| GP |
Posted
on 02-Dec-01 07:53 PM
With due ackn. to Indian Express:
Mystery Maoists, red with shades of grey
Military chief Thapa wanted to be atomic engineer, Bhattarai made Indian pilgrimage
SANKARSHAN THAKUR
KATHMANDU, DECEMBER 2: POLITICALLY they are all extreme shades of red but personally, the men spearheading the Maoist underground in Nepal are a more colourful, indeed more accomplished, lot that most would expect them to be. One is an atomic engineer with a notorious love life on the sidelines of the guerilla war, another is a top flight academician who once collaborated with the Nepali government to rebuild the towns and cities he now wants to lay siege to, yet another has made himself known for how little is known of him.
A degree of mystique is perhaps essential to an underground curriculum vitae; the Maoist triumvirate of Prachanda, Baburam Bhattarai and Rambahadur Thapa has it in good measure. ‘‘They would not mean what they do if everything was known about them,’’ says Bishnu Upadhyay, a postgraduate student at the Tribhuvan University, ‘‘Secrecy and mystery is key to their movement but I am quite sure they are also there for style.’’
The one making waves at the moment is, of course, the least known of the three—Maoist military commander Rambahadur Thapa, 44, who goes by the appropriately elusive alias of ‘Badal’. As commander of the underground militia, Badal is known to have been the man who initiated the current hostilities with the government, effectively sabotaging ongoing talks.
The son of a retired Indian Army jawan, Thapa went to school in the eastern province of Chhitwan and came to Kathmandu for higher studies. Little is known about his early youth but he was able to manage a ticket to the former Soviet
Union where he studied Atomic Engineering for several years before being thrown out by the authorities for being ‘‘too radical’’. Apparently, say Thapa’s contemporaries, he had begun to label the Soviets ‘‘revisionists’’ and had got involved with ultra-leftwing groups in Moscow. He never got to complete his course. It was during his days in Russia that Thapa also came in touch with Libyan militia and guerilla trainers who were patronised by the Soviets those days. It was under them that Thapa is believed to have picked up the rudiments of guerilla tactics and strategy. It is not known, though, whether he went to Libya for training for received helped from the Libyans in Russia itself.
‘‘By the time he came back, he was a changed man,’’ says one of Thapa’s former classmates in Kathmandu, ‘‘He was talkling a strange and tough language, he was talking of annihilating the status-quo and uprooting the monarchy. He naturally caught attention easily and had to go underground.’’
Thapa is known to have retained his hardline views. Proof of it is the manner in which he has disrupted negoatiations which he believes will take the Maoist dream nowhere. ‘‘He is cold-blooded and ruthless in his tactics and his is very single-minded, he will have his way, by extreme force or violence if that has to be the case,’’ said a Communist leader here.
But there is another, softer, side to Rambahadur Thapa. He has a charm, they say, that is difficult to ignore and he can be a romantic, even in the trenches. Sometime back Thapa fell in love with fellow traveller Pampha Bhusal, then a footsoldier in the Maoist army and now a member of the underground’s central committee. The Maoist leadership frowned on the romance and directed Thapa to end his liaison. Thapa resisted. The leadership threatened him with a court of inquiry for breach of discipline. Thapa resisted again and used his military prowess within the organisation to quash the probe before it got off the ground. Thapa and Pampha Bhusal remain together, whether the leadership likes it or not.
Thapa has had to fight most of this internal battles with Prachanda, Chairman of the Maoist group and the man known to have rallied leftwing splinter groups into a force to reckon with. Like Thapa, Prachanda too spent most of his early years in the rural poverty of Chhitwan in eastern Nepal. He was a primary school teacher through the 1980s, a period when he became increasingly influencd by Marxist ideology. He was part of the leftwing Jana Morcha and campaigned for elections when democracy returned to Nepal in 1990 but he was disillusioned, and underground, within a couple of years. Prachanda next surfaced in 1995 with the Maoists’ controversial memorandum for overthrow of the monarchy and vanished underground again. Very little is know of Prachanda, save that he is a nomad, lives a spartan life and conducts his affairs with military discipline: he is up before dawn and is on the move most day. He has a family but little time for it. His wife lives in north India with his daughter. Guess what she wants to become? A fashion model. Those who have seen her say the fashion world would be grateful.
The man who has played mediator in most Prachanda-Thapa rows is probably the best known among the three: JNU alumnus Baburam Bhattarai who is currently also the Convenor of the Kendriya Jana Sarkar, the parallel government announced by the Maoists sometime ago. Bhattarai was a brilliant student all his life—‘‘There isn’t an exam in my memory he did not top,’’ says one of his teachers—and earned a scholarship under the Colombo Plan to study architecture in Chandigarh. Thereon, Bhattarai went to the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture for an M.Tech degree. This is where he fell in love with Hishila Yami, daughter of a prominent Nepali family, and married her. (Yami too is member of the Maoist central committee).
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| GP |
Posted
on 02-Dec-01 07:55 PM
With due ackn. to Indian Express: (last part)
It was during his JNU days (he was doing a doctorate in urban planning) that Bhattarai became influenced by leftwing ideology, but it was nothing more than fancy flirtation then. Bhattarai returned to Kathmandu to set up a consultancy in architecture and design and also signed up with the government to rehaul some of the countryfs cities and towns. But then, quite suddenly, came democracy and the quick disillusionment with it. Bhattarai was swept into leftwing politics and, soon, into the underground. But just before he decided to take the plunge, the young Maoist paid his dues to his earlier life: he took his ageing parents on a pilgrimage to the four holy dhams in India. Of the three, Bhattarai has the strongest India links and whenever speculation whirls in Nepal on where he could be hiding now, most guess his other home: India.
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My Comments:
I posted it here to let everyone know the inside of the contents.
This whole article is just a fabrication, because there is not a single
person or character that can be verified, who said what. Its how
Indian News media works. Shame on IE.
GP
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