Contractor Sarada Adhikari, whose home in Khumaltar Dahal currently rents, has long been accused of using Dahal’s influence to advance his business. The other day someone even claimed that Dahal was the real owner of the home.
The former Maoist leader’s name has been linked to billions inside the country and abroad. A trip to Dubai, and the predictable headlines come pouring in. The word ‘cantonment’ has become synonymous with you know what. Still, Dahal has rarely responded to such allegations. Enough is enough.
In a candid and wide-ranging interview with Janata Television, Dahal said he had no clue what the house owner did or did not do. “Any contracts he might be working on were signed before I moved in,” Dahal explained. “I have no relationship with him even as remote as that of a cattle seller. Now, I have started looking for another house.” It’s that bad, eh?
Far from being complicit in nefarious acts, Dahal said he actually has been busy exposing them. On the irregularities surrounding fertilizers, the former Maoist chief insisted, he had actually pressed the Minister of Agriculture to identify the offenders and take prompt punitive action.
Dahal appeared particularly stung by what he characterized as below-the-belt allegations of nepotism incessantly heaped on him over the years. Invoking what you could call the Koirala defense, Dahal explained that his entire family had involved themselves in the ‘People’s War’. Why should the sky fall when some happen to get minor responsibilities, he asked?
“Prakash didn’t just take pictures. He carried a gun,” Dahal said of his late son.“Renu formed women’s organizations all over Rolpa and Rukum. How is it nepotism when she contests an election and wins?”
“Bina was active in politics before coming into our family,” he said of his daughter in law, who serves as Prime Minister K.P. Oli’s Water Supply Minister.
Turning to allegations that he has always betrayed someone or the other during his political life, Dahal asked why, if that were so, people like Khadga Prasad Oli, Madhav Kumar Nepal and Narayan Kaji Shrestha would unite with him. I guess we’d have to ask them.
Describing himself a conciliator, Dahal claimed he possessed the natural traits of someone who could bring everyone together. “I used to play the role of mediator in the village, even when I was a child.” So it was because of the state’s callousness that he had to take up arms.
On the party’s ideological orientation, Dahal said that it would be against the spirit of party unity to speak in favor of either multiparty democracy or ‘Prachanda Path’. The party would have to move forward synthesizing both. Perpetual motion, if not permanent revolution, huh comrade?
Addressing charges of ideological deviancy by former Maoist allies such as Mohan Vaidya and Baburam Bhattarai, Dahal said history would be the judge of whether he left them or they had left him. Whatever the truth, we do know who’s better off, don’t we?
