At a Kathmandu rally where Comrade Prachanda was seen weighed down with strings of congratulatory marigold around his neck, the rallying cry was of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Prachandaism’. While the Maoist supremo has nurtured a personality cult within the party, running a guerrilla organisation as an ideologue and being the prime minister of a nation shares little in common, writes Mahtab Haider

My main thrust is that I hate revisionism. I seriously hate revisionism. And I never compromise with revisionism. I fought and fought again with revisionism. I hate revisionism. I seriously hate revisionism.
   Pushpa Kamal Dahal (Prachanda), chairman, Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), in an interview published in Revolutionary Worker, February 2000
   First there is no independent and authentic account of events in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge available so far. Whatever is emanating from the Western media seems highly exaggerated to us.
   Dr Baburam Bhattarai, Maoist second-in-command, in an email interview with the Washington Times, 2002
   We have said that, ultimately, the process of destruction is not only a process of destruction, it is also a process of construction. Without destruction there will not be construction, as Mao and other great leaders have said. But which is principal? After the initiation [of the ‘People’s War’] we said, for us, destruction is principal, construction is secondary. And when we reach the point of seizing and exercising real power, at that point, questions of construction will be the main point. But even then, there will be the point that without destruction there can be no construction.
   Pushpa Kamal Dahal (Prachanda), chairman, Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), in an interview published in Revolutionary Worker, February 2000
   
   THE choices that confront ‘Comrade Prachanda’ and his Maoist high-command as they ready themselves to take up key posts in Nepal’s government are essentially between construction and destruction. Few had predicted that the former rebels who have waged a 10-year violent insurgency that has seen 14,000 killed (admittedly most of them by state security agencies) would emerge victorious in the constituent assembly polls on April 10. As it stands now, with vote counting expected to continue for another week, the Maoists already have a significant lead over the other parties and are expected to pick the posts of prime minister, home minister and foreign minister in the new government that will rewrite Nepal’s constitution. Of the 224 seats that are elected through a winner-takes-all system, the Maoists have won 119. Of the remaining constituencies in the 601-seat parliament which are elected on proportional representation, the Maoists already have a 33 per cent vote.
   But the ideologues who had once dismissed the Cambodian Khmer Rouge genocide as exaggerations by the Western media and demanded Nepal cut all ties to the imperialist United States suddenly find themselves in a position where they can be held accountable to their ambitious talk. As easy as it has been for them to employ radical rhetoric against the often floundering and corrupt Nepali establishment, it will now be their turn to prove they are any different. Signs that the Maoists are embracing this august responsibility with a view to tact rather than dogma are already evident in the few public statements that Prachanda has made. For one, he has said that the people should not have any reason to doubt his and his party’s commitment to multi-party democracy, and he has made significant political overtures to his two mainstream rivals the CPN (UML) and the Nepali Congress, who have both dominated elected governments since Nepal saw democracy restored in 1991. Prachanda has also said that his government will look to foreign investments for developing Nepal’s tremendous hydroelectric potential, and that his new government will maintain equidistant ties with India and China. Clearly any distaste that Prachanda had for ‘comprador capitalist dogs’, ‘revisionists’ and ‘imperialists’ has already been assigned to the backburner as the Maoists ready to take power in Nepal.
   Much has been written in the past week about election results that the BBC has described as an ‘electoral thunderbolt’ that even took the Maoists by surprise. What made millions of Nepalis turn out at the voting centres and vote for these former rebels whose ‘people’s war’ was often financed and sustained with grain and money seized from them and fought by their sons and daughters press-ganged into combat? If the pervasive economic misery and poverty of ordinary Nepalis was unbearable because of the exploitation by the high castes and capitalists of Kathmandu in the decades preceding the war, it was worsened to a great degree by the violence and the state response it elicited. As the Maoist insurgency slowly spread from district to district in rural Nepal since 1996, so did the Maoist high command lose much of the tight control that it might have exercised on its cadre in the initial years. In fact, the April uprising of 2006 that overthrew King Gyenandra’s autocratic rule – largely through cooperation between the mainstream parties and the Maoists – came as a boon for the latter, giving the rebels a dignified chance to end their insurgency that was fast spinning out of control and becoming aimless violence at the extremities. Towards the end, the Maoists did indeed control large swathes of Nepal, from where the state and its bureaucracy had retreated, but the high command would have been worried that the young militia who enforced the Maoists doctrine in the field may not abide by any pact their leaders’ might sign to end the insurgency. Now, two years later, on another fortuitous April, Prachanda and his colleagues are the new establishment in Nepal.
   This outcome is no doubt a result of the regime of intimidation and terror that the Maoists have enforced in the Nepali countryside for the past 10 years, often beheading Nepali Congress grassroots leaders in public accusing them of being part of the landed establishment which exploited poor Nepalis (which of course they were to a great extent). The youth cadre of the Maoists, known as the Young Communist League, have been active for the past year canvassing support for the party and making it tough for rival parties to operate in areas they have come to control over the past decade. But it would be a grave injustice to say that the Maoists have won these elections, dubbed free and fair by observers, through the use of such intimidation only. That would not explain this terrific round of victories in Kathmandu, where the state is strong. It is the Nepali people, underestimated by political pundits who might think their political acumen is poor because of their poverty and illiteracy, who have granted this almost unanimous mandate to the former rebels. There may be two reasons for this. The first is that the NC and the CPN (UML) have a poor track record in being able to give ordinary Nepalis the minimum prosperity that they have demanded in the past two decades, and the people are tired of their skirmishing and acrimony that has seen a string of unstable coalitions ruling Nepal in the past. Supplementarily, the people are also keen to give the Maoists a chance to deliver on their talk, and the Maoists have, to a nominal extent, proved that they are committed to their goals of ethnic and gender parity in caste-riven Nepal.
   In the run-up to the elections, the Maoists fielded by far the most ethnically diverse group of candidates compared to the other parties, featuring 11 Dalits, 73 Janajatis and 63 Madhesis. Similarly, while the other parties fielded women candidates in constituencies that they had little chance of winning, only 26 each from the NC and the CPN (UML), the Maoists nominated 42 women. These are positive signs and bode well if they are not mere political stunts. But lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the Nepali people have delivered their verdict in favour of the Maoists also possibly because they want peace. Because they want an end to the abductions, the violence, the rapes, the murders and the destruction of the social fabric of rural Nepal (more than 200,000 people have been displaced by the 10-year conflict), by both the Maoists and the army.
   But there are ominous signs as well. On April 12, at a Kathmandu rally where Comrade Prachanda was seen weighed down with strings of congratulatory marigold around his neck, the rallying cry was of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Prachandaism’. While the Maoist supremo has nurtured a personality cult within the party (towards the end of the insurgency, schoolchildren were often abducted by the hundreds and indoctrinated in the “Prachanda Path’), running a guerrilla organisation as an ideologue and being the prime minister of a nation shares little in common. The failure to make that transition from guerrilla leader to statesman has engineered the fall of numerous political giants who often led successful liberation movements against colonialism, or even socialist revolutions that sought economic justice.
   Unfortunately, if Prachanda does indeed become amenable to political compromises that might violate the dogma of the Prachanda Path, it remains to be seen how amenable his cadre will be in obeying a leader who foreswore ‘revisionism’ and reneged when he came to power. Also, Nepal’s peace process is by no means over – in fact, only now is the nation starting to take stock of its wounds. The challenge for the Maoists will be to disarm their 23,000 strong ‘people’s army’ and to level the playing field for future democratic elections. Their demand till now has been that their militia be absorbed into the Nepalese Army, a proposition that the military establishment has rejected outright. If this does not happen, will the militia be willing to lay down their arms and go back to the same villages where they pillaged and tortured with the power that the barrel of a gun bestowed on them?
   During my time in Nepal three years ago, covering the ‘people’s war’ for this newspaper, I came across a documentary called The Killing Terraces, by Nepali journalist Dhruba Basnet, which featured among its interviewees, an 11-year-old orphan Dilli Bishwakorma. Dilli – we are told – lives with and looks after his younger brother and sister. His two elder brothers left to join the Maoists after their parents died. This was how the dialogue in the documentary went:
   Dilli: I feel like drinking the blood of their hearts.
   Interviewer: Why?
   Dilli: They killed my mother and father.
   Interviewer: Do you know who killed them?
   (Dilli nods)
   Interviewer: Who?
   Dilli: The police
   This conversation represents the kinds of scars that will need to be salved for the next thirty months for Nepal to find closure to their people’s war. The responsibility is a great one, and the onus is on Prachanda and his colleagues to find a new language of reconciliation that will contrast sharply with their radical violent language of the past, and still not lose credibility with the Maoist cadre. In this single regard, above all others, the new Maoist government in Kathmandu cannot afford to fail.
   mahtabhaider@gmail.com