Rightist Communists?
In a recent meeting with the donor community representatives, Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai said his party is a “rightist communist” party. In several occasions earlier, Bhattarai and his party chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal alias Prachanda had claimed that theirs is a 21 st century Communist party, much different from the other communist parties.
But they have not elaborated on their ideas and it seems to be a strategy to keep everybody guessing. Though this is a good strategy in marketing management to generate curiosity among prospective clients, it is bound to fail if the suspense is too stretched. 
The Maoists’ delay in making their detailed economic philosophy public is hampering the Nepali economy. Big domestic and foreign investors have not made any investment commitments so far as they are only continuing their existing activities. And whatever new investment commitments are made are very marginal, much below the expectations the people had after the success of the April revolution.
In this situation, the Maoists must answer some questions plaguing the public mind. For example, how different are the economic policies of the CPN-Maoist from the traditional Marxist economic theories? What changes are there in view of the debacle of the Soviet Union and the quick change in the economic policies of China ?
No matter how changed the Communist philosophy may be in the present context, it is still based on the shaky foundations of the same Marxist theory of surplus value which in turn is based on the long discarded subsistence theory of wages. Thus the Marxist economic philosophy is now based only on some emotional issues rather than on sound economic theories.
Going by their rhetoric, the Nepali Maoists appear similar to the Communists of Central and South America , who are strong believers in the dependency theory. Does it mean that the CPN-Maoist will adopt similar policies regarding foreign investors and globalisation as adopted by the South American Leftist leaders such as Venezuela ’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia ’s Evo Morales?
Connected to this are other two questions: If Nepal is the dependent country or ‘periphery’, in the dependency theory, which is the ‘core’ country that persistently (though unconsciously) tries to keep Nepal dependent? What can the CPN-Maoist do to successfully remove this dependency syndrome if it comes to power? According to the Maoists’ earlier stance, the ‘core’ country was India, but that has changed now as the Maoist leaders have recently started singing India’s praises. So, if they no longer believe in this dependency theory, why are they still repeating the same old prescriptions of dependency theorists? It may be recalled that the remedies suggested by the dependency theorists are: import substituting industrialisation (ISI), protection of domestic markets by import controls, restricting foreign investment and foreign exchange controls. Though Cuba and Jamaica once successfully implemented these policies when they received massive support from the Soviet Union, the empirical evidence from everywhere else has proven these policies to be utter failures. Instead, there are many other small countries like Nepal which were successful by following almost total liberalisation and being outward-oriented.
