All Ganga Maya wanted was justice. When she decided to go on hunger strike with her now-deceased husband, Nanda Prasad Adhikari, it was to draw attention of the government towards the murder of her son, Krishna Prasad Adhikari, and to see those involved in the dock.

Her son had gone to Chitwan to see his grandparents and was killed there, allegedly at the hands of members of the CPN Maoist, who are said to have abducted him on June 6, 2004.

All she wanted was a free and fair trial, but she ended up seeing her husband succumb to hunger while the perpetrators, under the protection of political leaders, run scot-free.

But even as she lies in bed at Bir Hospital, a weak, famished, incapacitated being with a narcotic gaze, shrivelled skin and body all sinews and bones, she has unwittingly become someone fighting for more than a personal cause: She has shown the path to the families of the deceased who are struggling to come to terms with reality and live with the consequences in the aftermath of the revolution.

The idea that violence can address social evils and get rid of all forms of injustice is as old as it is seductive. Going back to the primitive legal code that demanded an eye for an eye and nothing less, it is preached by a handful of political and philosophical doctrines and believed by countless people, like the chief revolutionary in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, who calculates the cost a perfect equality to be a hundred million lives.

But far from ushering in an era of equality, prosperity and happiness, the blood-soaked revolutions of the past 100 years or so, just to give an example, and their equally violent aftermaths have become dark episodes in human history, a blot to our common legacy.

Stalin’s war against Russian peasantry in the 30’s, according to Robert Conquest in his book The Harvest of Sorrows, cost more than 40 million lives; 65 million people died during Mao’s rule in China; 25 million perished at the hands of the Nazis; and the Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia liquidated more than 2 million people—a quarter of the country’s population—during their stay in power. (All of the above numbers are conservative estimates.)

Without even considering the human toll of armed struggles in Latin America, Africa, South and South-east Asia and elsewhere, the Vietnam War and Isis, the total easily surpasses the 100 million mark set by Dostoevsky’s revolutionary. And yet the world is still unequal and unjust.

If, after all the blood spilt and lives lost, people still get carried away by the hypnotic appeal of ideologies that condone violence as an answer to myriad social and political  problems, it has got to do more with the power of such ideologies and skill of those who deploy it than anything else. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the dissident Soviet writer and Nobel prize winner, observed, the power of such an ideology lies in its ability to somehow legitimise evil and convince the perpetrators that their actions are, without doubt, right and justified.

It is to the credit of Nanda Prasad and Ganga Maya that they have shown the actions of the perpetrators were neither right nor justified and rescued the story from anonymity—a narrative of an innocent life lost, and with it the broken hearts, failed dreams and lost hopes of those around him—all the while giving us a fair bit of idea about who the criminals might have been. 

With the Maoists now running the show, Ganga Maya’s quest seems to be more elusive than ever. But whether Ganga Maya and those like her will receive justice in the future will depend on whether we can bring to light their story. As long as deaths do not go unrecorded or undocumented, as long as  they do not get erased from public memory and recede into the world of numerical mumbo jumbo, there is a chance that justice will be served.

One death is an event, many become statistics. The true homage we can pay to the victims of the revolution is to make sure that each individual story gets recorded and becomes an event. They might or might not get justice but there is no point in losing hope.