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Former Nepal PM Manmohan Adhikary dead

Deepak Goel in Kathmandu

Former prime minister and president of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxists-Leninists) Manmohan Adhikary died early on Monday morning. He was admitted to a Kathmandu hospital last Monday after an attack of hypoxia felled him unconscious when he was campaigning for the forthcoming general election in the Himalayan kingdom.

Adhikary, 79, the sole survivor from among the co-founders of the 50-year-old Communist movement in the Hindu kingdom, is survived by his wife Sadhana, whom he married 45 years ago, and a son and a daughter.

Projected by the CPI-N (UML) as its prime minister candidate, Adhikary plunged into the campaign with gusto despite his age and ill health. A chronic asthma patient, he was felled by an attack of hypoxia shortly after he had addressed an election meeting in a rural area of Kathmandu district. He was contesting two parliamentary seats in the capital district.

He was rushed to the Tribhuvan university teaching hospital in a comatose condition with vital signs like heartbeat, pulse and respiration missing. He was immediately revived in the emergency ward through cardio-pulmonary resuscitation and admitted to the intensive care unit where he died a week later.

The last rites of the veteran Marxist will be performed at the Aryaghat -- from where every Nepali Hindu believes his spirit goes straight to heaven -- on Tuesday. His body, draped in the Communist flag, will lie in state at Shaheed Manch in the heart of the city from where it will be taken in a procession through the winding roads, streets and by-lanes of the Kathmandu valley.

The election-coalition headed by Nepali Congress president and Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala -- and of which Adhikary's CPN-UML is a partner -- has declared a three-day period of state mourning for the Marxist leader with the national flag to fly at half-mast atop all government buildings.

Tomorrow, when Adhikary is to be accorded a state funeral, government offices all over the country shall remain closed.

Fondly referred to as the ''Bhishma Pitamaha'' of Nepali politics, Adhikary was a Leftist of the classical Marxist mould. He was elected CPN-UML -- a post he retained to the very end -- when it was formed with the merger of his CPN (Marxist) and the CPN(ML), the leading two Left entities in the country, in 1990, shortly after a popular movement overthrew the erstwhile partyless panchayat polity to restore multiparty parliamentary democracy in Nepal.

He remained a sobering restraining influence on the hardliners within the CPN-UML who, but for him, would have liked to adopt ''a more revolutionary path.''

Adhikary began his political career at 22 by taking part in the Quit India movement against the British and was jailed for his efforts. For the subsequent four years, he was an active member of the Communist Party of India.

But the Benares Hindu University science graduate later chose anti-India election rhetoric to woo Nepalese voters in the CPN-UML's quest for power in the kingdom. The ploy, a usual gimmick of every Nepali politician, worked and his party was voted the single-largest in a hung parliament elected in the November 1994 mid-term poll.

Adhikary served as Nepal's prime minister for nine months before he was voted out through a parliamentary censure.

UNI

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