A leader looks back

Atmabrittanta: Late Life Recollections

By B.P. Koirala

(Compiled by Ganesh Raj Sharma

translated by Kanak Mani Dixit)

Himal Books, Kathmandu 2001

Pp. xvii+304

ISBN 99933 13 08 4, NRS 400

The late B.P. Koirala was a charismatic figure who shaped the history of Nepal with his indomitable will, fierce intellect and intense commitment to nationalism, democracy and socialism. His passing at the age of 68 years was most untimely as he died in harness, while combating an absolute monarchy and a feudal social order.  Born in 1914 into a family of patriots, he learnt to defy the powerful from his father, Krishna Prasad, who was a very determined person. While collecting customs in the Indo-Nepal border for the Rana government, the elder Koirala once sent the rag-like clothes of the commoners to Prime Minister Chandra Shamshere, wrapped in a bundle with the request to inspect them in order to see the people's penury and misery. Obviously, he had to be punished for this insolence, and the whole family had to flee the motherland, while close relatives who stayed behind were jailed or suffered otherwise. Thus, from a life of comfort, the Koirala family was reduced to extreme poverty. Krishna Prasad eked out a meagre living as a street vendor, selling knickknacks in the trains of Calcutta and elsewhere. Despite the hardships, he refused to compromise with the prime minister. One of his sons, Harihar, died of cholera at a very young age for want of treatment.

These and other episodes in the life of the Koiralas in exile have been narrated by B.P. Koirala himself in this, his posthumous work, titled Atmabrittanta. The book belongs to the genre of conversational autobiography, as recounted to his friend Ganesh Raj Sharma, who was B.P.'s comrade in the struggle and his lawyer in the court. Sharma tape-recorded Koirala's testimony and later transcribed it. The transcript was published by him in Nepali in 1998, and this has now been translated into English by Kanak Mani Dixit. It is to the credit of Sharma that he has been able to prepare such a narrative from what must have been many sittings over a long period, on an old tape recorder, and at a time when B.P. Koirala's throat cancer was getting the better of him. Dixit has done a creditable job of translation, bringing the story smoothly into English. Unfortunately, the story stops at 1973 due to B.P.'s failing health, although B.P. Koirala, Nepal and the Nepali Congress went through several phases between then and 1982 when he passed away. There was, for instance, the hijacking of a Royal Nepal Airlines plane, an attempt at armed insurrection in the country, Koirala's return to Nepal and his prosecution for sedition, and the plebiscite of 1980 on the partyless system. These were all events in which B.P. was a guiding figure.

One looks wistfully at the developments in the 1990s when parliamentary democracy returned to Nepal, the Nepali Congress gained power, lost it owing to internal splits, was voted out and then returned to power, again. Would this agonising history of inner-party power struggle have been there if Koirala had been alive in that turbulent decade? Was it because regime after regime led by his comrades-in-arms, Bhattarai and Girija Prasad Koirala, upheld the status quo to such an extent that his passionate plea for land reforms, made in the 1950s, soon had to become the battle cry of the Maoists? Meanwhile, one would hope that the publication of the autobiography, in its original Nepali, has played some part in reminding the cadres of the two big parties, the Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist Leninist), and of the dreams of this great Nepali leader.

These "deathbed reminiscences" detail much of B.P.'s early years and the great difficulties the family passed through. In doing so, they highlight the situation that prevailed in the country. B.P. recounts his educational career, the influences on his young mind from the insurrectionary organisation, Anusheelan to Gandhi, Karl Marx and the democratic socialists. Thereby, he traversed the entire gamut of the thought that affected the first half of the twentieth century. Some of his childhood recollections from which he drew his first principles have also been recorded. For instance, one of his relatives left her husband owing to the latter's cowardice, ran away and stayed as a live-in with her sister's husband, and told B.P. that living with a spouse one did not love was vyabhichar and morally repugnant.

