Nobody questions the sacrifices that he — and hundreds of thousands of political activists, both liberal and progressive — made in toppling Panchayat rule. He and his generation could have rested on the laurels of this achievement alone. But of course they did not.

In 1990, Koirala, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai and Ganesh Man Singh were co-leaders of the Nepali Congress. Their rivalry heightened when Koirala became prime minister in 1991. What the country had needed at that time was a Nehru, but what it got was a Mrs Gandhi: he set about instating his family as his party’s inheritors. The power struggles he waged in his own party cost it its majority in 1994, diminished its public standing, and eventually split it down the middle, with Sher Bahadur Deuba heading the “rebel” splinter party.

Koirala also badly mishandled the counterinsurgency. Following on Deuba’s brutal police crackdown of 1996 — “Operation Romeo” — Koirala in 1998 unleashed “Operation Kilo Sierra” in the Maoist heartland. Like all the violation-rife crackdowns that followed, this inflamed resentment against the state, benefiting the Maoists. Koirala was adamantly against negotiating with the Maoists; he wanted to defeat them militarily. He created the Armed Police Force in January 2001, and four months later launched the Integrated Security and Development Programme, laying the grounds for the Royal Nepal Army’s engagement. In July, a month after the massacre at the royal palace, he ordered the RNA to war. (They refused: but a precedent had been set, a precedent that Deuba followed upon at the end of that year.)

... contd.