The only Hindu kingdom in the world is in the process of transforming itself into the world’s only country where a communist party has come to power vanquishing all others in a free, democratic, multi-party election. The magnitude of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)’s victory is so breathtaking that even last-ditch supporters of the country’s centuries-old monarchical system have chosen to call it a day.

Many foreign entities are part of this crestfallen crowd, with the United States of America department of state to the fore: after all, Nepal’s royalty has been the jewel of its eye. The collapse of the ‘evil empire’ the Soviet Union presided over had allowed the Americans an untrammelled entry into central Asia. They had cherished clandestine hopes about the land-locked country. Those daydreams would now need to be aborted. The Chinese leadership too could be — who knows? — somewhat disheartened by the Nepal poll outcome. The colour of the cat is still a crucial ideological issue with the Maoists; any cat will do for the Dengites.

Reaction is similarly mixed in India, which in fact was strongly represented, by proxy in the Nepal elections. The Bharatiya Janata Party naturally has a proprietorial concern for the security and well-being of a Hindu monarchy. Some among its creamy layer are also related by marriage to the Ranas, the most powerful royalist coterie in Kathmandu, while a few others are known to have fraternal links with business groups that provide financial assistance to Madhesi factions supporting this or that Indian immigrant group. However, the more important surrogate electoral presence was that of the Indian Congress and the Left. The Nepali Congress, built in the image of the Indian National Congress, is not only emotionally attached to the Indian party, it has, according to rumours freely circulating, habituated itself to draw up its strategy and programme in close consultation with its Indian counterpart.

The persistent ambition of policy-planners in New Delhi has been to present India as south Asia’s natural leader, basking in the love and admiration of neighbours, big and small, thereby appearing to the US as a credible strategic partner in future jousts with the People’s Republic of China. To have Nepal safely in its pocket would have strengthened this ambition. The eclipse of the Nepali Congress will now set everything in disarray.

The Indian Left had a more limited field for furrowing. Let the Nepali Congress emerge as the first party, it did not matter much; but the second accredited political formation following the poll, the official Left in India had been telling those within earshot, must be its ideological ally, the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist). As in domestic politics, so too in across-the-border political assessment: bourgeois parties have ceased to occupy the place of the major adversary of the establishment Left in India; that position now belongs to the deviant Left. Interestingly, India’s orthodox Left seems of late to have acquired a certain respect for the Central Intelligence Agency. For example, in the prolix listing of knaves and scoundrels who allegedly took advantage of the temporary discomfiture of the Left in Nandigram in West Bengal, the CIA was left out of the enumeration. On the contrary, the CIA’s dissertation on a Maoist conspiracy, originating in Nepal, intending to infiltrate India via West Bengal, and gradually spreading across to Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, has reportedly greatly impressed the Indian Left; it is the season of received wisdom: Maoists have naughty designs on India, they want to exploit the poverty and land hunger of our people to foment revolutionary anarchy.

The Nepali electorate has understandably let down India’s genteel Left leadership; the CPN(UML) has been reduced to the position of a poor third while the CPN(Maoist) has emerged supreme. Is this, however, not an occasion when sectarian reasoning deserves to be discarded? What about the grandeur of what has taken place in Nepal? In a free democratic poll, the deprived and impoverished millions, led and inspired by a communist party, have marched to the booths and asserted their will to get rid of the vestiges of feudalism and semi-feudalism. Is this not a great historic occurrence?

Suspend for a moment other concerns, consider the suffrage in Nepal as a phenomenon qua phenomenon. That little canton in Italy, San Marino, had, in free elections, voted for a communist mayor for years on end in the post-World War II period; the world was tantalised. Way back in 1957, Kerala voted the communists to power in a multi-party electoral battle. That state was a puny constituent of the Union of India. So what, it was an unprecedented achievement and the world’s press made a beeline for Trivandrum. And the Left Front’s seven consecutive electoral triumphs, stretching over 30 years, in West Bengal, another hamstrung-by-constraints constituent unit of the Union of India, have been accorded the accolade that was due. Is not the Nepal happening even more epoch-making? Not a minor canton, not a relatively powerless province in a federal set-up but an independent country, still a formal monarchy, where a communist party participating in a multi-party election has won, single-handed, an overwhelming majority of the seats that were at stake.

Should this not have been regarded an extraordinary event, calling for celebration for Left forces everywhere? As the news of the CPN (M)’s stupendous success started flashing across television channels, should not directives have gone out from all Left party headquarters that cadre be immediately on the march, throng roads, streets and thoroughfares of villages, towns and cities, build victory arches, illuminate party offices, fly the Red Flag high and organize rallies to hail the toiling masses of Nepal for their courage and resoluteness? Instead, apart from issuing a brief statement expressing satisfaction at the poll result, there has been deathly silence. Such lack of generosity is saddening, and, cannot one add, asinine too?

The official Left, particularly in India, is worried; perhaps its adherents have good reason to worry. Once they themselves withdraw into a cautious corner, a radical initiative in any part of the world by any other group can make them feel vulnerable. But this sense of vulnerability might one day spell doom. For caution often leads to a breed of conservatism. And a morning arrives when conservatism is no longer distinguishable from unalloyed reaction.

The Left in Nepal has experimented with a strategy of revolutionary activism that has had a deep impact on the country’s masses, especially the youth. Prachanda and his comrades realized the implications of this massive swing in their favour, and confidently opted for participation in multi-party elections. Their preoccupation for the present, common sense suggests, will be exclusively on domestic matters. To imagine that thundering success on homeground would now tempt them to infiltrate into the heartland of India is nothing more than nervous speculation. Revolutions can be neither exported nor smuggled in. If India falls prey to revolutionary turmoil, it would be on account of, as the cliché goes, quantity on its own maturing into quality, not because of Maoist infiltration from Nepal, with a population less than 2 per cent of India’s.

The CPN(M) should not feel daunted. For the experience of Fidel Castro and his comrades with the then alive-and-very-much-kicking world communist movement was no better: their revolution, the reproof was handed down, was not according to grammar. Circumstances changed so rapidly that orthodoxy had soon to eat humble pie; Castro and Che Guevara were invited to take over, lock, stock and barrel the erstwhile communist party in Cuba. History is known sometimes to repeat itself.