Sita Dahal, Comrade Prachanda, Dr Baburam Bhattarai and Hisila Yami pose for a photo before heading to the historic Chunwang Baithak in Rolpa. Photo by Dinesh Shrestha
This article is from myrepublica.
Nepal – People’s War in Pictures
By Subel Bhandari
Dinesh Shrestha is a photojournalist. But he is not a mainstream photographer like others. What he does, he claims, is “mission journalism.” And according to this mission journalism, people like him work for a specific purpose.
“We tell news as it happens; we are there on the ground and report as we see it. And we do this for a reason,” he admits and derides the idea of “desk journalism” which, according to the scribe, tends to “assume a lot of things and remains far from facts.”
An original of Gorkha, Shrestha was involved with “party activities” since his schooldays. By party, he meant the Maoists.
After fleeing from his village due to police operations during the initial years of “People’sWar”, he came to Kathmandu and started working as a journalist. After a year of working with the then leftist paper Janadisha, Shrestha was arrested in 2002, when Nepal had just seen an emergency.
Revolution in South Asia 