Hammer And Fickle

- Shubhanga Pandey

An unusual emblem entered Nepal’s political iconography early this August. In Bharatpur, supporters of the southern city’s new mayor, Renu Dahal, sewed together the flags of the Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre)—stars and stripes in red and white in the first case, and a hammer and sickle in white on red in the other—and paraded in celebration. Dahal, the daughter of the CPN(MC) leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal, better known as Prachanda, won after a partial rerun of an earlier local-body election. The first, disputed run of the Bharatpur vote was held in May; CPN(MC) activists interrupted counting to tear up ballots. Prachanda was then the prime minister, at the head of a coalition between the CPN(MC) and the Congress, and, in keeping with the conditions of the alliance, he resigned shortly afterwards in favour of Sher Bahadur Deuba, the Congress supremo and present incumbent. The August celebrations in Bharatpur suggested that the alliance continued in good health, to the cost of the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist Leninist)—a member, alongside the two allied parties, of the “big three” of Nepali politics in recent times.