The function there unveiled the tight student-teacher bond that is seldom reflected in the chaos and busy life of a politician. [break]
With choking throat and teary eyes Bhattarai said, “I am what I am because of JNU. ”In his highly emotional speech, which went for 20 minutes while he struggled to hold back tears from rolling down, he said, “JNU is one of the best universities in the world,” adding, “I am proud that JNU has preserved that culture of revolutionary fervor and activism.”
Praising the prestigious institution, he said, “I am proud to be an alumnus of this university.” He urged all to keep up the same zeal and culture.
Bhattarai completed his PhD at the Centre for Study of Regional Development in June 1986, where he got his first lessons in communism.
His dissertation-- The Nature of Underdevelopment and Regional Structure of Nepal-A Marxist Analysis-- was published later in book form by a Delhi publisher when the Maoists were underground in Nepal waging their armed struggle against the state.
Addressing a jubilant audience of present and past students who were chanting the communist greeting ´lal salam’, JNU faculty and former Nepali students of JNU, he thanked his supervisor Prof Atiya Habib.
“She guided my work for five years when I joined JNU and I have no words to thanks her. She was not only a teacher but was like my mother,” a wet-eyed Bhattarai said to thunderous applause.
He added, “I couldn’t have completed my work here with all the twists and turns of political events without her.”
As Prof Habib begun by saying, “I address not PM Bhattarai but our own Baburam,” the PM became overwhelmed with emotion, the tears quickly pooling his eyes.
Habib, who has known both Bhattarai and Hisila Yami for 32 years, said Bhattarai was a "problem child” and “continues” to be one.
She praised his simplicity and sincerity and said that her first impression of him way back in 1975 was of a simple lad with “a spark and twinkle in the eyes, boyish look with impish mind and smile on his face.”
“You read extensively, and produced a thesis draft of 500 pages with an additional 300 pages of appendix,’ she said, adding, “This was the most comprehensive work done on Nepal, and you didn’t want to delete anything.”
She referred to Bhattarai’s inner strength and recalled with sadness the accident that he had and when he suffered from short memory loss.
She said that he was usually unkempt and would have ´not eaten for days´. Most touching was her remark on the New Year card which Baburam sent her every year. “One year the card didn’t come till March and I was anxious,” she said.
One incident she referred to was in 2004 when he came to see her and her husband when the police were hounding him. "As you were leaving, I asked you how you would go,” she recalled. He had replied, “By bus.”
In the end, she said “I want a guru dakshina today and that is that the card must reach me every year in January.”
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