How did the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) win so many seats in the Constituent Assembly? More importantly, can they now prove to the Nepali people and the world that they can be the vanguard of pluralism and progress?
For thirty years, modern Nepal was ruled by a royal autocracy. Then, starting in 1990, the people began to experience inefficient, perhaps, but real democracy, through the medium of political parties. In 1996, one of these went underground, to engage in Maoist revolution, picking up the gun against the multiparty system of the day. Though gaining momentum and spread over the first seven-odd years, by 2005 the insurgency had achieved a stalemate with the state security. The rebels then decided to relinquish the 'people's war' and, along with the other parties, helped generate the People's Movement of April 2006 against the king, Gyanendra – who had in the meantime taken over. Two years later, on 10 April 2008, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) made a leap into the government, winning an astounding 50 percent of elected seats in the Constituent Assembly, and nearly 30 percent of the proportional-representation votes. In so doing, they trounced the two main forces of yesteryear, the Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), and gained a definitive mandate from the people.
The win by the former rebels is explained most significantly by demographic shifts in Nepali society. These delivered a wave of support straight into the Maoist hands from the Dalit, ethnic/indigenous janajati, youth and economically marginalised strata. They also had a fine-tuned campaign machine that used populist rhetoric to woo the masses, and did not shy away from countrywide threats and intimidation. The demographic surge and populist campaign gave the Maoists the bulk of their votes, but they were nervous enough about this first-time outcome to feel the need for coercion. In retrospect, they might themselves agree that they need not have.
The decisive evolution in the public's self-awareness began with the 1990 People's Movement, which did away with the royal Panchayat regime, and provided space for ethnic assertion and grassroots activism. The radical transformations that, over the last decade, overtook Nepal's diverse population, are also explained by: exposure to the wider world through media and first-time road transport, political awareness through non-governmental activism, the experience of local governance, the arousal linked to the 'people's war', and the democratic fight against the autocratic royal, Gyanendra. A huge spike in the youth population, coupled with higher literacy, delivered a voting category that was quite different from the one which had exercised the ballot the last time, in 1999. All of this was carefully utilised by astute strategists within the Maoist party, who had stayed in continuous touch and engaged with the villages when the other political parties had been scared off by the insurgency.