For thirty years, modern Nepal was ruled under 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 conflict 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 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, coupled with election-day rigging that seems to have caught everyone unawares. 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 Gyanendra. A huge spike in the youth population, coupled with higher literacy, delivered a voting category that was quite different from that which had voted during the last elections, in 1999. All of this was carefully honed by astute strategists within the Maoist party, who had stayed in continuous touch with the villages when the other political parties had been scared off by the insurgency.
While these and other societal shifts were obvious, they had not been studied adequately by many analysts in terms of electoral impact. Those with lack of foresight and insight included this writer, who had suggested a third-place showing for the Maoists, after the UML and Nepali Congress. Based on the experience in other countries, the reading was that the Maoist violence was too recent in the public memory for the party to do very well in its first electoral exercise, but that staying the course would deliver the support of the underclass and marginalised to the Maoists in the long run. Indeed, it seemed that the public would not give unqualified support to the Maoists in the absence of some kind of apology for the excess that was the 'people's war'. As it turned out, the populace had no time for any kind of further evolution: that the Maoists had called off their insurgency and come into the peace process and elections was deemed enough to give them a resounding mandate.