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Agrarian Radicalism and Maoism in Nepal For over 10 years the Maoist revolution has been raging in Nepal. Rent by civil war, the country is witnessing the ruin of development efforts that until recently fueled nationalist illusions. The absolutist Hindu monarchies of the Shahs, whose religious and historical roots grow out of a long national past of warring conquest, is living out its last days in the face of the success of a new radicalism which, in scarcely a decade, has transformed farmers who worked the arid mountain soil with swing-ploughs into guerrilla fighters trained to use the Kalashnikov.