B.P., who was imprisoned by the British in 1930 on suspicion of being a terrorist, but released after four months for lack of evidence, was one of the earliest members of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), the left bloc in the Indian National Congress (which subsequently broke from the mother party to become the socialist party in north India and, in at least one state in south India, a unit of the Communist Party of India). The Indian socialist leader Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia and B.P. were very good friends. With Jaya Prakash Narayan, the relationship was at a personal level. A leading light of the party, Devendra Prasad Singh, who later became a member of the Indian parliament in 1960- 66, was his closest friend. B.P. was active in trade union work, and was arrested on several occasions on that count. Further, the CSP gave him the responsibility to organise its student wing. However, in 1939, he decided to wind up all his work in India and concentrate on democratising Nepal. But, after the Quit India struggle was launched in 1942, he was arrested when on a casual visit to India to see Devendra Prasad Singh and other friends.

B.P. was in jail from 1942 to 1945, during the Quit India struggle. However, Nepal was uppermost in his mind and he decided to form a political party in Nepal. Atmabrittanta describes in detail the birth and growth of the Nepali Congress and the struggles that it passed through. He acknowledges the support he received from Indian socialists and other leaders and describes his visit to Burma in 1947 to get support from socialists in that country. When in Nepal, he was arrested and kept in detention despite his poor health, Gandhiji intervened on his behalf and the Rana prime minister was forced to release him. B.P. also tells us about the sense of camaraderie that Dr. Rajendra Prasad, who went on to become the first president of the Indian republic, showed when they were together in jail. The Indian communists worked hard on him, but their denigration of Gandhi and the Congress Party's anti-imperialist struggle estranged him from them. B.P. writes that books by Dantwala and Masani helped him achieve ideological clarity. While in Benares, he came into contact with well-known Hindi litterateurs of the day and his stories started to be published in the Hans monthly, edited by Munshi Prem Chand. However, Surya Bikram Gyawali, the prominent Nepali writer, persuaded him to write in Nepali. That was how B.P. became an established name in Nepali fiction.

The struggle in Nepal started with a workers' strike in Biratnagar, led by G.P. Koirala. The Nepali army arrested six leaders of the strike, including B.P. They were taken to Kathmandu over trails that traversed the back of the country, and this helped the activist, who till then had concentrated on the eastern tarai plains, to convery their message to the people en route. It was also during this trip along the hill route from Dhankuta to the Kathmandu valley that B.P. witnessed the poverty of the people, which helped shape the bedrock of his economic programme for the country. He and his comrades suffered innumerable hardships in Nepali jails, and a time came when he was compelled to refuse to eat for weeks altogether. He was on the verge of death due to this fast, but would not accept a humiliating compromise. His mother also stood firmly behind him in this decision. Those five years of hardship between 1947 and 1952 were quite testing for all the freedom fighters. However, the flight of King Tribhuvan to India to escape the grip of the Ranas helped in enabling the Nepali Congress to participate in power.

What marks this book is B.P.'s bitter memories of the superiority complex of Indian leaders and diplomats who, at the point of political transition, thrust their will on Nepal and created a mixed regime of the Ranas and the Nepali Congress without consulting the parties concerned. B.P. became Home Minister and tackled various mini-revolts courageously. He even took on Bharat Shamshere, the leader of Gorkha League and when the latter's rowdies surrounded his residence, he kept a cool nerve and confronted the rioters head on. This was B.P.'s hallmark—firmness in the face of extreme crisis. He even forced the Prime Minister, Mohan Shamshere to resign. C.P.N. Sinha, then Indian Ambassador in Kathmandu, was out to support the Ranas, and at one point, B.P. was compelled to comment that Sinha should not think of Nepal as Muzaffarpur district, where Sinha was once chairman of the district board.

