[From The Worker, #3, February 1997.]
Com. Tirtha Gautam: A Great Proletarian
Revolutionary and Hero of the People’s WarOf the many proletarian revolutionaries who have laid down their lives to fuel the fire of people’s war raging in the Himalayas for the past one year, Com. Tirtha Gautam perhaps stands the tallest as an outstanding proletarian revolutionary and a heroic guerilla fighter. Not only because he is the highest-ranking Party leader to have attained martyrdom in the process so far, but because of his qualities as a genuine Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary and his rare sense of courage and sacrifice. He met the envious death of a great hero while valiantly commanding the people’s guerilla fighters during the first successful raid of a police outpost after the historic initiation of the people’s war at Bethan (Ramechhap) on January 3, 1997. Determined to prove it is people or the human factor that is decisive in war and not the weapons, he commanded the guerilla squads equipped with low-tech weapons but with high revolutionary morale to mount a daring attack on the enemy with high-tech weapons but a low morale and he proved the Maoist military theory correct on that historic day but at the cost of his own life. Through his heroic death he not only inspired the guerilla fighters to win the battle on that day but helped to raise the people’s war in the country to a new height.
Com. Tirtha Gautam was a member of one of the Sub-Regional Bureaus of the C.P.N. (Maoist) in the Eastern Region, Secretary of Kavre-Ramechhap District Organising Committee and the Military Commander of the same district. Barely in his thirties he had more than a decade of revolutionary communist life and was a full-time Party functionary since the last seven years. His high ideological-political level was reflected in his constant siding with the revolutionary faction during long years of inner-struggle with the Right liquidationist opportunists in the Party. Similarly he either led or was associated with all the leading guerilla actions in the Sub-Region since the time of preparation and initiation of the people’s war. Born in a lower-class peasant family at Chauri village in Kavre district in eastern Nepal he worked as a school teacher before assuming the role of a full-time revolutionary.
Immortal martyr Com. Tirtha Gautam is a beacon to all proletarian revolutionaries in Nepal and elsewhere. The Party is proud of the great hero and pays special red salute and revolutionary homage to this outstanding Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary!