Against the backdrop of violent protests in Kathmandu and outside, Nepal's former Maoist guerrillas returned to power Sunday, two years after the fall of their first government, with parliament electing India-educated leader Baburam Bhattarai as the restive republic's fourth prime minister in three years.
The 57-year-old scholar, who comes from a lower middle-class farmer's family in western Nepal's Gorkha district, and is described by acquaintances as having tended his father's cows and cut grass, showed his mettle during his very school days, topping the board exams, winning a prestigious international scholarship and going on to obtain a doctorate degree from New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Bhattarai, known as Laldhwoj - red flag - while living underground during the 10-year insurgency fought by his party, became Nepal's 35th prime minister after clinching a last-minute deal with the Madhesi morcha, a bloc of five ethnic parties whose 71 lawmakers held the key to Sunday's closely watched election.
After his candidacy was proposed in parliament Sunday by Maoist chief Prachanda and seconded by another deputy chief of the party, Narayan Kaji Shrestha, Bhattarai defeated his lone rival, Ramchandra Poudel of the Nepali Congress party, by polling 340 votes. A total of 575 MPs were present during the poll.
Poudel, a former deputy prime minister who had been the Nepali Congress's candidate in the earlier 17 rounds of vote, received a shot in the arm Saturday night with the third largest party, the communists, announcing they would support him.
However, despite the 108 communist MPs behind him, Poudel faced an uphill task as his own party had only 114 lawmakers. Sunday's election saw him poll 235 votes.
The Rastriya Prajatantra Party Nepal, the only royalist party seeking the restoration of monarchy and a Hindu state, boycotted the vote, demanding a fresh election to choose a new parliament. So did the communist Nepal Workers' and Peasants' Party, accusing "Indian expansionism" of influencing Nepal's prime ministerial elections.
The Maoists, who after fighting a 10-year war signed a peace accord in 2006 and won the election in 2008, are now offering to disband their guerrilla army within 45 days of forming the new government.
The existence of their People's Liberation Army (PLA) with its nearly 20,000 fighters even five years after the insurgency ended is regarded as the main obstacle to the peace process and led to the fall of the first Maoist government in 2009.
Bhattarai is regarded as the moderate face of the Maoists, whose chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda failed to return to power after backtracking on his promise to demobilise the PLA, return the properties captured by the rebels during the civil war, and end the culture of impunity that saw both the state and Maoists carry out torture and extra-judicial killings.
Nepal's parliament elected a Maoist leader as prime minister on Sunday after weeks of failure by lawmakers to form a national unity government that has threatened a fragile peace process in the nascent Himalayan republic.
The election of Baburam Bhattarai, a senior leader of the former rebels who waged an armed insurgency against the now-toppled monarchy, follows two years of turmoil in South Asia's poorest nation where Asian superpowers China and India jostle for influence.
Bhattarai faces the twin challenge of integrating and rehabilitating more than 19,000 former guerrillas and must oversee preparation of the first republican constitution, two major conditions of a 2006 peace deal which ended a decade-long civil war that killed 16,000 people.
'Completing the peace process and preparing the new consitution are my priorities. Number three is providing relief to the people,' Bhattarai said after his election, his faced smeared with vermilion and marigold garlands around his neck.
His appointment is seen easing a political impasse in Nepal, which has struggled through two years of stalemate since the former rebels quit the government in a conflict with the president over the control of the national army.
Nepal has potential to generate hydroelectric power and is courted by neighbours India and China as a geopolitical ally, but instability has spooked investers and distracted parliament in a country struggling with near-double digit inflation.
Bhattarai, whose United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has 236 lawmakers in the 601-seat parliament, defeated Ram Chandra Poudel of the Nepali Congress by 340 votes to 235, after clinching a power-sharing deal with several regional parties.
The 57-year-old India-educated Maoist ideologue, whose party has expoused a largely reformist and social democractic agenda, replaces Jhalanath Khanal, a moderate communist who resigned two weeks ago after six months in office having failed to advance the tortuous peace process.
His election raises hopes for a revival of the edgy peace process and could settle the future of Maoist combatants, which the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) says is crucial to reducing two standing armies to one
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