By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS,
Kathmandu : Almost eight decades after he led the famous Long March of the Red Army, an incredible year-long odyssey overcoming starvation, sickness and decimating ambushes, late Chinese chairman Mao Zedong has hit a high note in Nepal, courtesy the Maoists who drew their inspiration from him.
In September 1935, about a month before Mao’s First Red Army reached its final destination, losing almost 90,000 soldiers on the way, the revolutionary wrote the celebrated poem, “The long march”, to put heart into his floundering men.
Now the poem – “The Red Army fears not the trials of the Long March/And thinks nothing of a thousand mountains and rivers” – is on the lips of another army and other revolutionaries in Nepal after being set to music and released as part of a music video by the chairman of the Nepal Maoists, Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda himself.
“Chairman Mao’s Long March was known to Nepal even before the Maoist party came into existence,” says Maila Lama, the 35-year-old veteran of the Maoists’ People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and now revolutionary composer to whom goes the credit of bringing Mao’s poem even to the mobile phone sets of Nepal as an increasingly popular ring tone.
In 1990, after three radical Communist parties of Nepal merged to form the Communist Party of Nepal-Unity Centre, which was the forerunner of the current Maoist party, Lama says the party published a commemorative volume on Mao, which included “The long march” translated into Nepali.
Last month, Lama created a music video containing nine songs that inspired the Maoists and their guerrilla army while they fought their decade-old ‘People’s War’ against the state from 1996.
Besides tracks by Lama and his peer Balaram Timilsinha, the collection of nine songs includes “The long march”, now metamorphosed as “Rato machheharo” – The Red Army.
“The Long March is a great energiser,” says Lama, the son of a farmer in Kathmandu who joined the underground Communist movement in Nepal more than 20 years ago and became the commander of a platoon of guerrilla combatants.
“It inspired our soldiers to endure hardship with the promise that victory would be ours at the end.”
Lama’s last offensive was against a police post in Bethan in Ramechhap in 1997, in which the Maoists killed two policemen and lost three of their combatants. The following year, he lost an eye while training his platoon in the use of land mines in Kavre district.
Now unable to see with his right eye and with only partial vision in the left, Lama is a member of the Maoists’ cultural brigade that brought out the music video, titled “Matribhumi” (Motherland).
“The Long March” sequence is an amalgamation of scenes from a video tape by students of a Chinese university and the Maoists’ own PLA in action.
While chairman Mao is portrayed as a source of inspiration, Nepal’s southern neighbour India, currently the Maoists’ bête noir, is projected as a predator.
The video sleeve bears the image of the Indian national flag, shaped like a claw, hovering ominously over Nepal, a reminder of the Maoists’ allegation that India has been encroaching on Nepal’s territory and interfering in the republic’s internal affair.
“We have no enmity with the Indian people,” Lama says. “However, Nepal has the right to exist as a sovereign, independent nation.”
“There are real images showing the atrocities perpetrated by the Indian border patrols. These were taken first-hand during the journey to Susta (a controversial border area where Nepal says Indian encroachment is at its worst) undertaken by top Maoist leaders like Baburam Bhattarai,” he says.
While launching the video at a programme in Kathmandu last month, Prachanda, now fighting a long march for prime ministership, came down heavily on India.
India has not been able to respect Nepal’s sovereignty, the revolutionary who once carried a price tag on his head, said. While it has been seeking to isolate the Maoists in Nepal, unfortunately, a group within the party itself was also seeking to do that, Prachanda said.
We will defeat these designs but we have a long march before us.
(Sudeshna Sarkar can be contacted at [email protected])