The political stability promised by the People's Movement of April 2006, which led to the downfall of the Nepali monarchy and brought the Maoists into aboveground politics, has proved to be a chimera. The elections to the Constituent Assembly in April 2008 brought the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) into the house as the largest party. However, it did not have even a simple majority, and getting the support of two-thirds of the house, as required to adopt a new constitution, would have meant winning the cooperation of the two other major parties, the Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist).
The subsequent two years were meant to have been set aside for the writing of the constitution. Instead, they have seen growing polarisation on the ideological front, which has seeped into the very pores of society, with the people starkly divided into 'pro-Maoist' and 'anti-Maoist' camps. Today, the only positive way to look at the last two years is as a cooling-off period for a peace process that seemed to have moved rather too rapidly for the players, particularly the Maoists. After all, the former rebels were catapulted from a brutal insurgency to the Constituent Assembly (which also serves as Parliament) to leading the government, all within just two years.
One could easily say that this period was not enough to convince the cadre about the U-turn taken by the party high command from state capture to open, parliamentary politics. While trying to tackle the contradictions within the party between the Maoist purists and the pragmatists, the leadership sought to mollify their cadre, reiterating that the plans for a 'protracted people's war' were still on. The distance that the Maoists had to travel from their radical positioning meant that, when constitution-related discussions did take place, the UCPN (Maoist) representatives sought to introduce elements into the draft that were far from democratic, including curbs on the judiciary's independence, attempts to foist political 'prior rights' by ethnicity onto a mixed populace, and criteria that restricted the freedom to organise into political parties. Most importantly, the Maoists insisted that they were in support of multi-party competition even while vehemently opposing the term pluralism, hinting at a deeply held ideology that held out the spectre of one-party autocracy.
The other parties arrayed against the Maoists, in particular the CPN (UML) and Congress, while riven by schisms, stuck to their liberal-democratic ideas of constitutionalism. Essentially, these were anchored in the principles enshrined in the superseded Constitution of 1990, with adjustments made in favour of secularism, federalism and republicanism. Both the Maoist and non-Maoist sides sought to consolidate their respective positions over the last two years, and this polarisation came to a head as the deadline of 28 May neared. Members of civil society were also forced to publicly define their opinions on a spectrum of issues – the constitutional draft, the Constituent Assembly's term extension, the basic values of constitutionalism, and the formula for the demobilisation of the 19,000-plus Maoist ex-combatants – rather than continue to sit on the fence.