‘base areas’ and ‘people’s governments’ where it had defeated the state forces (Adhikari, 2014; Shneiderman and Turin, 2004). The movement drew most of its cadres from the rural youth and historically marginalised ethnic and caste groups, and between 30-40 per cent of those who fought in the People’s Liberation Army were women. As part of its strategy, the CPN-M propagated an agenda of women’s liberation that over the course of the war evolved into a nuanced gender ideology, translating to concrete campaigns aimed at mobilising rural women (Yadav, 2016; Riley, 2022).  

The People’s War had a disproportionate impact on Nepal’s already marginalised populations – not only because the war was mainly fought in rural areas – but also because people from marginalised ethnic and caste groups were perceived to be potential ‘sympathisers’ of the movement, and as a result became targets of the violence perpetuated by the state forces, including enforced disappearances, extra judicial killings, and sexual violence (Robins, 2013; Rawski and Sharma, 2012). Whilst persons were also made to disappear by the Maoists, the majority of disappearances were the responsibility of the state forces, appearing to have been used as a strategy by military commanders at several levels in the hierarchy (Robins, 2013: 68; OHCHR, 2008).

The Maoist movement had not only succeeded in taking over most of Nepal’s countryside but had also illustrated the extent of the historical inequalities between urban and rural Nepal, between the Tarai (the southern plains) and the Kathmandu Valley, and along the lines of caste, ethnicity and gender (Gellner, 2008; Sijapati, 2013; Tamang, 2009; Hangen, 2010). The extent of the change that followed the war was exemplified in the Constituent Assembly that was elected in 2008, and which in its first sitting abolished the over 240 years old monarchy. The CA was the most representative elected body in Nepal’s history and the CPN-M gained a clear victory in elections moving from a fringe party of the radical left to one of the major political forces in Nepal. Whilst the 2008 was in many ways a watershed moment, the promises laid out in the Peace Agreement to address the issue of transitional justice, including the fate of the disappeared, did not materialise (Bhandari, Chaudhary and Chaudhary, 2018).

After the Peace Agreement was signed in 2006, Nepal witnessed an increased international presence, including initiation of the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) charged as part of its mandate to ‘verify’ Maoist combatants (Bleie and Shestra, 2013). The contested questions of what to do with the two standing armies (PLA and the Nepal Army) and how to confront the violent past (structural violence stemming from historical forms of exclusion as well as wartime human rights violations) were increasingly approached through familiar frameworks and activities that constitute ‘peacebuilding’. 

It is against this background that the podcast explores the stories of women who fought in the PLA and the women who are active in the victims’ movement, organising around the issue of disappearances. By 2013 when the interviews were conducted, the women activists I met had spent often a decade waiting to know about what happened to their loved ones – and a decade organising. The women I met who had fought in the PLA had recently left the ‘cantonments’ – semi-temporary camps that had been set up as part of the peace agreement. Many of them had spent a nearly seven years in an out of the cantonments, before taking on ‘voluntary retirement – a cash package – and were no starting to rebuild their lives.