Prachanda’s Long Walk: Rise Of A Rebel

The revolutionary Maoist leader Prachanda has now become the Prime Minister of Nepal — by isolating the National Congress and its intrigues. And the same time, in this complex situation, Nepal still has two armies facing each other, and a great (potentially hostile) power, India, across a long and indefensible border.

In honor of Prachanda’s selection as Prime Minister, his close party collaborator, Baburam Bhattarai, said: “Today is a day of pride and it will be written with golden letters in the history of the nation.” Bhattarai predicted that Prachanda would be a leader “for a new era”, comparable to Lenin or Napoleon.

by Anand Gurung for Nepal News
A glimpse at Prachanda’s childhood years and then as a devoted teacher during his younger more salad days before he turned into active politics might help in knowing the person behind the name Prachanda who is better known to the rest of the world as a leader of a violent Maoist insurgency in the strategically important place between India and China — one who was the most elusive underground leader in the world till two years back with many in Kathmandu doubting if he even exists because, according to an editor of a leading English weekly, “so little was known about him during the first five years of the war” and who, rather uncomfortably, sits over/on top of so many transformations the nation has changed in the matter of two years.

Nepal: Prachanda Becomes Prime Minister

Ex-rebel Maoist chief elected as Nepal’s new PM

KATHMANDU (AFP) — Lawmakers in Nepal on Friday overwhelmingly elected Maoist leader and former warlord Prachanda as the Himalayan country’s first republican prime minister, officials said.

The vote clears the way for the ultra-leftists, still listed by the United States as a terrorist organisation, to plough ahead with their vow to radically reform one of the world’s poorest nations.

The vote in Nepal’s constitutional assembly also ends months of political deadlock that followed the sacking of unpopular king Gyanendra and the abolition of the 240-year-old monarchy.

Prachanda, 53, led a decade-long mountain and jungle insurgency to overthrow the monarchy — a war which cost at least 13,000 lives and shattered the landlocked country’s mainly-agricultural, subsistence-based economy.