B.P. came to believe that the Indian leaders, including Nehru, did not want strong and independent minded leaders to emerge in Nepal. However, B.P. also admits to his own mistakes, such as when he went to Nehru to seek arms. Unable to meet him, he passed the message on to M.O. Mathai, Nehru's private secretary, which annoyed Nehru no end. Yet, inspite of the wilfulness of King Mahendra, and India's indifferent attitude, B.P. compelled the king to hold elections and that was how the Nepali Congress came to power in the general elections of 1959, with B.P. as prime minister. His efforts to introduce and implement land reforms and other progressive programmes provoked the feudal vested interests. Meanwhile, a king who saw power receding from his grasp decided to act. King Mahendra dissolved Parliament and jailed B.P. and other leaders. There was, says B.P., a love-hate relationship between Mahendra and him. The king appreciated B.P.'s intense nationalism, but not his democratic values. There were instances when he was offered power by use of insurrectionary methods by the bigwigs in the armed forces, but B.P. refused. He makes the point towards the end of the book that, perhaps he was a democrat and not a revolutionary. Once, as Home Minister, he had tamed, single-handed, rebels armed with weapons, yet, he was not so ruthless as to resort to any means. This was the Gandhian influence on B.P. Koirala.

In 1969-70, the people of East Pakistan rose in revolt against the rulers, and an insurrection started. B.P., who had collected arms to launch his own insurrection in Nepal, was asked by J.P. to give some of the weapons to the Shanti Bahini, the freedom fighters of East Pakistan. He did, somewhat reluctantly. After that country became sovereign, its leaders could not muster the courage to express their gratitude to him publicly, worried about displeasing Indira Gandhi. B.P. had debated at length his decision to intervene in the affairs of a neighbouring country, and said that in case the people were oppressed by an authoritarian regime, supporting their democratic struggle was correct and justified. B.P. also justified strongly the insurrectionary method employed by the Nepali Congress, for the same reason that it was a fight against an autocratic regime.

B.P. may have been distraught at Nehru's evolving attitude, but he was no less disillusioned with the Socialist International, whose leaders showed him great courtesy, but never moved beyond words when it came to supporting the cause and the struggle he espoused. He met the leaders of socialist parties in power, explained to them that the Nepali Congress was the one party capable of wresting power in Nepal, but he was told by these European socialist stalwarts that their eyes were fixed on Africa. One can only speculate that if socialist leaders had remained in power in Indonesia where the socialist leader Soetan Sjariar had become Prime Minister, or Burma, which had U Ba Swe as Prime Minister, quite possibly, B.P. would have found support from them. But, an insurmountable problem was the conduct of his own close colleagues, primarily his elder brother 'Thuldaju ', Matrika Prasad Koirala, who was a very ambitious person but not a fighter. In the course of Atmabrittanta, he discusses the internal goings-on of the Nepali Congress and also makes deeply personal and illuminating observations on many political personalities of mid-twentieth century Nepal.

The most fascinating account, however, is about B.P.s marriage with Sushila, who was almost illiterate and very thin and apparently unattractive at the time, so much so that most people wondered why B.P. had married her. Yet, he taught her; and, as she grew, blossomed into a very pretty person and an accomplished artist. B.P. himself was a connoisseur of art, and I have a fond memory of meeting the couple in Vienna when B.P. was explaining to Sushila the meanings of the carvings on the walls of historical buildings there. The love and respect that the couple had for each other was something to admire. Moreover, those who had interacted with him frequently, as I did when he was in Delhi in exile, staying in Gulmohar Park, cannot forget B.P.'s splendid manners, his affection and generosity and the care that he took of the party workers who went to see him. Once he visited the office of the Socialist Party, sometime in early January 1974, when general elections in Uttar Pradesh were at hand. He had come to give a contribution of 25,000 rupees for the election fund. I said to him that he was himself in exile and had to find money to procure arms and sustain the workers of his party, but he was keen that as a fraternal gift, we accept the contribution.

B.P. and other leaders of the Nepali Congress were never averse to a negotiated settlement with the monarchy, and they kept extending a hand of co-operation. But, then, while monarchy was to be retained, there could be no compromise on the

sovereign right of the people to govern themselves. On that, too, B.P. was committed. He was also extremely sensitive about the separate and sovereign identity of Nepal as a nation, and minced no words with Indian leaders and the officialdom on this score. Yet, it does not seem that India learnt anything from these encounters with B.P. Koirala. Its leaders wanted such pliable figures as Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, who dissolved parliament and all political parties on the advice of Indira Gandhi. This was something B.P. abhorred, not only for its anti-democratic dimensions but also for the servility it showed to another country.

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