KATHMANDU: Nepal Samajbadi Party (Naya Shakti) chair and former prime minister Dr. Baburam Bhattarai has launched a sharp critique of Nepal’s communist leadership, likening the current state of the movement to the era of stagnation under Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Posting on social media alongside a photograph of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and Maoist Centre chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal “Prachanda” in conversation, Bhattarai questioned what he described as the directionless and intolerant tendencies within the country’s communist parties.
Citing the well-known adage, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history,” Bhattarai said it applied precisely to Nepal’s communist movement.
“The hard-earned achievements of people’s struggles and the decade-long Maoist war have now ended in utter decline,” he said.
According to him, the legacy of the Jhapa uprising through the People’s War has been steadily reduced to stagnation.
“Leaders make lofty proclamations about communism arriving by a fixed date, but in practice there is neither ideological clarity nor qualitative transformation in policies and their implementation,” Bhattarai said.
He went further to compare Nepal’s communist parties’ intolerance of dissent to the “Great Terror” under Joseph Stalin, when political rivals were purged.
“Even today, we see leaders and cadres politically eliminated from party structures and power under baseless accusations,” he said, recalling how Stalin sidelined or executed Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin after Lenin’s death.
Bhattarai also criticized the culture of unquestioning loyalty among cadres, especially within the Maoist camp. “Today workers cheer when their leader targets others, only to weep when their own turn comes. It is time they learned from history,” he stated.
Calling for courage to explore “alternative paths” for building socialism and advancing humanity, Bhattarai argued that Nepal’s communists risk repeating past mistakes by clinging to personality cults and refusing internal reforms.
Comment