Pushpa Kamal Dahal may think he is the most important player in Nepali politics, but it is his wife Sita (pic, right) who has the final word. Leaders close to the UCPN (M) chairman say he can’t do a thing to prevent her influence on the party. Case in point: their daughter Renu’s election campaign.
A few days before Dasain, Nanda Kishor Pun went to Dahal’s house hoping to get money for door-to-door canvassing and had to watch on as Sita convinced her husband to channel that money into their daughter Renu’s campaign fund instead. It was Sita who proposed that Renu run from Kathmandu and Dahal agreed, choosing to face accusations of nepotism instead of the wrath of his wife.
Five months ago, Sita’s once-favourite daughter-in-law and her son, Prakash Dahal’s, second wife, Srijana Tripathi, poured her frustrations in an interview with a weekly paper, saying Sita turned a blind eye to Prakash’s mistakes.
“I stayed with them even after my husband Prakash had eloped with another woman, but Sita never said a bad word about him,” says Tripathi. “I could never get any love or appreciation from her, so I finally decided to leave after eight months.”
Dahal removed his son from his secretariat and also from the Newa State Committee following the Mt Everest debacle. As always, Sita protested the move, even though her son had opted for it. These days, Prakash goes around with his father as if not a thing happened.
Sita is seven months older than her husband. The two grew up together in Kaski and later in Chitwan after both their parents migrated to the Tarai. Dahal’s uncle proposed to Sita’s family for the two to get married. Dahal was educated and Sita came from a well-off family, it seemed like a reasonable match. Both sides agreed.
Rajendra Maharjan, writer of Janayuda ka nayak, a book on the decade long insurgency, says Sita told him that Dahal and her were like friends and not like a married couple. “We started talking to each other only after a long time. He was shy, I was no better. Each knew the other from childhood, so it was strange when we ended up as husband and wife.”
According to close friends, Sita instantly fell out of favour with her new in-laws. Even when his son was head of government, Dahal’s father Mukti Prasad chose to stay at his granddaughter’s rented apartment in Balkhu and not in Baluwatar. Sita is not on speaking terms with any of her husband’s siblings.
Sita never approved of her husband’s politics. When the Maoists planned an underground war, she cried and pleaded with Dahal against fighting it out. Which is why, in the early days of the revolution, leaders say the chairman was tortured by the situation at home.
After the insurgency began, Dahal took his wife everywhere he went, almost without fail. Sita came with him to Kathmandu when the first police post was attacked in Rolpa in 1996 and then to India three months later when her husband was sheltered there. Upon her insistence, their two daughters were married to Indian civilians in Lucknow. She even managed to force her elder daughter to come to Jalandhar, Punjab during the insurgency.
In his book, senior UCPN (M) leader Baburam Bhattarai admits that Sita could not stand criticism and used her power to distance her husband from those who crossed her. Even central committee members and their wives were not spared. “He could not discourage her from breaking protocol and saying whatever she wanted to other fully committed and responsible comrades,” Bhattarai notes in the same book. Later Bhattarai himself would suggest that Sita be made a part of the central committee.
“She is not a political person but a housewife,” says a Maoist central committee member who has known the Dahals for 19 years.
During the course of this investigation, Nepal tried to get in touch with Sita Dahal but to no avail. Her husband’s secretary defend her by saying: “She was a patient woman who had a huge role to play in the success of the civil war.”