Pushpa Kumar Dahal | The rebel who embraced the status quo Premium

The new Nepal PM has come a long way from being a revolutionary militant leader set on changing the political and ideological structures of the country to becoming one of the Kathmandu power elite that is wedded to the status quo 

Pushpa Kumar Dahal has a fatal attraction with power. The chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist-Centre) became the Prime Minister of the country, recently, for the third time after stints in 2008-09 and 2016-17. Nepal’s fragmented polity always provides for coalitions and this allows smaller parties to either become kingmakers or lend a leader to occupy the seat at Singha Durbar in Kathmandu for expedient purposes.

Except, in Mr. Dahal’s case, his party, the CPN (M-C), was part of a pre-poll six-party coalition led by the Nepali Congress (NC), which won just about an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections held in November 2022. But it but saw it fit to quit the coalition after the polls and firmed up a post-poll alliance with the leading Opposition party, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist, or UML), led by Khadga Prasad Oli and six other parties, and secured the coveted Prime Minister’s post for a prospective period of half the term of government.

Observers following Nepali politics would not be surprised at the malleable nature of the political alliances in the country. Ever since Nepal transited from a constitutional monarchy to a constitutional republic in 2008, the three leading political forces — the social democratic-oriented but centrist NC, the purportedly leftist but status-quoist on principle UML and the historically leftist CPN (M-C) — have been arranging the decks of government among themselves and other smaller partners. In fact, the UML-CPN(M-C)’s sudden marriage of convenience is a throwback to the previous elections in 2017 when both parties (which also included a UML faction led by former Prime Ministers Madhav Nepal and Jhalanath Khanal) had formed the government with a commitment to merge into a single Nepal Communist Party.Much water has flowed through the Bagmati river since then with Mr. Oli’s refusal to hand over power to Mr. Dahal in 2020 being one of the key reasons for the breakdown of the NCP into its former constituent units, besides Mr. Dahal’s party and Mr. Nepal’s UML faction — later christened as Communist Party of Nepal (Unified-Socialist) — finding common cause with the NC purportedly as a check against Mr. Oli’s authoritarian tendencies.

Yet, despite the ever present flux in party alignment and coalition formation, the fact that Mr. Dahal went on to become the PM despite his party’s dismal showing in the parliamentary elections — it finished a distant third with a total of 32 seats in the House of Representatives with just 11.32% of the vote — is seen as the latest example of political opportunism by a leader who has come a long way from being a revolutionary militant leader set on changing the political and ideological structures of Nepal to becoming one of the Kathmandu power elite wedded to the status quo.

Born in a poor Bahun (Khas or hill Brahmin) family in Kaski district to the west of Kathmandu in 1954, Mr. Dahal went on to pursue higher education in a three-year degree programme in agriculture and animal science and became a schoolteacher in Gorkha district. He had been attracted to communist ideas by then and soon quit his teaching post to become a full member of the Communist Party of Nepal (Fourth Convention) — then a major clandestine communist force that was founded by the radical leader Mohan Bikram Singh — before taking up an office-bearer’s position with Mr. Singh’s breakaway Communist Party of Nepal (Masal). In quick time, Mr. Dahal, then known by the nom de guerre “Biswas” (or trust), was elected to the party’s central committee in 1984. The Masal group split further, with Mr. Dahal joining hands with another radical leader Mohan Baidya to form a new party, CPN(Mashal) while Mr. Singh retained control over CPN(Masal).

The Mashal group went on to term themselves as a party aligned with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, essentially committing itself to the prospects of militant struggle and organising the peasantry to gain power in the rural areas and using them to to encircle the cities and capture power. It had in the mid-1980s already become part of the clandestine Revolutionary Internationalist Movement — the ideological group of like-minded Maoist parties which included the Shining Path of Peru. In 1986, a violent action by the Mashal group brought it under the scanner of the Nepal police and led to the arrest of its party cadre, with the fallout leading to the resignation of Mr. Baidya from the leadership of the party and the elevation of Mr. Dahal as the general secretary. Mr. Dahal reportedly underwent training in guerilla warfare in India in the late 1980s with help from the Maoist Communist Centre, then in undivided Bihar (the MCC was later to merge with the People’s War group to form the CPI (Maoist) in 2004).

The radical left Mashal group later merged with other like-minded parties to form the CPN (Unity Center), which underwent further splits to emerge as the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in 1994 led by Mr. Dahal and including other leaders such as future Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai. The Maoists, unlike the UML and the NC, had not accepted the constitutional monarchy order that had been arrived at after the first Jan Andolan in 1990 and resulted in then king Birendra giving up on absolute monarchy and restoring the parliamentary party system.