Prachand PM of Nepal
2:02 AM
As Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ takes over as Nepal’s Prime Minister on Wednesday, for the second time in seven years, he can look back at a remarkable life - of accomplishments and failures, of joy and frustration, of receiving adulation and being the object of hatred, of inflicting violence and striving for peace.
Prachanda was born in the family of a farmer, with marginal landholding, in Nepal’s mid-hills. Like many other hill-origin families, they moved to the Tarai, in his case Chitwan, for better prospects. He went on to study agriculture, and work - ironically enough - in a USAID-funded project, but his heart was in left politics.
He slowly rose up the ranks and when his one-time mentor and later ideological rival, Mohan Vaidya ‘Kiran’, led a failed revolutionary bid, Prachanda took over as the party’s general secretary in the mid 1980s. Kiran told this writer a few years ago, “I saw revolutionary young talent in him.”
Prachanda’s career can be divided into his war-time avatar and the open-politics avatar.
Four things stand out about Prachanda’s revolutionary insurgent politics, till 2006.
One, he led the party through the People’s War. Managing factional feuds, ideological rivalries, long-distance operations, an adverse external situation, and confronting onslaught from the army, he remained firmly in control. His leadership experience stretches over three decades now.
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