|
The greetings to the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist), held from February 16-21 in Butwal, read in part thus: "The eighth Congress of the CPN (UML) is taking place at a crucial juncture. The entire world is in the grip of the most severe financial crisis in the past few decades - one that was termed as more severe than the Great Depression of the 1930s. What had started as a crisis in the financial sector had engulfed the real economy resulting in the closure of many manufacturing units and many more facing closures. Industrial outputs worldwide are witnessing a rapid fall. Millions of people are losing their jobs and according to the latest reports of the ILO more than 50 million would join the ranks of the unemployed...
“All the apologists of capitalism are straining their nerves to ensure that capitalism comes out of the present morass with minimum damage. Towards this end, they are even ready to increase the role of state in managing the economy, an anathema according to their own 'sacred' philosophy not long ago. This may be a paradox for capitalism's ideologues, but the fact remains that the State of the ruling classes has always defended and enlarged the avenues for super private profits. “The objective conditions existing today are opening up possibilities and it is imperative upon us to utilise them. We have to intervene effectively to advance the movement for social emancipation and end the exploitation of man by man. No amount of reform of capitalism can make it an exploitation free system. The only way for humanity's liberation from this exploitation is the establishment of a socialist system. The current capitalist crisis tellingly demonstrates the vacuity of the “eternality” of capitalism.” The communist parties of Nepal, major or minor, are showing that they are under the pressure of history to define and redefine themselves as potent political forces. The eighth congress of the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML) elected Jhalanath Khanal as its president and a jumbo central committee. It came at a time when Girijababu, leader of the oldest democratic Nepali Congress, still keeps his party under his thumb; and the Unified CPN-Maoist has been electing a body of leadership on the basis of inner party consensus leaving some inner dents and some leaders forming splinter groups.  | |
But what the neighbours and the world would see is that the communists of Nepal have chosen to experiment with a very unique mode of communist leftism in politics. The ferocious guerrillas who have come to govern the country through the people's mandate in the elections and the others who have been democratically choosing their leadership and creating important party formations of new leftist political experimentation will be seen by both communists and non-communists, academics and pragmatists round the world as leftist forces who are engaged in important political practices. The political categories that were used to discuss leftist and non-leftist politics in Asia became what the scholars say “dubious” after the 1960s and 1970s when categories like class, class struggle and means and modes of production and the party-state relationship lost their past one-linear meaning. Asian leftism lost that track. Despite the evocation of the one-linear meaning, Nepali Marxists, most importantly the Maoists, have experienced that loss most conspicuously. Curiously, they are the pioneers of the deconstruction of the leftist politics that stressed class struggle based on universalistic Marxist principles. They are both engineers of non-class struggle politics and its principal brunt bearers. The left waves became eloquent in Prachanda's speech that he delivered to turn the Narayanhiti Palace evacuated by the last king Gyanendra on Jun. 11, 2008, into a museum on Feb. 26. This was curiously an interesting image of a museum whose history was addressed by a Maoist leader. New forms of museums emerge after bloody political histories. The Bangladesh war museum in Dhaka houses the horrors of 1970; the Tuol Sleng museum of Phnom Penh in August 2008 houses the gruesome records of the Khmer Rouge human slaughter under the name of Maoist revolution. The erstwhile guerrilla leader and president of the Unified CPN-Maoist Pushpa Kamal Dahal “Prachanda” evoked the quirks of Nepal's history at the opening of the Narayanhiti Museum. The nightmare of the royal massacre of Jun. 1, 2001 transformed the psyche of the Nepali people. After the bloodbath, senior Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai published a long essay in the Kantipur daily in which he suspected the hand of conspirators behind it. He called upon a fair trial and warned people that they should be alert about this matter. The publisher and editor of the paper were put behind bars by the then government to which the major opposition parties gave a nonchalant shrug. Nepali history slowly rolled back to a scroll. Ironically, the royal institution was abolished thanks principally to the Maoist-led people's war that came to an end after signing a peace deal with the other seven parties on Nov. 21, 2006. Speaking at the opening of the museum, Prachanda repeated the selfsame logic of Baburam Bhattarai presented in that essay when he spoke positively of king Birendra whom he called a humanist and liberal monarch whose photos he had seen in the interiors of people's houses in the remote villages. He promised to open an independent investigation into the murder. The press that remained silent like stones for eight years suddenly reported the prime minister's declaration with a sense of urgency. In Nepal, history is treated like a sporadic action, a sudden realisation, a recollection of last night's dream that is interpreted over breakfast and forgotten again. History is treated like a Chinese scroll that is opened in time slowly to read the text or to see the pictures, and then rolled up again. Prachanda precisely unrolled the scroll of history at the opening of the museum. After protracted wars and massacres of people by political and military forces, the peacetime governments show two prominent gestures. They declare people martyrs and set up museums where they showcase the memories of war. The metamorphosis of Narayanhiti Palace from a seat of powerful dictators to a museum of the people has opened up important discourses. We have yet to see how the left waves blow into museums and academies. 
|
Show/hide comments
Show/hide comment form
