Youth protest NATO strikes WFDY calls for protest action against NATO strikes. Manmohan Adhikari dies Former Nepalese PM and senior communist leader dies of heart attack

Special Correspondent

Funeral of Manmohan Adhikari

Former Prime Minister and President of he Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxists-Leninists) Manmohan Adhikary, admitted to HO ISF last after an attack of Hypoxia felled him unconscious when he was campaigning for the forthcoming parliamentary elections, died this Monday morning,

Mr. Adhikary, 79 the sole survivor from among the co-founders of the fifty-year-old communist movement of Nepal, is survived by his wife Sadhana, whom he married 45 years ago, and a son and a daughter.

Projected in the coming parliamentary elections by his CPN(UML) as its Prime Minister candidate, Mr Adhikary was into hectic electioneering despite his ripe age and usually ill health.

A chronic asthma patient, he was felled by an attack of Hypoxia shortly after he had addressed an election meeting in a rural area of the Kathmandu district - he was contesting two parliamentary seats in the capital district.

He was rushed to the Tibhuvan University Teaching Hospital here in "A comatose condition" with vital signs like heartbeat, pulse and respiration missing. But he was immediately revived in the emergency ward through Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation and admitted to the intensive care unit of the hospital where he remained under "constant observation" till the very end. Besides being attended by senior Medical Practitioners here, Mr Adhikary was also examined by three leading physicians from India. His condition, however, continued to deteriorate and he never regained consciousness save on one brief occasion on Tuesday last.

Over the past one week, slowly his kidneys deteriorated and starved of oxygen following the Hypoxia attack - his brain stopped responding to any stimuli. Hooked to life-support systems - an artificial respirator assisted him breathe and injected with adrenaline to help his heart perform its function, he struggled for life till 0232 hrs early this morning when doctors finally declared him dead.

The last rites of the veteran Marxist leader will be performed at the Aryaghat here tomorrow evening Till than, his body draped in the red Communist flag, will lie in state at the "Shadeed Manch" in the heart of the city from where it will be taken in a funeral - procession through the winding roads, streets and by-lanes of the Kathmandu valley.

The "Election-coalition" headed by Nepali Congress President and Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala and of which Adhikary's CPN(UML) is a partner has declared a three-day period of state mourning for the Marxist leader with the National Flag to fly at half-mast atop all government buildings.

Tomorrow, when Mr. Adhikary is to be accorded a state funeral, government offices all over the country shall remain closed.

Fondly referred to here as the "Bhishma Pitamaha" of Nepali politics Mr Adhikary was an old guard leftist of the classican Marxist mould.

He was elected President of the CPN(UML) a post he retained to the very end when it was formed with the merger of his CPN(Marxist) and the CPN(ML), the leading two left entities in the country, in 1990 shortly after a popular movement overthrew the erstwhile partyless panchayat polity to restore multiparty parliamentary democracy in Nepal.

He remained a sobering restraining influence for keeping up the unity and strength within the CPN(UML).

Mr Adhikary began his political career at the young age of 22 by taking part in the "Quit India" movement against the British and was jailed for his efforts for the subsequent four years, he was an active member of the Communist Party of India.

The Benares Hindu University science graduate went on to found the CPN(UML),  which was voted the single-largest in a hung parliament elected in the November, 1994 mid-term polls.

Mr Adhikary served as Nepal's PM for nine months before he was voted out through a parliamentary censure.

Shortly before his parliamentary ouster, Mr Adhikary, on August 14, 1995 had a miraculous escape.

He sustained only minor injuries when a Royal Nepal Army Helicopter carrying his crashed in West Nepal following failure of the tail-rotor, but the spinal injury he suffered nagged him to the very end.

An upper class landowner from Biratnagar in south eastern Nepal and a relative of Nepali Congress President and Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala whom he called "Mama", Mr Adhikary had never compromised with the pro monarchists in Nepal throughout the struggle against the partyless panchayat polity which governed Nepal for more than thirty years.

Mr Adhikary had earlier entered Nepali politics joining the struggle for democratic rights against the authoritarian Rana regime in the late forties. And when he co-founded the Communist movement in Nepal, he was elected the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of Nepal.

He remained in prison for a total of fourteen years with one single term lasting as long as ten years during the panchayat regime which he opposed uncompromisingly.