I was not surprised, therefore, when a friend of mine from school, who had settled in the US after graduating as a medical doctor a long time ago, broke into a Bollywood song with his newlywed wife at a reception he threw for hundreds of his relatives and friends, by appearing on the stage in a Kathmandu hotel with fully functioning fog machines and disco lights. Quality apart – the sight was straight out of a movie set. Had I got a chance to meet my friend in person after that event, I would have asked him to step out of the freezer and face it: We are much different than our movies show us to be. Much different also than when he left us.[break]
The same phenomena hold true for most of our leading politicians. They got their political “dikchha” (baptism) during the Cold War years, if not during the colonial era. This also holds true for most of the Communist leadership that we see at the top today, and that of many of the socialists (communists call them capitalists), and royalists, too (socialists call them rightists). And just like my friend in the earlier paragraph, in my way of looking, they all remain frozen in time – totally unmindful of the great leaps the society has taken while they were wasting their time reciting their “gurumantras,” and not evolving.
Marx renounced all religions, famously saying “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,’ Yet ironically, Marx ended up founding his own religion with him firmly placed as the ‘prophet.’ His latter-day followers who ascended to great heights, like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, went a step further. They all proactively tried, and to some extent succeeded, in becoming ‘messiah’ themselves, albeit for a short while. If Prachandas, Baburams and Baidyas are trying to play the same old trick, I am sorry to say, such tricks do not work over and over. They should find new ones if they are really hell-bent for their messianic careers. On the contrary, if they truly want progress, they must step out of the refrigerator that they have locked themselves in. The temperature outside is much warmer, and may heal all their frostbites. They should apply all their learning to do some original thinking and make their beliefs relevant to 2013.
Communism, as propounded by Marx and Engels, was set against the background of the Industrial Revolution – when men started to think that they have tamed, or can tame, nature and all its forces. It was a political theory that, despite being rooted in an honest zeal to end oppression of man by fellowmen, chose to tame the same man’s natural instinct to make his own destiny. It chose to forget mankind’s repeated rejection of any philosophy that suppresses man’s pursuit of happiness and attainments.
Still, when Marx propounded it and Engel supported it, the philosophy was largely relevant of the times in which these great thinkers lived. Mao Zedong earned a messianic status during his life because he was giving an average Chinese a sense of honor against the unjust acts of the greedy colonialists and the traitors within their own society who were playing hand in glove with those colonialists. The same goes for Stalin, Lenin and all the shining stars of Communism. They all rose to fame and earned prominence as what they fought for and stood against were hugely relevant in their times. Besides, people they mesmerized did not have better options at hand.
What Nepali Communism’s impersonators have done instead is to artificially create a virtual world to play games that they think they have mastered, but unfortunately can only be played within make-belief universes. And just like a video gamer, they keep playing those virtual fantasies – occasionally sharing their exploits by speaking out to us (in their choice of words, we are either ‘proletariat’ or ‘bourgeois’) using jargons that nobody outside their gaming community has any clue about. Their inconsistencies keep coming out all the time in the forms of their wearing golden Rolex watches in TV interviews where they despise the capitalists’ greed endlessly, their vow to stop functioning of schools with ‘foreign names’ while the names of their parties themselves start and end with foreign name/s, the sight of them wearing tika all over their foreheads, and garlands all the way upto their eyes that are considered symbolic of the same ‘opium of masses’ they so passionately oppose.
To this day, Nepali Maoists characterizing their political opponents in Nepal as enemies bears the authentic stamp of a full-blooded religion. But sorry, that does not work anymore. People of the 21st century, anywhere in the world, rather than believing in totalitarianism or absolutism of any disguise want to debate, learn, and then act – and do this continually in a never-ending loop. They want to be sovereign masters of themselves, having the perpetual right to change their representatives at will. Democracy, with all its faults, is the best system, as it allows correction, and allows it endlessly. No wonder even its detractors cannot afford to claim that they are non-democracies. As per NobelPrize.org, there are only four countries in the world that claim not to be a democracy. They are Saudi Arabia, Burma, Vatican, and Brunei. That means even those countries that are ruled by dictators and theocrats claim themselves to be democracies – such is its acceptance.
The funny thing is that in Nepal, and some other remaining bastions of Communist impersonators, the communistic line of thinking that has been rejected the world over, and has indeed become kind of a joke, is considered ‘progressive’ and repeatedly recognized so even by their detractors. Even many common people who are always on a lookout for ‘authority’ accept this joke as reality without even doing some basic questioning. Such section of the people shows the same symptoms of living in refrigerators, and they need to step out just as much.
So much for ‘Communist Impersonators.’ The author of this article in his next piece will cover the story of another group of impersonators that is hogging the limelight in Nepal’s political landscape. The author calls them ‘colonial game players.’ This group that comprises all the rest of the political parties of Nepal is devoid of original thinking just as much the ‘communist impersonators’ do. Nepal and Nepalis have to move ahead with thoughts that encapsulate the wisdom earned by humankind till this moment in history. We need to improvise this universal wisdom to our local needs. What we don’t need, but unfortunately often seem to be indulging in, is all of these over-frozen and irrelevant ideas that prohibit questioning of any kind. We have spent a hell of a time sitting inside the refrigerator, thanks to the leaders we chose. We need to step out, and step out soon, even if these leaders choose not to.
prashaantsingh.wordpress.com
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