Prachanda’s secret life unraveled

Prachanda’s secret life unraveled
ekantipur, 18-Oct-08

In 2006, Anirban Roy was on assignment to report on the April Movement targeting the autocratic regime of King Gyanendra. While in Kathmandu, Roy heard a lot about Maoist chief Prachanda who had stolen the national and international limelight through his avant-garde ideologies.

“Everywhere you went, people talked about the radical communist leader,” he recounts in the preface to the book. “Prachanda was the new epicentre of Nepal's political dynamics.”

The 38-year-old journalist is today the Kathmandu-based correspondent of The Hindustan Times. Though he visited Nepal five times between 2001 and 2006 as a tourist, it was during his sixth visit that he became inquisitive about the persona of the Maoist top brass. He was truly enamoured of the aura of the Maoist chief and his disputable ideology that “gave a voice to the millions of poor and oppressed people” and at the same time “led a bloody civil war killing 13,000 people”.

“The Maoist chief led an underground life for more than 25 years, and piecing together the stories about him and authenticating them were the most difficult part,” he writes. The result, Prachanda: The Unknown Revolutionary, is a work of investigation. The writer has interviewed almost all of Prachanda's close associates and relatives.

The book gives the reader a glimpse into Prachanda's hidden life with rare anecdotes and photographs. A photo of a young Pushpa Kamal Dahal shows him staring coyly and tightly clutching his fists. It goes without saying that he was a determined young man. He was obsessed with books on revolutionary icons such as Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong and Naxalite leader Kanu Sanyal, of whom he considers himself a “self-proclaimed” disciple. In school, he often sneaked into the library or bookstores that imported books on communist ideology from India. In college, he would borrow profusely from teachers, his compatriots and libraries run by socialist states.

His infatuation with communism began from the time he was a school-goer, and he would often bunk classes to participate in communist programmes. Then two things happened that would shape his communist beliefs—the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China initiated by Mao Zedong and the Naxalbari uprising in India headed by Kanu Sanyal. While the Naxalbari movement next door provided Prachanda moral support to envisage a similar kind of revolution in Nepal, Mao Zedong's strategy of a prolonged People's War taught him the benefits of setting up bases in the countryside and surrounding the cities.

At 19, Prachanda was already giving lectures to locals on the new theories of communism. Upon his graduation from the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science (IAAS) at Rampur, he was already a pukka communist. Life took a U-turn when his family became unable to pay for his university education. He could not even secure a government job, and had to be satisfied with being a teacher. He was never fond of teaching, however, and he kept hopping from one teaching job to another. Teaching allowed him much free time which he could devote to the burgeoning communist movement. The radical communist leader even took a job in a U.S. sponsored development project for three months owing to acute poverty.

After he was appointed general secretary of the All Nepal Youth Organization headed by Matrika Yadav, Pushpa Kamal Dahal for the first time campaigned openly in support of the communist movement and against the draconian panchayat regime. The police soon raided his house on the charge of inciting youths against the panchayat regime, and he was forced to go underground. He was 27. After that, he constantly shifted from one hideout to another with his wife and four young children.

The first thing Prachanda did after becoming general secretary was convince his father to sell their house and land at Bhimsen Nagar to raise money for the party. He was lucky to have a wife who did not mind surviving on rice and green vegetable soup and cooking on a single kerosene stove. Despite the difficulties and hardships, his children also have fond memories of him. His youngest child Prakash recalls how his father was different from other fathers. “He never had to hurry in the morning to go to the office. Instead, he stayed home reading books or discussing something with friends.”

Prachanda's disillusionment with the Nepali political system was incited by ceaseless political squabbling for power and negligence of the plight of the rural poor. He dreamt of destroying government institutions and replacing them with a revolutionary peasant regime. He wholeheartedly followed the methods laid down by Peru's Shining Path rebels. Prachanda dealt with dissent ruthlessly, hence there was a tremendous rise in extrajudicial killings, kangaroo courts and cases of torture.

Unfortunately, Roy makes no mention of the wrong ways that Prachanda allowed his cadres to pursue to get their way. From the start of the civil war, Maoist cadres have indiscriminately indulged in threats, extortion and intimidation. They have tortured, maimed and killed hundreds of people who refused to do as they said. Prachanda has described the People's War as the means to end feudal structures. Ironically, the city-centred elite whom the Maoist view as feudal have remained untouched by the civil war.

Despite the flaws in his strategies, Prachanda received immense support from people at the periphery -- Dalits, the socially marginalized and minorities—who have been historically oppressed by the establishment. There are still a substantial number of Nepalis who see the Maoists as their messiah—the only alternative to the old, repressive social order.

The unexpected performance of the CPN-Maoist in the Constituent Assembly election has brought Prachanda to the forefront of politics. He has made it to the prime minister's chair and accepted that there is no alternative to multiparty democracy in the country. However, there are challenges ahead. Now he has to deliver peace, stability and economic prosperity to a nation reeling under acute poverty. The people have willingly given him the mandate to draft a new constitution and initiate new economic development. If he fails to deliver, the euphoria will die down.

The best thing I like about the book is the conciseness with which it has approached the life of the rebel leader. Descriptions of the battles between Maoists and security forces given from a Maoist perspective also make captivating reading. The best account is that of the attack on Beni Bazaar in which the Maoists destroyed the Kali Prasad barracks, the district police office and the district administration office. They also took 33 persons captive besides seizing a huge quantity of arms and ammunition.

There are two things that I cannot fail to mention. First, Roy has concentrated on only one side of the coin: Prahanda's charming personality. The writer has showered him with praise and justified the bloody civil war as the best way to establish a new Nepal. What he needs to do is also dig up Prachanda's ruthless side, the factors that prompted him to choose armed struggle and if a bloodbath is indeed a prerequisite for revolution. Second, as Roy has admitted in an interview to The Hindustan Times, the book that he has written is merely a skeleton. There are many autobiographical elements that are missing, and Roy needs to do more research to give the skeleton flesh and blood in the subsequent editions.

Reviewed by Monica Regmi