Nepal's Maoists plans to conquer Mt Everest

Three years after they won the ballot battle in Nepal and unfurled their red flag over the former Himalayan kingdom, Nepal's Maoists have now announced an even loftier plan - to conquer Mt Everest, the highest peak in the world.

While the Maoists' 10-year guerrilla uprising was led by their chairman and supreme commander of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda, the Everest war will be led by Prachanda's son Prakash, Yuvraj Dulal, brigade commander of the PLA's 3rd Division barracked in Chitwan district in southern Nepal, and Krishna KC, Maoist central committee member who survived illegal arrest by the army and gruesome torture in a secret detention camp during the insurgency.

"We will attempt to summit Mt Everest in 2012," the 29-year-old Prakash told TNN. "It had been my dream since childhood to climb Mt Everest and next year, we hope to plant the communist flag as well as the flag of the PLA on the (8848m) summit." Besides his father, Prakash's hero is Tenzing Norgay Sherpa, "the first Nepali to reach Mt Everest along with Sir Edmund Hillary".

The Maoists, now the largest party in parliament as well as the ruling alliance, announced the expedition Monday at a programme to honour Apa Sherpa, the legendary Nepali climber who summited Mt Everest a record 21 times this month before and then said he would no longer climb the peak that had brought him fame worldwide.

The Maoist expedition, a first in mountaineering history, will start training next year by first taking on lesser peaks, Prakash said. The chairman's son, a badminton player who also accompanies his father during his morning walks to keep fit, has been working as Prachanda's bodyguard and secretary.

Though he became an official member of the party 13 years ago, Prakash says he was politically conscious even as a schoolboy. "With my father being the chairman of an underground party, politics was bound to be in my blood," he says. "I had to leave my school in Kathmandu when I was in Class VIII. The People's War had started and security forces began combing schools, looking for students with the Dahal surname."

The party decided that Prachanda's children should be sent to India for safety and Prakash completed his higher secondary education from Jalandhar. When the peace talks started, he returned to Nepal and in the last three years of the civil war, remained in Rolpa, the remote western district that was the cradle and capital of the Maoist movement.

Prakash said his family welcomed the expedition announcement and hoped he would be able to take the communist flag to the top of the world. "We are not thinking of the risks," he said. "There were plenty of risks during the People's War."