With peace overtures between Premier Deuba and Comrade Prachanda hogging the media limelight (including in this paper) other political games being played in the country have receded somewhat. But the rumoured unity between two major factions of Nepal Communist Party-the UML led by Madhav Nepal and the ML led by Bamdev Gautam-is of no less long term significance. After all, put together, they would be a formidable force and a challenge to the Maoists-particularly because Comrade Prachanda proposes to play outside the constitutional arena.
Maoists have the guns and the power of intimidation, but it's still the UML and ML that have cadres all over the country, committed to the politics of the ballot rather than of the gun. In the end, even the cadres prepared by Prachanda, when tired of life in the jungle, have to drift into the arms of a future UML-ML combine.
Even though initial Gautam-Nepal meetings have been encouraging, unity between the estranged comrades will be difficult. No less difficult than the possibility of divorcees consenting to return to the conjugal bed. One knows the other's dirty secrets, and the skeletons in the cupboard are rattling. They have also got used to living alone.
Neither has the electorate forgotten their mutual mudslinging just before the last parliamentary elections. Today, if the flag at the Balkhu Darbar looks tattered and discoloured, blame it on bickering comrades who attacked it with hammers and sickles.
What was it that prompted Prachanda to grab the gun six years ago? There are as many answers to that question as there are astrologers on the sidewalks of Ratna Park. Everything from rampant poverty, unemployment among Nepal's youth , a very high failure rate in SLC examinations, corruption in high places, conspirators in the court, instigation from abroad, and the process of globalisation have been blamed for the rise of left extremism in the country.
No doubt, these are causal factors that make people adopt desperate means without pausing to consider the consequences of their actions. But the collapse of the former united UML is no less responsible for the rapid rise of the Maoists and the acceptability that they have gained in certain sections of society. It also explains why disenchanted cadres are drifting to the extremity.
Obsessed with gaining and then holding power, the leaders of the UML forgot the very reason for their party's existence: spearheading a political movement for social justice. As soon as that ideological anchor was lost, the disintegration of the party was inevitable. With Bamdev Gautam, Sahana Pradhan and the Mainali brothers deciding to break away, there was a sudden vacuum at the highest levels of the party-based political system.
Prachanda and Baburam Bhattarai could of course have filled that space at the left end of the spectrum while remaining in mainstream politics. But the duo didn't have a credible political organisation, for their party was made up primarily of daydreamers in a trance of Stalinist utopia. Bhattarai and Prachanda also lacked the patience to lead a possibly long-drawn political movement. Both of them grew up in the \'here-and-now' Panchayat days when you associated patience with the decades-long political wilderness to which the Nepali Congress leadership was relegated. Canvassing quietly in the countryside is too effeminate, going around with a gun is far more charismatic.
Unfortunately, guns give control without legitimacy. Winning the genuine support of the people takes time. Once militants come over-ground, they suddenly realise there is no detergent powerful enough to wash away the blood stains of the past. Be it the Naxalites in India or the Shining Path in Peru, gradual demise is the ultimate fate of every armed rebellion fired by the power of hatred alone. Even the comrades that \'cut off' a handful of heads during the Jhapa Movement are today finding it hard to live down that experience.
The world needs radicals of the kind that Dr Martin Luther King Jr called "creative extremists". Like Matrika Yadav of the Maoists themselves, who uncharacteristically (for his party, that is) adopted a very Gandhian method of protest by going on a fast to draw the attention of jail authorities towards the dismal conditions in prisons.
If talks between Maoists and the government are successful-and that's no small \'if'-and the Maoists come above ground, it is likely that we will find them not as big a political force as their terror seems to signify. Once the armed rebellion ends, there will still be the need for a political party like the undivided NCP (UML) to speak on behalf of the downtrodden. The Nepali Congress has lost its socialist moorings, and we need to put our faith in the re-emergence of a truly united Marxist party pursuing a socialist agenda.
That is where the opportunity lies, and the factions of Nepal Communist Party had better seize it before it vanishes as swiftly as it has presented itself. As the leader of the largest faction, primary responsibility for forging a unity between the legitimate leftist forces of the country remains with Comrade Madhav Nepal.
To form a vision, all that Comrade Nepal needs to do is to look at the record of his idols in West Bengal. Indira Gandhi's trusted hatchet man, Sidhartha Shankar Ray, decimated the Naxalites in that state, but the primary beneficiary of Ray's efforts became Communist Party of India (Marxists). It came to power in the state in the seventies, and hasn't been voted out since. Free-market enthusiasts may not have liked Jyoti Basu, but it was under him that the West Bengal government succeeded in substantially reducing the number of people below the official poverty line. Today, Maharashtra may be the richest state in India, but it's CPM's Bengal that has lowest proportion of the official poverty.
Comrade Buddha Dev Bhattacharya, the new Chief Minister of West Bengal, seems to have finally realised his debt to the Naxalites. He has mooted the idea of giving a \'freedom fighter' pension to the surviving Naxalite cadres. Those acolytes of Charu Majumdar who have not either died, or accepted ideological death by becoming apologists for the marketplace, stand to benefit by this grand scheme. Prachanda and Bhattarai may not need the pension when they retire, but the common cadres of the Maoists could do with the money once they throw away the guns and forsake living on extortion.
We all live and learn. Perhaps the left will too. The Maoists are clawing at the door.
