South Asian Outlook : An Independent e-Monthly | South Asia: Nepal

SOUTH ASIA: NEPAL

Girija Prasad Koirala
Prime Minister of Nepal

25 April 2006 – 18 August 2008

22 March 2000 – 26 July 2001

15 April 1998 – 31 May 1999

26 May 1991 – 30 November 1994

Death of a Democrat

BY KRISHNA SHARMA

He may not have been a great statesman like Indian Prime Minister said of him in 2006, but GPK certainly was the lone runner who made Nepal win the marathon for democracy.

I had just got home after playing football in that dusky winter evening when a group of people came to meet my ailing grandfather in his mid eighties in the early eighties. I don’t remember any faces except the one that would later become Nepal’s first democratically elected Prime Minister and would continue to be so for five more times including the head of the nation briefly while the Himalayan nation would transition itself from monarchy to the republic in 2006/07. Girija Prasad Koirala was passing through our village to be underground again after attending freedom fighter Alok’s funeral in Rupandehi, about 20 miles east of Lumbini where Lord Buddha was born and five miles east from our home.

Girija Prasad Koirala, (20 February 1925 – 20 March 2010), of that time was a tall and bald but little known leader of the Nepali Congress. He was so thin that he would look like a scarecrow in the white shirt and loose gray trousers. He slightly stooped. I remember fixing my eyes on him not because he was exceptionally arresting or because he was a gifted orator or because he was already a popular politician. He was just different from others who were present during that time.

Ever since, every time I would see him on TV as a politician giving rousing speeches or would have an opportunity to meet him personally as a newspaper reporter, I would revisit the moment I had first seen him at my house in that gloomy evening. He would always look the same to me, despite that he had put on a little weight, was sturdy in traditional Nepali dress and would smoke from a cigarette holder and would never leave white handkerchief from his hands. Although he would always be surrounded with personal secretaries and security escorts and some of his party workers, I would find him alone walking the walk on his long slender legs. He walked with others but his walk was completely different from others. He walked with a purpose for the nation.

Girija Prasad Koirala changed the face of the nation without changing things much for himself. He died of chest infection on March 20 at his daughter’s house. He was 86, the age my grandfather was when he had visited to meet the latter while being underground since Nepal was then ruled mercilessly by the King who had granted no option for the parties to participate in the political process.

There certainly were weaknesses in him. We all make mistakes. He was rightly accused of not being able to leave his legacy to the party by producing an able successor and promoted his daughter to central level while scores of committed Nepali Congress leaders needed his political nurturing. He may have turned deaf ear to the corrupt party workers. But they were the sins the price of which he paid while he was alive by not being popularly liked to be the nation’s first president and making his party lose the elections when it was a must to further push the nation towards political and social stability.

But these are the petty things if we compare them with what he gave to the nation. A man of action, his understanding of the politics was so rooted to the cause of the peoples’ freedom that he made kings to surrender, brought underground Maoists to the mainstream politics thereby ending the bloody insurgency that had cost thousands of people in ten years, and created grounds for everyone to land and correct their mistakes. He may not have been a great statesman like Indian Prime Minister said of him in 2006, but he certainly was the lone runner who made Nepal win the marathon for democracy.

Much of the credit goes to Koirala for the advances made during the dozen years of democracy till 2002, including press freedo. He truly believed in open society. And yet, he was prone to the ills that dog us to this day – from slumpy economy to energy dependence. Koirala was unable to come to grips with the newer challenges beyond pluralism, posed by identity assertion and economic globalization, to name a few.

Although Koirala led a plain life, living in the apartment of his nephew most of the time when he was out of power, he allowed politicians from his party to be immeasurably rich. The corruption charges leveled against him during his prime ministership would have mostly to do with the income he had to generate for the Nepali Congress, in a polity where there is no sanctioned party-finance mechanism.

Koirala took a political rebirth after 2002. When the now deposed king Gyanendra grabbed power in October of that year and other democratic leaders fell like ninepins against the royal coup, Koirala held firm even as many regarded him as a laughing stock. He resisted Gyanendra resolutely. He insisted that the reinstatement of the dissolved parliament was the only way that would be acceptable to the people. There were hardly a score of leaders who followed him but he proved right. While blaming parties for being corrupt, Gyanendra had taken the excuse of the Maoist insurgency to grab the power. Koirala was smart enough not to allow King’s men to develop contact with the Maoists and he himself initiated contact with the underground rebels. By mid 2005 he was successful in bringing all the major political parties to signing the 12-point agreement that sparked the People´s Movement of 2006.

After the success of popular uprising -- 2006, Koirala was unanimously unopposed when it came to leading the country back to peace and democracy. During the time when Koirala was both head of state and government till the elections of April 2008, he had a great chance to show his statesmanship. But the way he led the nation was the same. It was the status quo of his ruling that irritated the Maoists and who finally discarded the possibility of making him the first president of the Republic of Nepal.

Although nothing really was left with him after Nepali Congress lost the Constituent Assembly elections, it was his political personality and his unwavering commitment to democracy that everyone feared to walk past his ideology. Although he is gone, nothing would stop me from remembering him walking the dusty road of democracy with great pride and confidence. While he walked the walk and ran the run, we still have miles to go without him.

While I pay my respectful homage to Koirala I wish all others to remember what he said once -- make compromises with all others but not with democracy while you walk the walk.

[Source: Nepal News]