The announcement of Prachanda Path, the 'new' ideological lodestar of our insurgent Maoists, can be construed to mean a number of different things. Firstly, at a more prosaic level, it can be seen as a blatant attempt to put a fresh, nationalistic spin into what undeniably remains a tired, imported revolutionary model. Secondly, it can be interpreted as a shrewd move towards what Umberto Eco calls a 'semiological guerrilla warfare'. Given the tragic association of Maoism in the past century with such monumental follies as the 'great leap forward' and the 'cultural revolution', our Maoist high command's desire to sanitise their bloody insurgency through a clever piece of semiological/linguistic surgery is understandable. But more interestingly, Prachanda Path is perhaps a highly ambitious bid of Chairman Prachanda to ascend Red Olympus and rub shoulders with the likes of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

History tells us that the apotheosis of Communist leaders is generally accompanied by an embarrassment of epithetic riches. A classic example is provided by Pico Iyer, who, during his visit to North Korea in 1990, discovered that the great leader Kim Il Sung was not just a 'great comrade, great man and fighter' to his people, but also a 'great thinker, politician and strategist...a great man and father of the people...the sun of the nation...peerless patriot and national hero...all-triumphant, resolute and incomparable leader...eminent Marxist-Leninist and outstanding military strategist'.

'Prachanda' is already a rather flattering nom de guerre of Pushpa Kamal Dahal, whose own canonisation as signaled by the announcement of the ideological offshoot deserves a special epithetic celebration. At the moment, I can think of only one epithet-one that has the added virtue of resonating with Hindu mythological connotations-capable of doing justice to his newfound, homegrown greatness: The Great Ploughman. Can you think of others?

Ram Limbu
Sydney