Teachers recall an introvert who didn’t mix with girls

Teachers at the CCA remember him as a “quiet, respectful and responsible” student. But, they say, he never showed an inclination for politics. “He was an introvert and did not mix much with the girls in the college. He was always engrossed in his own thoughts, quite happy in his own company,” says Professor Bipin Malik, a member of the faculty at CCA.

His project guide, S S Bhatti, adds: “He was very well-disciplined, and an asset as a student.”

Principal Rajnish Wattas, who then taught Bhattarai landscape and architecture designing, says nobody could have imagined that Bhattarai would enter politics. They all thought he would be a “smart, intelligent architect”.

But two years after he left CCA, when Bhattarai enrolled as a doctoral student at JNU’s Centre for Study of Regional Development in 1979, he was already showing his political inclinations. He founded the All India Nepalese Students’ Association in 1977, and joined the CPN three years later.

His teachers and friends at JNU remember him differently, as someone who would passionately discuss Gandhi, Ram Manohar Lohia and Karl Marx — all in the same breath.

He took eight years to finish his thesis on the nature of development and regional structure of Nepal — a study that was later published in his fourth book, The Nature of Underdevelopment and Regional Structure of Nepal: A Maoist Analysis, in 2003.

“He was in no hurry. He was always academically inclined and wanted to do a very good thesis,” recalls Prof Atiya Habeeb Kidwai, his supervisor.

“He came as a student inspired by Jai Prakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia. He was certainly under the influence of Marxism, but not so impressed by Marxism as practised in India. He was all for an indigenous approach to radical politics in South Asia and studied the role of caste, which is very important for formulating an egalitarian society,” says Dr Sudhindra Bhadoria, who was with Bhattarai at JNU.

Bhattarai’s research work suffered a temporary setback when he lost his short-term memory in a road accident in his second year at JNU. He was forced to start his thesis from scratch.

“He could recognise only a few people, like his family members and close friends,” says Kidwai. But a few months later, Bhattarai recovered and resumed his field trips to Nepal.

His 900-page thesis began with Marx’s famed quote on “changing the world” and concluded with an exhortation that development of Nepal was not possible without structural transformation of society. The CPN (Maoist) later adopted his work as a “lucid exposition of politico-economic rationale of the epochal volcanic eruption” of the “people’s war” that it launched in 1996.

Incidentally, it was at JNU that Bhattarai met and married his wife, Hisila Yami, better known as Comrade Parvati. The couple had an Arya Samaj wedding.