Chapter 6

Summary

On 1 February 2005, the only challenger to Prachanda's supreme position and power was locked up, under armed Maoist guards, inside a small mud house in an isolated corner of Lawang village. In a poorly-lit and unheated room, the deputy leader of the Maoists, Baburam Bhattarai lay on a small bed, reading. Detained with him was his wife Hisila Yami, who was also a Maoist leader. She appeared much stronger than her intellectual husband, and was frustrated at not being allowed to go outside. Incarcerated because of her husband's actions, she considered herself a sati of the twenty-first century.

Baburam Bhattarai was arrested for writing an article that had been published in the premier national broadsheet Kantipur (Daily) before the party had a chance to debate its content. Bhattarai's article, “Princely Tendency and Democracy”, was a follow-up to another shrewdly analysed article, “Difference between Democracy and Monarchy”, by Devendra Raj Pandey, a civil society activist. Bhattarai had written:

At a time when King Gyanendra is about to proceed on a pilgrimage to Delhi to seek blessings for his direct military rule after doing away with the remaining… democratic facades and when the principal international power centres are inclined to put their bets on the King, all the genuine democratic forces ought to seriously consider the princely tendencies within themselves.

(Bhattarai 2005, 12)