Surba Manya Neta Ganesh Man

I don't know when I first heard the name of Ganesh Man Singh. But I remember that one of the first things I heard about him at a very early age was his daring escape from a Rana jail in the summer of 1944. I heard about this historic event from my grandfather, the late Ganesh Raj Onta (1910-1995), who was a fellow inmate in the same jail. The better-known Ganesh Man, member of the Nepal Praja-Parishad, was serving a life sentence and the little known Ganesh Raj (whose name has all but faded away from nationalist histories of the anti-Rana movement), member of the so-called Raktapat Committee, was serving a 12-year sentence for their various anti-Rana activities. They had both been imprisoned since the early winter of 1940 when the Rana administration led by Juddha Shumsher cracked down mercilessly on all kinds of anti-Rana political activists. I no longer remember the details of what my grandfather told me of the great escape but I remember vaguely his telling me that those who remained in the prison, like him, were further tortured by the Ranas in an attempt to extract information about how the escape had been planned and about Ganesh Man's subsequent plans.

Although I was born barely 60 metres from what in recent years has been called his Chaksibari residence, I did not get to see Ganesh Man in public until much later. Like many other of my cohorts who were born in the mid-sixties, a time when the Panchayat system was consolidating itself, I came to know of his incarceration in the hands of that system only later.

Before Thamel became a tourist ghetto, as I and many of my childhood friends played marbles and 'seven stones' on the street in front of Chaksibari, I recall how especially deserted the whole compound used to look. At that young age, little did I realize the significance of Ganesh Man's continued absence from his home (he was in exile in India for almost a decade) and of his commitment to anti-Panchayat politics. Little did I know then that the very same compound, some twenty years later, would be the site where anti-Panchayat forces would find their strength for the Jana Andolan. I happened to be away from Nepal during the Andolan and hence missed the opportunity to see Ganesh Man in public at the pinnacle of his long political career.

The last occasion when I saw him up close was when he visited our house following the death of my grandfather in October 1995. He said a few kind words about his senior during that visit.

Like many other hundreds of thousands of Nepalis, I paid my last respects to the Ironman of our time on September 18th and 19th. As his body was being taken out of Chaksibari for its last trip around the city, I noticed that among the people who constituted the funeral procession, a motley crowd of Lilliputian politicians from all the camps of the present Nepali political landscape was also present. Masters of the Panchayati system and diehard Congressi and Comrade types - those chiefly responsible for making a complete mockery of the achievements of the Jana Andolan - were all there. It is a cruel irony that those who were responsible for incarcerating Ganesh Man for years during the Panchayat era and who partly built their political careers by calling him 'anti-nationalist', were never themselves incarcerated as part of a much-needed act of cleansing for this nation after 1990. It is doubly ironic that the chief political actors who did virtually everything to marginalize Ganesh Man from national politics in the last five years are now doing their 'Ganesh Man's loss is irreparable' dance.

Hence it would be completely depressing to let this group of hypocrites define - or more likely hijack - how the memory of Ganesh Man should be celebrated in this nation. If we let those party politicians chiefly responsible for the stunting of democracy in Nepal construct a schema within which Ganesh Man's legacy is to be captured, we would have failed to honor the giant once again. If we are to make sure that his legacy is itself not incarcerated by the mediocrity of today's party politicians, I suggest that we celebrate Ganesh Man as an icon not just for the political field in Nepal but for our entire social fields. This would not only be a field in Nepal but for our entire social fields.

There might be many ways in which we can rescue ourselves from the malignancy of fatalism eating away the social body of the Nepali nation. One way in which Ganesh Man's legacy could be used for this purpose is to remind ourselves and our posterity of the darkly fatalistic age in which Ganesh Man began his political life. The fatalism in which we find ourselves steeped at the moment is by no means more fatal than what pervaded in this society in the 1930s. Our own desperate times are by no means more desperate than the late Rana era. If Ganesh Man could rise from a society drenched in hopelessness, so can we. His life and work, should be a giant beacon of hope for people from all walks of life: we too can be the masters of our own destiny. For that to happen we only need to muster up the kind of courage and patience that Ganesh Man possessed.

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