Scenes from a documentary show

By Anand Gurung

After the documentary film ended the lights were turned on at the British Council hall. The audiences were requested to stay for the main segment of the programme. Helpers brought large sofas into the raised platform and soon the stage was set for panel discussion on Voices of the Abandoned, a documentary film concerning the plight of Nepali children during the conflict. One by one the host called in the panelists into the stage, which included a politician, a child rights activist, a Maoist leader and a UN rep. Then each was asked what needs to be done to improve the condition of children whose lives have been ruined by 11-year long armed conflict. After mulling for a few seconds each spoke at length about their thoughts on the subject and tried to address the questions raised by the documentary in their own ways. They talked about ways to deal with the problem, gave advices, and came up with what they said was definitive solution to this humanitarian crisis. But one knew that all they were doing was speaking in the jargon of their respective professions and that their preaching was not going to improve the condition of even one child that was documented in the movie or for that matter other children who have lost their innocence early to the brutal war of the grown-ups.

Following the panel discussion, the floor was soon opened for queries from the audience. The moderator of the discussion programme had not so much as hinted at its beginning, when a dauntless red-haired lady stood up and said in her typical American twang.

“I want to ask the Maoist leader in the panel,” she said looking straight at him, “If your party is still committed to violent politics? Would you return to the old ways if things don’t work out quite as you have planned?”

She paused for a while, then in the same breathe she continued, “You consider capitalism evil, denounce American imperialism, but look what you have done. To establish your communist state your party has killed and maimed thousands of people. Isn’t it time for doing some soul searching, to acknowledge that violence and killing led it nowhere and perhaps adopt a more Gandhian way to achieve what you have set out to achieve?” She shook her head looking at the Maoist leader and raised her shoulders, as if she already knew the Maoist leader had no answer to her question.

The discussion was now really charged up, and everybody at the audience looked at the Maoist leader. “…our party doesn’t believe in violence,” the Maoist leader stuttered in English. He was trying to regain his composure after the unexpected barrage of hostile questions from the lady. “But we believe that if violence is the only way through which we can secure the future of the country and its people and bring about a classless society where everybody is equal, then there’s nothing wrong in it…” Listening to what he said some people in the audience shook their head in disagreement. They would no way buy to this kind of lie.

He then looked straight at the red-haired lady and said, “Now let me draw your attention to the death and destruction during the First and Second World Wars, were the communists responsible for it?”

And suddenly aware that the Maoist leader in some vague way had made a strong point, the lady stood up again and in her loud voice, coupled with the violent gesture of her hand, tried to counter it. But despite the lady’s shouting, the communist leader carried on. “Let me again draw your attention to the Vietnam wars in which thousands upon thousands of people were simply butchered to death. Tell me who was responsible for it?”

The lady was about to go on her diatribe once again when the moderator intervened and requested her to refrain from asking political questions from hereafter and just stick to the issues related to the documentary. She quietly took her seat for the sake of courtesy, but she hadn’t accepted defeat.

Then another from the audience asked the Maoist leader, “In the documentary we saw little children at your party run schools being taught C for ‘communist’ and M for ‘memorandum’ instead of C for ‘cat’. We saw even one of your party comrade say that education means nothing to the party and that they rather give more priority to practical education like teaching children how to plough, perform military drill. What are you turning these children into?”

The Maoist leader snapped, “First of all, let me make it clear to you all that our party gives as much importance to education as any other party. You got our comrade wrong; he was only saying that the party lays more importance on practical education. See, we don’t believe in the so-called modern education system which only lays importance on bookish knowledge, it is a serious fault in our country’s education system and we mean to change that.

At that instant the moderator cut him in the middle, and asked what then should the audience make of the children being taught C for ‘communist’ instead of cat and M for ‘memorandum’?

The Maoist leader, with his face puckered up with sarcasm, said, “Okay then why does your modern education system teach G for ‘God’ and K for ‘King’?”

Extensive reading of the communist literature seemed to have made the Maoist leader quite an expert in giving precise replies to the sort of questions he was asked.

