Some want him to be Deng Xiaoping and unleash Nepal on the path of free market fundamentalism. [break]
A few others are coaxing him to jump from the pedestal of liberating politics towards the scaffold of libertarianism and do a Narsimha Rao for the country.
The fashionable intelligentsia seems to have forgotten that Dr. Bhattarai is a Maoist first and foremost, and is firmly wedded to a radical leftist ideology that he helped package as Prachand Path.
The selective amnesia, however, is an essential element of being the ruling elite.
The nobility thinks that even though he has turned out to be a rogue progeny, Baburam belongs to one of the most revered families of Gorkha.
Along with Ganesh Pande and Narayan Aryal, Pundit Gajanand Bhattarai had played a seminal role in getting Dravya Shah from Lamjung and putting him on the throne through a clever manipulation of tradition, superstition and trickery at the race of Ligligkot.
The Bhattarais served the House of Gorkha as royal astrologers for generations.
By the time Baburam was born, circumstances of the priestly family had been somewhat reduced.
But as an old saying in Maithili goes—no matter whether small or big and lower or higher, all Tulsi leaves are equally sacred—the scion of a family that once anointed rulers and appointed courtiers can never be too insignificant to be revered.
Now that a second Bhattarai has become a premier, perhaps the old nobility does not want to repeat the blunder of 1990s when it ditched Krishna Prasad in favor of Madan and Bidya Bhandari.
As it turned out, the pan-chewing Pundit remained more loyal to the royalty and the class interests of the nobility than the upstarts they backed in the hope of manipulating their favorites against parliamentary democracy.
Apparently, Pushpa Kamal Dahal did everything right to please the privileged ones, but the nobility would rather lose to one of its own than take the risk of winning with a rank outsider. Perhaps a fit case of the “once beaten, twice shy” dictum.
The gentry are even more enamored of what they consider one of their own kind: A meritorious middleclass achiever who has risen through the ranks with grit, determination and hard work.
It is true that Baburam began at the bottom—well, almost bottom – although Luitel School was not exactly in Kalikot or Kailali, and reached the top due to a combination of happenstance and lucky breaks. But he is more of a deviant risk-taker than a conformist that populates the bourgeoisie.
Trained as an architect, he never designed mawkish Malla-style mansions or gawky Rana-Roman edifices to humor the naïve nationalists and nouveau riche of the Kathmandu Valley.
Educated as an urban planner, he did help lay out some minor settlements but failed to break any new ground in the discipline. He has written a full-length dissertation in political economy, but it is not for the uninitiated or the fainthearted.
The published version is almost impossible to plough through if one is not well versed in Marxist “science” of history, society and politics.
The nerdy fringe of upcoming professionals that believes that Nepal can be transformed through cyber activism and t-shirt sloganeering adore techno-savvy Bhattarai who was one of the first public figures in the country to use his Facebook account for political propaganda.
His choice of a Nepal-assembled Mustang has been nothing short of a publicity coup.
It is possible to settle the future of the combatants languishing in temporary camps with a bit of boldness.
The decision to entrust responsibilities of the cantonments to the monitoring committee is a positive start. Rusting weapons in containers have lost even their symbolic significance and have become an embarrassment.
Now that they have the keys, it would be up to the technocrats in the Special Committee to dispense with the awkward legacy in an appropriate manner.
Constitutional issues, too, are less complex than they appear on the surface. With monarchy gone and Nepali Congress reduced to being a peripheral force of political economy, the Maoists probably feel confident that they would dominate whatever system of governance the country adopts.
The UML may pose a bit of a problem in the next election. Stalin once said that what really matters in competitive politics is who counts the vote. On that front, UML loyalists in the administration give them an edge over all others.
That is a hazard Maoists have coped successfully in the past, and there is no reason for them to fear it in the future.
Premier Bhattarai’s biggest challenge would come from a category, and not castes or class that made Maoists what they are today.
The downtrodden, the landless, the marginalized, and the exploited had been told that the Maoists would liberate them. For “the wretched of the earth” who have been promised emancipation, it does not matter who is the premier in Kathmandu.
The triumvirate that rules the country at the local levels consists of the Chief District Officer, the police superintendent, and the army commander of the area.
Nobody in the intelligentsia can offer any advice about the correct way of reining the horse that the new premier would have to ride.
It threw away Dahal, danced with Madhav Kumar Nepal, and did not move even an inch with Jhalnath Khanal in the saddle.
Largely created during the Panchayat era, this atavistic group does not belong exclusively to the nobility, the gentry, the technocracy, or the laity but is a combination of all that; resents everyone equally, and detests politics and politicians the most. This Fifth Category remains unchanged and unchanging.
“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new,” sighs Samuel Beckett in one of his caustic masterpieces.
Everyone in Nepal has high hopes from Bhattarai precisely because they are sanguine that this man cannot do much and would do nothing to derail the gravy train.
It is tempting to tell Premier Bhattarai not to heed any advice and let conscience be his only guide, but that would be a logical impossibility: If he is to disregard all suggestions, he cannot even heed that advice.
The next best thing for him is rekindling the fire in his own belly. This country badly needs some churning; stabilization can wait until after the new Constitution has been promulgated and the next elections held.
The conscientious conservatives—yes, such a self-proclaimed group does exist, even though in its own imagination—are ecstatic that the revolutionary premier has turned reformist and adopted notionally nationalistic symbolism to establish his credentials.
Premier Bhattarai’s problems partly lie with the proletariats who consider him to be too introverted and withdrawn to listen to their grievances.
As a learned ideologue and venerated scholar, he can produce lengthy and reasoned apologias for the Maoist insurrection.
However, it would be difficult for him to talk his own cadres out of the quagmire of disillusionment that they have been thrown into due to the insensitive leadership of a party that once boasted of being a grassroots organization.
His core team, too, does not inspire confidence. Bhattarai would need Dahal by his side to handle Maoist supporters.
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