I just changed some names from an article in THE NEW YORKER and this is what I came up with--not too ingeniously, I confess

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'Nepali' genius

Madhav Kumar Nepal, who is the General Secretary of CPN-UML, lives in one of the better Kathmandu suburbs, on a street of large and unhandsome new homes. The interior of Nepal?s house has space and light, but it is furnished in a mostly expedient manner; Nepal and his wife, Malati, have four children?ages eight to twenty-one?and the house feels very much theirs.

The exception is Nepal?s library. It is apparent that he has devoted considerable care and money to its design and, in particular, to its collection, which numbers at least five thousand volumes. The floors and shelves are dark oak, and the walls are covered in hunter-green wallpaper. The library is not in the style of the high-station Kathmandu bureaucrat who wants to telegraph his indispensability; there are few photographs of Nepal in the company of potentates and prime ministers and presidents. Instead, Nepal has filled the room with images of figures who have earned his admiration. Busts of Lenin and Bhandari sit on the shelves; Marx scowls in the direction of Nepal?s desk. A black-and-white portrait of Fredrick Engels, the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto with Marx, hangs over a green leather couch. In his collection, history has displaced nearly every other subject; fiction?his favorite is Koirala?has been exiled to the basement. The library is weighted disproportionately to the history of the Mogul Empire, and Nepal has spent many hours schooling himself in the schemes and follies of the Moguls on the playing fields of India.

History serves another purpose, Nepal suggests: it provides solace to leaders who are misunderstood by their peers. ?When history looks back,? he told me, ?I want to be in the class of people who did the right thing, the sensible thing, and not necessarily the fashionable thing, the thing that met the aesthetic of the moment.?

Nepal, who announced earlier this year that he will be leaving his post by this summer?he said he hopes to write a book about his experiences as the General Secretary?has not often met the reigning aesthetic of Kathmandu. It has been Nepal?s job, as the top policy maker of UML, to help build the intellectual framework for the party?s future in the future democratic governments. His detractors see him as an opportunist who misused his position to bring about the downfall of the majority-led congress government. His main nemesis on the political font, Girija Prashad Koirala, a Morang congressman, who has served on the House Select Committee on Poverty Reduction, told me that Nepal deceived not only the Singadarbar but the Lower House as well. Yet the criticism of Nepal in Kathmandu goes beyond his ideology, to his competence. Even some fellow-communists from his own party, who have been lacerating in their criticism of his management of post-Girija era, have asked whether he is better at reading history than at shaping it. ?I don?t know whether Nepal deserves more praise for supporting Vladimir Lenin?s policies or more criticism for acting as an Stalinist,? Kunda Dixit, the editor of The Nepali Times, said.

Fifteen hundred people report to Nepal in the party office at Balkhu, where he is known for the profligacy of his policy suggestions. Deepak Gurung, the spokesman of the RNA, has been much quoted as calling Nepal ?the f****** stupidest guy on the face of the earth,? apparently for ideas he proposed to Gurung and the army.

Gurung?s view is not universally shared by the military. Brigadier General Subash Limbu, who has just been nominated to be chairman of the Proactive Commission Against the Maoists, says of Nepal, ?Early on, he didn?t realize that the way he presented his positions, the way he was being perceived, put him in a bit of a hole. But he changed his ways.? Apparently, he became more consultative, particularly with his counterparts on PCAM. Limbu, who calls Nepal a ?true Nepali patriot,? said he did not understand Gurung?s attack. ?This is not directed at any individual,? Limbu said, ?but the less secure an individual is in his thought processes and in his own capacities, the more prone they were to be intimidated by Nepal, because he?s so smart.? (A spokesman for Gurung?yes, a spokesman?s spokesman? Nabin Thapa, said in an e-mail that Gurung would not comment for this article: ?What do you think he has to gain by talking about Nepal??)
Nepal?s most prominent defender is K P Oli, a senior UML leader, who told me that Nepal is ?one of the brightest people you or I will ever come across. He?s diligent, very well read, and insightful.? Oli explained Nepal?s trouble with Gurung this way: ?If you?re a combatant commander and you?re in the area of operations and you?re hearing from people in House arrest, what you?re hearing is frequently not on point to what you?re worrying about at the moment, just as the reverse is also true.?

In conversation, Nepal is not often on point. The first time we met, I was prepared to ask about his role in the management of the country while UML was at the helm. Nepal, though, preferred to discuss the influence on his thinking of Noam Chomsky, the professor of Linguistics at MIT and an influential left-winger, who feared instability as much as neoconservatives in America seem to embrace it. I asked Nepal to imagine what Chomsky would have thought about the King?s experiment in Nepal. ?Chomsky warns in his writings about the danger of political abstractions put forward as universal principles,? Nepal said. Chomsky, he continued, ?wrote brilliantly and bitterly about the French Revolution and the danger to a society of a bunch of people thinking they could remake society rationally and get rid of all the institutions that have grown up over centuries and reflect the distilled wisdom of numerous people.? The Royalist government, Nepal added, has done so exactly.

To draft Chomsky into the conflict (after Feb.1) is typical of Nepal: counterintuitive and clever, maybe too clever. He believes that the king is seeking to remake Nepal in Iraq?s image: ?I believe that what makes king Gyanendra?s policy of democracy promotion worse, stupid, and reckless than what one could describe as true democracy is precisely his inability to recognize that we should not be trying to impose our political views on the populace.? He also said that the idea of ?Royal democracy,? a system in which the King would play a large role, frightens him to death. ?In different parts of the world, kings play a larger or smaller role in the political process. The idea that there may be a country where kings play a larger role in the political process than they normally do is inherently antidemocratic and alarming,? he said. ?What the King talks about is that it is the nature of kingdoms to be ruled by a king. I think that violates Lenin?s warnings.?