There was deep political uncertainty for months after the formation of the Maoist-led government in August. The Nepali Congress was in no mood for cooperation. Then arose intense conflict within the Maoist party itself, which culminated in the Kharipati convention of in November. Most of Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal's energies were focused on managing the threat of revolt within his party; all remaining energy was focused on managing relations with other parties.
Not many realize that Baburam Bhattarai was one of the top Maoist leaders affected by all this turmoil. After all, at stake in the ideological conflict within the party was the very strategy that Bhattarai had devised -- that of steering the party towards multi-party politics through the formation of an alliance with the parliamentary parties against the monarchy. But at Kharipati he appeared sidelined: the conflict was between Prachanda and Mohan Vaidya 'Kiran', and although Bhattarai supported Prachanda, he had become a secondary player.
Bhattarai had been pushed away from the centre of affairs of the Maoist party, but he did not display great distress or make any great attempt to regain centre stage. The Maoists were in government, he had been assigned the important position of Minister of Finance, and so he focused all his energies on figuring out the workings of the ministry, bringing reforms to it, and implementing the ambitious agendas he had laid out in his budget.
Bhattarai's actions at that time seemed praiseworthy but slightly absurd. Immersed as he was in the affairs of his ministry, it appeared that he had ceased to pay attention to the effects that broader political currents would have on his plans. He came up with scheme after scheme, but seemed to have forgotten that without an enabling environment on the ground -- which could only be achieved through effective coordination with other ministries and consensus with other political parties -- no plan would reach fruition. Baburam Bhattarai the finance minister appeared the idealist trying to plough his lone furrow.
This was, of course, not the first time that he had found himself at a tangent with the central trends in the Maoist party. In fact, no matter what prestige he commanded, his position within the party has always been somewhat uneasy. Perhaps this was because politics was not his natural vocation; as a child, he was solitary and cerebral, and harboured dreams of becoming an astronomer.
Among the upper echelons of the Maoist leadership he has always been somewhat of an outsider. Four of the five politburo members of the party at the time the Maoists launched their armed revolt had a long history of working together. They had had split from Mohan Bikram Singh's CPN (Masal) in 1985, to form Mashal, the party led first by Kiran, and later Prachanda. Bhattarai was alone among the five in having left Singh's Masal to join the rest only in 1991.
Lacking any obvious charisma or easy sociability, but with immense intellectual and strategic capabilities, Bhattarai has often been viewed with suspicion and envy. That he emerged during the early years of the conflict as the most visible of faces in the Maoist party did not help, and numerous attempts were made to cut him down to size. It appears that this was one of the goals of the party's second national convention, held in Bhatinda, Punjab in February 2001. It was then that the party decided to term the distillation of its ideology and experience “Prachandapath”, a move that appears to have been, in large measure, meant to lend greater prominence to Prachanda at Bhattarai's expense.
This was just a prelude to the severe action Bhattarai would face at the hands of the party in early 2005. It appears that this was a period where he grew disenchanted with the party and its leader Prachanda. Prachanda, he claimed, sought to centralize all power in his hands and develop a cult of personality. There was too heavy an emphasis on militarization within the party, and less on political strategy. And Prachanda and his followers were wrong in believing that the major enemy was India, against whom an alliance with the monarchy could be formed. In fact, Bhattarai claimed, the major enemy was the monarchy and efforts should be focused on building alliances against it.
It was then that the majority of the party leadership, led by Prachanda, decided to strip Bhattarai and his wife Hisila Yami of all their party positions and place them under imprisonment by the Maoist army. Bhattarai was accused, among other things, for appointing himself as "the intellectual" and taking it upon himself to provide advice to everyone and everybody. He was, it was claimed, infected by the characteristics of “bourgeois individualistic intellectualism” and “bourgeois intellectual arrogance.”
Bhattarai was imprisoned on Jan. 31, 2005. Gyanendra staged his takeover the next day, bringing an end to all thoughts of forming an alliance with the monarch against the parliamentary parties and India. There was no alternative but to revive Bhattarai's “democratic republican” line, the party leadership now desperately needed his strategic skills, and so he was rehabilitated. Over the course of the next three years, through the agreements signed in Delhi, through the 2006 Jana Andolan, through the Maoist entry into mainstream politics and through the Constituent Assembly elections, Bhattarai and Prachanda formed an indispensable pair: in negotiations with other political parties, in managing conflict with dissident sections of their own party.
When the Maoists began to mingle with a wide assortment of characters after 2006, those who met the two Maoist leaders were struck by the contrast between Bhattarai's stiff body posture and unsmiling visage and Prachanda's sociability and expansiveness. This contrast led to the common opinion, held especially among those in the international community, that Bhattarai was the rigid Maoist doctrinaire and Prachanda the pragmatic, flexible politician.
This couldn't have been farther from the truth. It was Bhattarai who demonstrated the most flexibility in his thought and was chiefly responsible for the ideological modifications that gave Nepali Maoism its distinctive characteristics. He formulated and wrote much of the theory regarding how the party would incorporate the demands of the marginalized ethnicities. It was him who it seems was mostly responsible for recognizing the need for multi-party competition and periodic elections if the Nepali Maoists weren't to follow the path of the Russian and Chinese communist parties, which, soon after attaining state power, turned into rigid and brutal machines disconnected from the people. And, of course, he played a major role in scripting the “democratic republic” path the Maoists would follow to ally with other political parties, participate in an interim government and in elections to a Constituent Assembly.
Mani Thapa, the Maoist leader once close to Bhattarai who was expelled from the party and went on to form the Revolutionary Left Wing, once pointed out the risks that Bhattarai continues to face. There are still many in the Maoist party who feel Bhattarai's “democratic republic” line to be revisionist, wrote Thapa, Bhattarai's organizational control within the party is weak, and so if the Maoists fail to institutionalize the republic and achieve tangible gains, Bhattarai will be blamed and once again face acrimony and punishment.
Most immediately, then, if the “federal democratic” line is to be considered a success, the Maoists have to gain legitimacy through their performance in government. And amidst all the bungling and thwarted plans, the Ministry of Finance alone seems to be making some steps towards its goals. If in November 2008, Baburam Bhattarai was a lone figure, pushed away by his party and ploughing his own furrow, five months later, despite opposition faced and mistakes made, his ministry has some tangible results to offer. The Maoist party, often at odds with Bhattarai's thought and personality, is in the meantime again keen to claim his achievements as its own.
aditya.adhikari@gmail.com
Source: April 7, 2009, The Kathmandu Post
