Ujwal Thapa’s light shines on

It was in his passing on Tuesday after a two-week battle against Covid-19, that Ujwal Thapa got the kind of public recognition that would have proven to him that his vision for the future of Nepal is the right one.

The outpouring of support and respect for this founder of a new and small alternative party showed just how much Nepalis want fresh new blood in the country’s leadership, and how disillusioned they are with the constantly-bickering superannuated faces in the mainstream parties.

In social media posts and other outlets, his colleagues, friends and even those who did not know Thapa personally, have extolled his inspirational leadership qualities, his self-effacing personality that hid a fierce drive for a new style of politics to deliver the kind of accountable and efficient leadership this country needs.

Ujwal Thapa never hankered after being a leader himself, prefering to breed leaders. Through the Bibeksheel Party that he founded and which later merged with Sajha Party, he was incubating a new generation of groundbreakers with the vision and competence that the current crop of tried and failed politicians in the main parties lack.

In his death, Nepal has lost a promising trailblazer who had the courage and commitment to finally lift the country with the gift of good governance. Although his party united, split and united again with Sajha, and despite not winning any seats in Parliament in 2017, in many constituencies candidates that Thapa had personally groomed got respectable numbers of votes.

One of them was Ranju Darshana whom Bibeksheel fielded as a candidate from Kathmandu. She tweeted on Tuesday: ‘The physical body of Ujwal dai is no more with us. He fought till the end. At 4:25 he stopped breathing. I’ve no more to say dai. I feel blessed that I got to be associated with you in your journey. You lived gracefully dai. And you left gracefully too.’

With its sights clearly on the next election, Bibeksheel-Sajha was working to build its base and take advantage of the widespread disenchantment with Nepal’s stagnant and corrosive politics. For this, the party would have to break the vote banks of the main parties, and get younger voters to place their bets on candidates with a potential for performance.

The overwhelming outpouring of grief, respect and affection for Ujwal Thapa showed that the party that he helped build is on the right trajectory. In his death, Ujwal Thapa also left a message: that a more responsible and responsive state would have been able to reduce the kind of suffering and loss of life that Nepal has endured during this pandemic.

To replace the old with the new, Bibeksheel Sajha will have to struggle against the established parties, including the one that once took up arms for the liberation of the people, which will fight tooth and nail to maintain their stranglehold on the state. They will use their troll armies, disinformation networks and detractors to discredit the new younger leaders (as they did in 2017) to protect the crony-driven and corrupt political superstructure that they monopolise.

On Monday, while doctors were trying to save Thapa’s life, his former colleague and friend Ashutosh Tiwari posted on Facebook: ‘Ujwal is a rare man who -- with no expert degrees, no mainstream political party support, no electoral victory to his name, and no previous high-paying job credentials -- comes perhaps once in a generation in a country like ours. There are people who have authority and power. And there are people like Ujwal who have courage and influence. I see enormous heartfelt outpouring of support, affection, love and concern for him in this light.’

These widespread messages of support in the past week while Thapa battled for his life at Mediciti Hospital showed that the Nepali public is impatient for change.

Thapa had gone on a trek, possibly trying to evade the second wave as it hit Kathmandu, which may be where he was infected. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and he was taken out of ventilator support and put on Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO). His cremation took place at Pashupati on Tuesday evening.

In a self-published memoir in English titled Why Nepal? Thapa describes his return from Bennington College in the United States in a light and self-deprecating style: how he became disillusioned with materialism, tried to enrol in a zen monastery in California, and finally returned to Nepal with just a computer in his bag, and started an IT company. But his activist streak showed in many rallies he held to defy political banda, and how this grew into a citizen’s movement and finally the Bibeksheel Nepali (literally: Nepali with common sense) Party.

In his book, he also lays out his vision for the country and how with honest and efficient politics, Nepal can have accountable leadership. He did not want Bibeksheel Sajha to remain an ‘alternative’ party, but grow into a mover-and-shaker political force to be reckoned with.

‘To build a society that can produce (judicious) leaders consistently, I am helping provoke Nepali citizens to be ‘bibeksheel’ in nature, and bring positive change within them,’ he writes in Why Nepal?. ‘I continue to work on my passion to build as many platforms/tribes/networks of hope for Nepal … in the hope that in the coming days we can join together to build a peaceful, prosperous Nepal within our lifetime.’