 EDWIN KOO |
Exactly five years ago this week when Prachanda surfaced from his underground life, the mystique granted him a rock star aura. Back then, public ignorance of the big comrade's true nature was only paralleled by one's opinionated stance on the New Nepal. Most in the Nepali diaspora felt that maybe, just maybe, for once here was a guy who was not going to pull wool over our tired eyes. There was an initial reluctance to believe, but jaded Nepalis lapped up the narrative of this Harlequin who came in from the night.
It did not take long for him to charm the cocktail circuit of the local intelligentsia and the emissary enclave into being wide eyed fans of their Encino Man. There was a desperate need to hoist someone up who would rescue us from the nauseating and interminable spectacle of parlour intrigues of petty self-serving demagogues. This mystery knight championed the neglected and exploited, giving voice to the anguish and anger of the downtrodden. We embraced the messenger, even if we opposed the means and abhorred the murder and mayhem he had wrought upon us. Awesome Man was going to lead us to the promised land and save us from ourselves. Or so we thought.
As aging boomers, we've seen our share of revolutions from ganja love hippies, rabid red guards of Mao's minions, to Uncle Ho's rag tag guerillas humiliating the great American War Machine. A decrepit hamlet in North Bengal gave birth to virulent Naxalism and choking a Bhadro Lok West Bengal out of its post-colonial brown sahib utopia.
As students in Calcutta who lived safely within our Jesuit College dorms, Communism was just a distasteful afterthought even if we had to coexist with those guys down in Presidency College who spouted Mar-Eng-Len theories in their khadi kurtas, swilled cheap coffee, smoked unfiltered Charminars and snorted at us in reverse snobbery for our puerile ignorance and bourgeois lifestyles. Kanu and Charuda were their heroes, Che Guevara their poster boy, while we in the hallowed halls of St Xavier's College disseminated the symbolism of Dylan's angst-filled poetry, sang anti-war Woodstock anthems and pondered over what we could do to get an I-20 for a US grad schools.
Back in Nepal, the 1990 street movement supposedly freed us of the dreaded yoke of the Panchayat regime. Mandalays were out and the Bahudaliya Prajatantra was born, and it did look like things were going to get better for a while. The rollercoaster nineties passed by in a haze, and while on the surface it seemed we'd joined the world community of free market economic progress, underneath it all brewed a lava of discontent. The first signs came like little crackers in a distance, and Rolpa and Rukum might as well have been a continent away for those living in the boom of Kathmandu.
The Nepali Congress meanwhile suffered under the weight of its internal wrangling, its leaders corrupted by power, nepotism and plain old greed. Geriatric leaders lost their aura and princes turned into frogs. We saw another major party gain power, mess it up and the musical chair never stopped.
The first decade of the new millennium was long and furious. The king and queen were killed by their deranged son and another king was rushed in his place. The soft-spoken but weak-kneed Birendra killed the myth and mystery of the monarchy was gone. Nothing was sacrosanct any more as our bruised national pride had to swallow the shame in the world stage. The dark figures of the Maoist revolution shadowed us everywhere. They came in from the night and haunted our existence, yet behind the ferocity of their mission, we sensed a righteous motive and it was then that we very grudgingly, in the face of all the contradictory evidence, gave in to Prachanda's smile. He almost fooled us all.
How many times since emerging in Kathmandu in 2006 have we seen him flip-flop on his assurances. He's been caught lying and admitting to his lies in front of an admiring audience of his own young army. He's promised the world on a platter for all who would listen to his vocal charades, threatened fire and brimstone to disbelievers who would dared question his words. He's cried wolf so often that even his own pack growls back at him. As a prime minister elected to office through popular vote, he had the world in his hands but in less than a year he destroyed that faith through triple speak and devious dealings. Prachanda has nobody but himself to blame, no matter how many times he raises the spectre of the Ugly Indian.
The ultimate lesson would be for his own party to mock his words as irrelevant. In a sense, today, that is already happening. The awesome one has now become an awful bore.
Read also:
Budge on the budget, EDITORIAL
Reinstating the state, ANURAG ACHARYA
Eight reasons why, SANJIB SUBBA
