The day Nepalese Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba spoke to Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee about declaring Emergency in Nepal was also the day Krishna Bahadur Mahara, chief negotiator for Nepal's Maoists, flew into Delhi. He was here to meet his comrades-and there are enough of them in India and the neighbourhood to begin worrying even the unflappable George Fernandes, India's defence minister.

SPREADING RED: Maoist attacks in Nepal coincided with those in India

Mahara returned to Kathmandu a day before Emergency was promulgated in Nepal on November 26, and immediately disappeared. Meanwhile in India, the Maoist Communist Council (MCC) held an "open trial" of three men before a crowd of 5,000 in Ambikapur district in Chhattisgarh. The men were tried for misusing the MCC's name for monetary gains. They were beaten into confessing their crime. A death sentence was passed and the three were promptly killed. In Andhra Pradesh, the People's War Group (PWG) chose more high-profile targets. A granite unit belonging to Union Minister of State for Defence U.V. Krishnam Raju was attacked. The Heritage Milk chilling unit owned by Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu's family was blown up. Other targets included a Tata Tea unit and a manufacturing facility of Coca-Cola. Orissa had a state minister's house attacked. Was it a coincidence that all this should happen at a time when the Maoists in Nepal battled the Nepal Army, which is receiving support from India? Did Mahara's visit have something to do with the events?

The Indian Government banned the PWG and MCC under the controversial POTO. Soon after, the responsibility for monitoring the entire 735-km Indo-Nepal open border in Bihar was handed over to the Special Services Bureau (SSB) and the state Government was asked to cooperate with it in keeping a watch on the Maoists. Nine SSB battalions comprising 8,000 jawans were moved to eight north Bihar districts adjoining the international border. The Defence Ministry has also decided to deploy the army to check any attempt by Maoist guerrillas from Nepal to sneak into India. According to Fernandes two more army stations will be set up in the Bihar.

The action has come, as always, belatedly. For some time now, intelligence reports had been talking of Maoist outfits in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal working towards a coordinated campaign against the governments in all these countries. They have formed an umbrella organisation called the Co-ordination Committee of the Maoist Parties and Organisations of South Asia (ccomposa) to closely monitor and synergise the activities of nine guerrilla outfits in South Asia. These organisations include the MCC, PWG, Revolutionary Communist Centre of India (ML) and the RCCI (Maoist) in India, the CPN (maoists) in Nepal, the Maoists Punargathan Kendra and Bangladesh Samyabadi Party in Bangladesh and the Communist Party of Ceylon (Maoists) in Sri Lanka. These outfits have established strong ties with United Liberation Front of Asom too.

The Maoist groups are not isolated fronts but are part of a multilayered, international network. Like Nepal's Maoists, the PWG and MCC are affiliates of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), a London-based umbrella organisation of Maoists and narcoterrorists the world over. According to the Executive Intelligence Report, RIM has strong ties with drug cartels, including the Afghansis in Afghanistan and the São Paulo Forum of South America. Organisations that formally belong to RIM include some of the most brutal narcoterrorist gangs in the world, like Peru's Shining Path.

Closely allied to RIM are the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA)-both ruthless killer gangs that finance their activities through opium trafficking, in partnership with the Afghansis and Pakistani groups. Both the PKK and ASALA were considered important pawns in RIM's plans for geopolitical destabilisation in the southern tier of the former Soviet Union. ASALA ostensibly fought for a "Greater Armenia" to be carved out of sections of Turkey and Azerbaijan, while the PKK pushed for a separatist Kurdistan, culled from Iranian, Turkish and Iraqi territories.

Chilling facts about the operations and the international connections of RIM too have started coming out. The EIR pointed out that Sikh separatists who assassinated prime minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984 were among the leading RIM allies in South Asia. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which masterminded the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi on May 20, 1991, was another RIM ally and a crucial component in the region's burgeoning guns-for-drugs trade. These groups are also part of the Afghansi apparatus, and both groups attended the founding conference of RIM in London in March 1984.

However, in its publications and declarations RIM claims to be "an international political formation which attempts to regroup the Maoists within the International Communist Movement". For years, its headquarters and publishing operations were located in Russell House in Nottingham, England, named after Bertrand Russell. RIM's journal, A World to Win, was published for years by Russell Press, an affiliate of the one-worldist Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.