Despite his disastrous stints both as prime minister of the country and as leader of his party, were a poll to be held today to gauge the popularity of our leading politicians, KP Sharma Oli would top it. Not by a majority, no way, but by a plurality, given the fractured nature of politics. That is not because of what he is likely to achieve as a political leader but for all the outrageous things he manages to say all the time, and, increasingly nowadays, write as well.

An example of the latter is a piece by Oli in Kantipur a couple of weeks back. Since Oli is an occasional contributor—not to mention someone of such high stature—the paper probably had no choice but to publish the rather portentously titled, “Maile dekheko Nepal” (Nepal as I have seen it). For had it been submitted by anyone else, a swift rejection would have been the most logical outcome. Yet, I can only muse on the legions of Oli fans and imagine their lapping up the 2,000 words of nonsense as words of wisdom from what they believe is the sagacious one.

Land like no other

There is one clear purpose to Oli’s article: To establish Nepal as a country that stands above the rest of the world in all the ways you can think of. Since I would recommend no one waste their time reading Oli’s article, what follows are snippets from the piece and a bit of commentary on the side to illustrate the kind of understanding of the world one of the most powerful men in Nepal has.

Setting the stage for the wonder that was and is Nepal, an early section reads thus: “There is no need to plant any vegetation; it grows by itself. No need to plant flowers; they grow by themselves. Trees, vines and creepers grow by themselves in the forest. There is no need to water them. They flower happily, smilingly. Some have thick green leaves, some have small ones. The birds roosting on them are born by themselves. The butterflies and bees that suck their nectar are born by themselves. The different insects that play in the grass are born by themselves. The fish, frogs and earthworms that play in the water are born themselves. There are sub-species among them based on altitude and temperature and flow of water.”

I guess the last sentence was Oli’s attempt to prove his scientific credentials since the preceding part would have made no sense whatsoever unless they were the musings of a poet or a description of swayambhu in many forms. Further, he writes: “The environment here is just so amazing that the tiger can be found here as can the deer. What the deer eats can be found here and what eats the deer as well. It is a unique cycle of nature. A unique cycle of life. Life that uses oxygen is found here as is the vegetation that provides the oxygen. Two types of animals live here, warm-blooded and cold-blooded. Humans and other animals have warm blood while cold-blooded ones like snakes, fish, frogs and the like are also here. Whoever can arrange for warmth lives happily in cold places. Examples of these are the chauri, yak and sheep with their long hair. Apart from some commercial fisheries, no one needs to raise fish in the fields, rivers and lakes. They are at home in the water.”

This is one paragraph with not even a word excised or inserted. One has to wonder if anyone would take Oli seriously after reading this. For the true believers, there is a lot more through. As a “communist”, he has his own take on society. Following Friedrich Engels, or so he would believe, Oli goes: “We had a self-sufficient economy in the Middle Ages. Each family had their own house and some fields. The fields would produce paddy, maize, wheat, mustard, buckwheat, potato and greens. Cattle-raising would happen by itself. People would raise chickens, goats, pigs and buffaloes and use them as needed. There would be an abundance of milk, curd, buttermilk and ghee for those who kept cows and buffaloes. Cloth would be woven from cotton. There was a tradition of keeping dogs. A dog would protect the house. It would not allow entry to anyone without the house-owner’s permission. A dog would not only look after the house but also horses, goats, cows, buffaloes, etc. Animals like jackals would not even come close to a dog. A dog was of immense use then. It would also help during hunts.”

Besides the erroneous fact that potatoes had not arrived in Nepal by the Middle Ages, this ramble is what Oli peddled as his [hallucinatory] vision of Nepal’s past through the country’s most widely circulated newspaper. I guess readers have got the gist of it although, of course, Oli is far from being done. He claims that Nepal is not only the fount of knowledge but also of consciousness, and the source of the most ancient philosophy. Nepal is where the first musical instrument was heard and where the first song sung. Our ancestors were the first to use fire and teach the world how to eat cooked food. Our land gave birth to both the alphabet and numbers.

More Indic than India

One does wonder about Oli’s supposed anti-Indianness. I do not mean the opportunistic stance he took around the adoption of the 2015 Constitution to emerge as a “nationalist leader” after having hobnobbed with the same Indian establishment for years. I mean more about the manner in which he continues to find ways to needle those currently in power in India. Most notable was the somewhat unnecessary stunt to declare that the hero of the epic, the Ramayana, was born in Nepal even though Narendra Modi and his party are in power in New Delhi on the back of the belief of millions in India that Ram was born in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya.

I would venture that Oli is anti-India only in the sense that he firmly believes that the Indic civilisation originated not in the Western Asian steppes nor in the Indo-Gangetic plains but up here in the Himalaya. That is why he appropriates everything attributable to Vedic society as ours and ours alone. And, like the Hindutva rightists of India, he, too, is a firm believer that everything worth knowing or discovering or inventing is all there in the Vedas and the Shastras—all written here in Nepal, by the way.

But Oli is also from the land of the Buddha and hence Nepalis are similarly blessed. “Why was Siddhartha Gautam born in this land and became the Buddha in this land itself?” he asks. “Why was Siddhartha Gautam not born in any other part of the world? When there was conflict elsewhere, why would the message of peace spread here?”

I feel for those CPN-UML comrades cringing while reading their leader’s views and yet having to kowtow to Oli for fear of his well-known vindictiveness towards detractors. Equally so for the editor of Kantipur for having to carry such balderdash. Credit, however, is due to the latter for having published within days a very well-crafted and -argued rebuttal to Oli’s overtly fertile imagination. Written by one Sandeep Thapa, it is as pleasant a read as Oli’s is excruciating. It turns out Thapa is with the obscure Scientific Socialist Student Union. He is also visually impaired but proved much more insightful about the world than the much more senior Oli. An intellect definitely to look out for, and that discovery is perhaps the only positive outcome of having persevered through Oli’s rant.