The discussion went on, and mostly revolved around the periphery of the subject matter dealt with in the documentary, never even seeming to touch the core issue. And again the documentary itself was just a series of interview of children who went through all the horrors of war one can possibly imagine and lived to tell the tale. Yes there were few poignant scenes like when a 12 years old boy in the Maoist-run school said his aim was to grow up to become a doctor and serve the country or when a similar aged girl recounted the travails her family went through during the war. But one felt that the documentary filmmakers lacked the kind of seriousness which the subject matter they were dealing with required (They seemed to lack even the slightest common sense that when you interviewed victimised children or even people you had to conceal his or her identity for obvious reasons.) Hence the jousting between the Maoist leader and few from the audience was the main highlight of the entire discussion, and so your correspondent mostly ignored the talks that followed and instead roved eyes on the audience sitting listening intently to it.

Being a documentary film made chiefly with the foreign expatriates and the Nepalese privileged class in mind, the audience of course consisted mostly of these very people, the sort you usually see in cocktail circuits of Kathmandu. So obviously for the audience comprising largely of these kinds of people the Maoist leader was kind of an enigma. In their world of fanciful living, lavish parties and bohemian carelessness, the very word communism is no doubt viewed with disdain and a sort of shudder as if it was some kind of a plague that they be as far away from as possible. So even though the Maoist leader didn’t have the kind of an impressive personality one expects from a radical politician nor had a persuasion in his speech, still he was for the time being the center of everybody’s attention – this largely described why he had to field one after another question from the audience.

But one look at him and you saw a kind of uneasiness behind his calm demeanor. In his apparent dogmatism and his strong belief in the ideology he so strongly defended you also saw the immense confusion he was bogged deep under. Every word he uttered seemed to have come not from him but from his wide reading of Marx, Engels and Mao. The set words and phrases he used seemed as bland as the communist utopia his party sold to the masses. His sacred scriptures being the communist manifesto, the Red Book ; all his knowledge was received, second-hand, and this was what made him, and any other communist leader, similar to any religious guru who they mean to rid the society from.

If we look into the political history of this country we find examples of top communist leaders leaving their ideology and doctrine altogether to become staunch royalists, even fanatical religious persons. What compelled them to do such a complete about turn? It is just plain and simple, when you go to one extreme you almost always go to the other extreme also, very much like a pendulum of a ‘grandfather clock’. The same force that drove these persons into becoming communists also impelled them to become die-hard monarchists or religious guru, two things all communists swear one day to annihilate from the face of the world to bring about a new state without class distinctions.

And for this they are ready to resort to whatever means as long as it helps them achieve their ends, which is to establish a true communist state. They are ready to sacrifice themselves and others for the ‘greater good of the masses’. And justifying their war as a struggle to liberate the oppressed masses from the tyranny of the feudalist, the rich, they themselves resort to violence in the present saying only ‘iron cuts an iron’. To them ends justifies any means – the end being a future society and ultimately a world that is just, peaceful and above all classless. Quite frankly, who wouldn’t want the world to be like that? But where Karl Marx, Chairman Mao and his blind followers went wrong was that if you use violence as a means to achieve an end however lofty and glorious it may be – ultimate peace, freedom and liberation from age-old oppression - it will still bring misery with it because violence begets violence. Because the end contains in the beginning, you can’t separate one from the other.

And so long as the privileged class, the rich, continue to prefer remaining in their own world of comfort and leisure while continuing to resist anything that has the capability to shatter it, till that time one or other group would emerge to overthrow them from there and take their place instead. This is what has always been happening throughout the history of mankind. Despite so many great upheavals and revolutions the status of the commoners has never actually changed, what has changed is the name of their masters. Very much like the way it was shown in the documentary show – it was the rich and the feudalists who used to oppress and exploit people in the past, and now it is the Maoists who sell them the concept of utopia. nepalnews.com August 07 07

(Comments on this write-up can be sent to editors@mos.com.np. The writer can be reached at andygurung@yahoo.com)

Have your say ! (Registration required)