Dr. Kundan Aryal

When Nepal's Maoist movement departed from a path similar to the one adopted in Peru under the leadership of Abimael Guzmán in the 1980s and 90s, the country ushered in the peace process. Thus, Nepali Maoists are different from Peruvian Maoists. Nevertheless, last week, the political enthusiasts along with the senior political leaders in Nepal recalled Gonzalo who had attained the fame of mythical proportions. The news of his demise invoked their memory of his attempt to become the fourth sword of Marxism after Marx, Lenin and Mao. For the last three decades, he was imprisoned for life as a convicted terrorist.

One of the fundamental news values is geographical proximity. However, the death of a prisoner in a distant Latin American county drew wider media coverage and individual opinions in social media. It took more than 26 hours to reach the Jorge Chavez International Airport, Lima from the Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu. It covers a distance of 17,500 kilometres from here. Such a longer regular non-stop passenger flight in terms of distance and travel time is not in existence so far.

However, the death of Abimiyal Guzman, a philosopher-turned Maoist guerrilla leader, in a maximum-security prison at a naval base near Lima, activated schemata of the Nepali media and individuals. Here schema refers to an abstract concept of pre-existing information within the heads of an individual which provides a frame of reference. Despite a contrast, socio-cultural context, a piece of news from a different hemisphere of this planet was news and a matter of conversation here in Nepal because of a schema that evolved over the last three decades.

Media coverage
Most of the world's leading media outlets right from BBC, Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian and many more cover the confirmation made by the head of Peru’s prison system, through Radio Programas del Perú (RPP) the nearly six-decade-old broadcast institution. Gonzalo breathed his last within the cell early in the morning. Almost all the media outlets of the global outreach did not miss to cite that an estimated 70,000 Peruvians were killed during the decade-long Shining Path insurgency, at least one-third at the hands of guerrillas. The Shining Path insurgency advocated a violent re-ordering of society away from the vices of urban life. Most of the media reproduced the image of the caged mastermind of insurgency in a jail-uniform that reads prisoner number 1509. The iconic photograph was taken in 1992, shortly after capturing him by a special police unit in Lima. Another reproduced photograph of his court hearing from 2018 indicated the symptoms of his growing age.

Against the backdrop, a brief assessment of news schemata in this regard belongs to an arena of mass media discourse. Such study would be relevant for the understanding of the newspapers or broadcast media, the institutions of written or recorded discourse in general. For instance, Aljazeera reports that Guzman was a lifelong communist who travelled to China in the late 1960s and was awed by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. It states that he made a resolve to bring Mao’s brand of communism into Peru through a class war that he launched in 1980.

China’s Global Times published a plain and simple news story, stating that historic leader of Peru's Shining Path guerrillas - blamed for one of the insurgencies in Latin America - died in a military prison. In any context, news stories headline and lead are considered as initial schematic categories. Likewise, the body of the entire text further exhibits schematic organisation and order of an overall news schema. In the context of global content, the analysis of the macrostructure could be instrumental to explore news discourse. Hence, the news schemata exist in the surface structure of a news story or the media coverage. There are many instances amidst the flow of global news where theoreticians have empirically proved the existence of news schemata.

The New York Times observes that like many of his generations in Latin America, Guzmán was thrilled with Fidel Castro’s revolutionary victory in Cuba in 1959. The schemata of the news produced in the Nepali media and opinions of individuals proliferated in the social media is based on a common knowledge of the recent past when the Nepali Maoists were thrilled with the violent actions carried out by the Shining Path in the 1980 and 90s. News schemata in the Nepali media are based on their socialisation with the chants and chorus echoing Peru and the Shining Path in Rolpa, Rukum and other parts of the country in the past.

Ideological commitment
The notion of such textual schemata could also be instrumental to analyse the tweet message by the former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda on the death of Gonzalo. He rightly mentioned that with the death of Gonzalo, the leader of the Peru Communist Party, a model of revolution has ended for the moment. He expressed his heartfelt homage to a leader, stating that Gonzalo was a symbol of ideological commitment, sacrifice and dedication. Such texts take the general public to a context of interaction between the background knowledge and the message of the text.

Communication scholars argue that news schemata evolving over the years are the major organising factor for the news reports in the media in society or the global context. The texts are superstructures and they are the manifestation of schema. Hence, in the case of coverage of the death of the imprisoned octogenarian leader of the Shining Path of Peru, a form of discourse based on the schematic superstructure, was visible across the world in media and social media.

(Dr. Aryal is associated with the Central Department of Journalism and Mass Communication of Tribhuvan University.)