In magic realism, a narrator is allowed to blend facts with fiction and give wings to the story to offer a bird's-eye view of grim realities. Had the soul of Pradip Giri—PG hereafter—flown over the premises of an imposing building by the banks of the Bagmati in Sanepa in the fierce midday sun of Sunday, August 21, 2022, the mythical phoenix would have been bemused by the fuss over the physical remains of his former self.

It is not easy to be an atheist and remain in mainstream politics. But even when forced to show his presence at religious rituals, PG avoided active participation and sublimated his reservations into cultural explanations. Agnosticism allows a person to refrain from worshipping buffaloes or harming the self with a lash and restrain oneself from looking at such archaic practices with undisguised contempt. But even the forgiving phoenix would have found it hard to explain the pomp over the mortal remains of a person that never showed any affinity with grandeur when alive.

Outside the Sanepa headquarters of the Nepali Congress, an enterprising person had set up a makeshift shop to sell garlands of marigold. Lackeys of mourners in air-conditioned SUVs were seen carrying bouquets for their masters that were to be ceremoniously laid over the body. Motorcyclists plucked stray flowers from roadside plants as they looked for a parking space on narrow bylanes along the road.

Once inside the premises, the hoity-toity headed straight to the stage where the body lay in state. The hoi-polloi queued up in a serpentine line to pay their last respects. Oblivious of the crowd in the yard, influential politicos of the party kept their gaze upon the main gate from where the prime minister was expected to arrive any moment. Chairs below the improvised canopy in white were meant for camera-hungry VVIPs of the state and society.

Frightened by the mêlée, the phoenix would have then flown away to wherever the heat of the fire hides before it is rekindled to offer light and warmth to humanity.

Indefatigable romantic

Varanasi was the beehive of oppositional politics in late 1960s. After the debacle in the China war, the death of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and an erosion in the image of the Indian National Congress, attempts were being made to form a grand coalition under the leadership of an equally charismatic socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia. In 1967, Lohia passed away before the experiment could succeed, but he had kindled a fire that remains active on the fringes of Indian politics.

Political romanticism had begun to find a new life. Later romantics eulogised higher values of the French revolution—Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Laïcité—but emphasised the importance of individual engagement for social transformation. PG got the first taste of politics in this milieu of revolutionary romanticism. Born into the feudal Giri family of Bastipur in Siraha at the fag end of Ranarchy, a young Giri perhaps sincerely believed that the creation of a better world was not only possible but imminent.

In the dormitories of Varanasi, PG learnt to love and loved to learn. He belonged to the community of political exiles from Nepal, but also hobnobbed with luminaries of the Indian socialist movement. He was young and knew that the best way to know more was to question everything. Perhaps this was the trait that BP Koirala admired, and the coterie around him resented. Books were PG's refuge. The reading culture of his cohort helped. Niranjan Koirala and Chakra Banstola were some of his friends.

Like most romantic revolutionaries of the era, PG's grey cloth bag in the early 1970s would invariably have some books along with essentials to see through sudden arrests such as a toothbrush, torchlight and steel glass! The difference between PG and his fellow young democrats was his ability to theorise the anomalies of everyday life.

He discovered the limits of revolutionary romanticism early on, and moved on to Fabian socialism. Unlike the dogmatism of Marxism, Fabianism was an approach rather than a doctrine, and believed in empowering the masses with an understanding of the causes behind their misery. Fabians believed that the creation of a new order needed to be gradual, and the will of the people would render revolution unnecessary.

The campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a world apart from the formalism of Varanasi and Sarnath. Unlike the overwhelming elegance of giant trees and manicured lawns at Banaras Hindu University, bushes around JNU grew wild and allowed seekers to wander around unnoticed. In its freshly stocked libraries, PG began to explore Marxism and Latin American commentaries upon neo-colonialism. He once explained that if Fabianism was the natural flow of the Ganga, Marxism teaches to harness it for revolutionary energy. These are not his exact words—it's impossible to paraphrase PG and yet retain the effervescence of his statement—but his enthusiasm for Marxism turned him into a fringe player in NC politics. The communists were reluctant to accept a democrat. He had become an eternal outsider.

Inexorable pragmatist

In a recent interview, PG narrated the difficulty of performing as an elected representative. During the lockdown, he approached the chief district officer of Siraha to seek assistance for a Covid-19 infected patient in his constituency. The CDO didn't pick up the phone. He then called the home minister. The home minister asked him to approach the CDO once again as the official instructions had already been given. PG texted the CDO with a request to call him back or look into his request. The response was complete silence. And yet, PG refused to accept that politics was not a practical arena for a thinker.

The paradox of appointed officials exercising authority without responsibility, and elected representatives being held responsible without being given adequate authority made people like PG and like-minded politicos in the Nepali Congress moot the idea of a directly elected chief executive to run the country. They soon realised the inherent risks of demagogic populism when the likes of Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, Narendra Bhai Modi, Imran Khan and Gotabaya Rajapaksa began to straddle the political stage in South Asia.

It must have been in the early noughties when nothing was going right in the politics of the country. He was once again asked whether he ever repented being in electoral politics. PG loved to give long answers to short questions and short answers to long questions. It was a cryptic NO with an explanation that he actually loved being engaged with the people in his party. Soon after, he went on to be the chief mentor and one of the founders of the breakaway faction of the Nepali Congress (D).

It is true that the Nepali Congress had become moribund by the late 1990s. But was it necessary to make it irrelevant? PG thought that nothing less than destruction would create the condition for the emergence of a democratic socialist party capable of facing the communist challenge head on. His diagnosis, prescription and treatment proved to be all wrong as the breakaway group turned out to be even more regressive than the mother NC. But not all political experiments succeed. PG remained unrepentant about his experience of trying to mentor Deuba citing the fate of Bhisma in the Mahabharat whose heart remained with the Pandavas, mind stayed with Krishna as the body fought for the Kauravas.

What would have been the final thought of the phoenix as it dived to have a closer look at the funeral pyre of itself at Aryaghat? Perhaps yet another question: Does the fire burn? PG would have quoted Sita's test by fire from the Ramayan to assert that it cannot sustain itself in the absence of any three of the fire triangle—fuel, oxygen and heat. In politics, ideology is the fuel. People are its oxygen. And power is the heat that can produce light and energy. Of the trio, only the ideology is eternal. PG is somewhere here.