Prachanda takes Manhattan

Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Prime Minister and Minister of Defence and Health of Nepal, addresses the general debate of the sixty-third session of the General Assembly.

“A Maoist Vision for a New Nepal” – an MP3 recording of a talk by Nepalese Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, aka Prachanda, presented by the India China Institute of New School University.

These MP3 recordings include remarks by Professor Andrew Arato, the Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory at New School University; remarks by Kul Chandra Gautam, advisor to the Nepal Democracy and Development Initiative at the India China Institute; as well as a Q&A between PM Pushpa Kamal Dahal and the audience.

These MP3 audio clips are presented by Hegemonik. They have been edited for length. As the program was both in English and Nepali (without translation equipment), clips have had Nepali language conversation excised. An unedited version is available upon request to the author.

• Speech by Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal (13:53)
  

• Remarks by Professor Andrew Arato (12:10)
  

• Remarks by Kul Chandra Gautam (4:48)
  

• Question and Answer with the Prime Minister (50:16)
  

“A Maoist Vision for a New Nepal” by Hegemonik is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Newly-elected Prime Minister of Nepal Pushpa Kamal Dahal came to New York this week. It was both his first trip to the U.S., as well as his first time representing Nepal before the General Assembly of the United Nations.

After speaking before the General Assembly, the Prime Minister (henceforth referred to by his wartime name, Prachanda) spoke to a mixed audience of intellectuals, expat Nepalis, and curious leftists at a talk sponsored by the New School University’s India China Institute.

Prachanda’s talk seemed aimed in large part at rallying international support (in the way of both foreign aid and investment) in the construction of a Nepal that now emerges from the shadow of a popularly deposed king, which now seeks to find a place in the modern world.

For the Leftists that attended, however, Prachanda’s bona fides as leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) provoked curiosity and questions of his views on socialism and revolution — topics which Prachanda seemed to revel to speak toward.

It is clear from Prachanda’s remarks that he has found himself in a situation fraught with contradictions: a former rebel leader who took a gamble on a peace process, Prachanda must now write a republic constitution for Nepal while negotiating strange geopolitical terrain between two emerging imperial nations, India and China.