Third Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Lecture

The Road to New Democracy in Nepal: Problems and Challenges

The Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Committee
cordially invites you to
3rd Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Lecture
Speaker: Baburam Bhattarai
(Senior Member of the Politburo, UCPN (Maoist)
and former Finance Minister of Nepal)
Friday, 14th January 2011
6.00 pm
Venue: Rama Watumull Auditorium (K. C. College)
Dinshaw Wacha Road, Churchgate, Mumbai, 400020

Baburam Bhattarai, one of the leading personalities of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) is, in his own words, “a typical representative of a Third World educated youth of peasant background, who finds the gross inequality, oppression, poverty, underdevelopment and exploitation of the overwhelming majority of the population in a class-divided and imperialism-dominated world just intolerable, …”. Along with Prachanda, since 1996 he has been at the helm of one of the world’s most significant mass movements for freedom and democracy. A “highly intellectual politician”, he is the author of a large number of books and articles, among which are The Nature of Underdevelopment and Regional Structure of Nepal: A Marxist Analysis (2003), and “Let’s Give No Legitimacy to the Beneficiaries of the New Kot Massacre” (Kantipur, the Nepali language daily, June 6, 2001) which immediately made historical waves.

Introduction to the Lecture Series: Anuradha Ghandy (1954-2008) was a leading organizer and thinker of the revolutionary movement in India. Early on, she developed a sense of commitment to the poor; she joined them in their struggle for bread and roses, the fight for a richer and a fuller life for all. Tragically, cerebral malaria took her away in April 2008. The memorial lecture is instituted in her memory to celebrate the spirit that made her selflessly adopt the cause of the damned of the Indian earth—the exploited, the oppressed, and the dominated—as her own. She was a role model in whatever she did, whether it was teaching sociology to post-graduate students at Nagpur University, or as a founder-member of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai, or as head of the Central Mahila Sub-Committee and member of the CC of the CPI (Maoist) —bold, courageous and decisive, yet kind, gentle and considerate.