UCPN (Maoist) leader Hisila Yami was invited to speak at a programme as part of Martin Chautari’s “March as Women’s Month” discussion series, held in collaboration with Chaukhat—a newly established feminist group. The talk was titled “Structural Constraints of Women’s Liberation,” according to her request. However, while the organisers and audience had expected Yami the political theorist and strategist for women’s rights to speak, it was Yami the politician who was present.

The politician Yami

Yami the politician was awe-inspiring. Oozing charisma, she maintained eye contact with the audience at all times, answering questions with warmth, humour and charm. At the end, she shook hands, took time to speak with attendees and insisted on a group photo with her Ipad. As a politician, Yami also showed her prowess at dodging difficult questions and responding selectively to issues raised. Given her party’s current internal and external challenges, the nature and tone of the talk was in one sense understandable. But the audience was visibly, and audibly, not happy. Two points were particularly contested. One was the insistence on women’s rights as secondary to class as “gender is not an ideology” in Yami’s words. And the other was the unwillingness to engage with issues of intersectionality—class, gender, race, ethnicity, age, religion, etc. Based on a basic Marxist reading, there was little room, and importantly willingness, in Yami’s talk for a dialogue.

The issue of dialogue was important in that at the most fundamental level, most of the audience was on her side. To be clear, the people present were not fawning acolytes. There were many attendees who abhorred the focus on the militarisation of women and the violence of war as a means to achieve rights. There were also those who were disappointed and angry at Yami’s alleged corruption and the treatment of female ex-combatants in the post-war period.  

However, without question, the Maoist party and Yami—through her various writings while underground (as Comrade Parvati)—have made an enormous impact on the women’s movement and women’s rights in Nepal. Most of the audience had read her work, noted the real strength and power of the Maoist’s women’s wing during the conflict, relative to the women’s wings of other parties and seen the intended and unintended impact on women’s rights in Nepal. As Gagan Thapa, youth leader of the Nepali Congress, stated a few years ago in the context of Maoist pressure to respond to women’s issues, “The Maoists are making us travel in 10 years a path we would have travelled in 50.” Of all of this, the audience was very aware.

Using this as the base, what had been anticipated was an engagement with Yami on the changed circumstances and its consequences for the potential for women’s emancipation and the gaining of rights for women. Yet, while Yami spoke on the need for new thinking within her party as a whole, there was no mention of what this meant in terms of women. A question on the present strength of the women in the party (given its history) was artfully avoided. There was thus no opportunity to understand how the women’s wing—so incredibly powerful and self-critical during the war (negotiating directly with the state and undertaking an internal survey during the war on the extent to which women face discrimination within the party) had fared so badly during the transition.

The Zetkin experience

If the theorist and strategist Yami had been present, a larger and less defensive engagement might have been possible. Even if more recent literature on gender and intersectionality did not form the bases of discussion, there were other avenues. For example, Clara Zetkin—key in the establishment of International Women’s Day and much cited in Yami’s writings and Maoist literature on women’s rights—had stressed the importance of women’s groups within the party.  Zetkin saw such groups as crucial for maximising women’s interests and representation, allowing women’s strategic recruitment and involvement in the socialist cause and providing a space where women could learn to think for themselves and make decisions on their own. Zetkin was one of the chief promoters of a separate women’s bureau within the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and within the Second International.

Zetkin also stressed, “If the socialist women’s movement is to achieve its full outward and inward success, it must, with all firm organisational connection to the movement as a whole, nevertheless possess a certain measure of independence and freedom of movement...If the male comrades are not judicious enough to provide this vital necessity, it must be fought for.” Yami stressed in her talk the need to give political training to women in their party. But there was no mention of the need for political training for men in the party on sexual prejudice and discrimination. Neither was there any talk on strategies to build up women’s wings for women’s rights within the party.

Women in parties

Zetkin’s own political experience within the SPD is illuminating. She was passed over as Party Executive for a more ‘accommodating’ female and the party abolished the Women’s Conference and in 1912, dissolved the Women’s Bureau. The long-term consequence of these moves, among other things, was a serious decline in the percentage of women in positions of real responsibility relative to their percentage in the party.

If there are lessons to be learnt from Nepali and international history—including  Zetkin’s own life—it is that the role of women in the Maoist and other parties must be a key concern for the women’s movement. And as importantly, a wider and more serious engagement by women in political parties with women with differing ideological inclinations must be seen as a strategic necessity in Nepal today.   

Tamang is a political scientist