“... I remember meeting a woman on our way to Gorkha, who approached BRB suddenly and scolded him, ‘you silly, Baburam! Why did you leave the party and Parliament when you were going to be the country’s next President!’ There were also people who predicted that BRB would henceforth be reduced to a mere Marxist intellectual.”  This is an excerpt from the book, ‘Hisila: From Revolutionary to First Lady,’ penned by Hisila Yami, former Maoist party leader and the spouse of ex-prime minister Baburam Bhattarai.   “As for me, I was glad that BRB had finally left Prachanda, who had always allied with or attacked BRB for his own personal motives and political gains,” writes Yami in her 2021 political memoir. 

It’s been more than seven years since Bhattarai ended his 30-year-old relationship with the Maoist chair, Pushpa Kamal Dahal. On 26 September 2015, six days after the promulgation of the new constitution, Bhattarai announced at a press conference that he was leaving the Maoist party. 

At the time, Bhattarai had described his old party as a ‘house with a red sticker,’ which is to say irrelevant in the changed political context. He also went on to allege Dahal of indulging in corruption and making alliances with “regressive leaders” like KP Oli of the CPN-UML.  But, as the saying goes, politics makes strange bedfellows. Bhattarai has now resorted to taking Dahal’s side in order to remain relevant in national politics. He has handed over his constituency (Gorkha-2) to Dahal despite his high prospects of winning the elections.  After Dahal fielded his candidacy on October 7 for the upcoming parliamentary elections, Bhattarai said: “I am extremely happy to hand over my electrical constituency to a towering leader like Dahal, which is an historic opportunity for the voters of this district.”  In fact, it was Bhattarai who convinced Dahal to contest the polls from Gorkha, one of the heartlands of Maoist insurgency, where the party made gains in the local elections this past May. After severing ties with Dahal, Bhattarai, who had made his name in the party as the Maoist ideologue, tried to form a new political party. On 12 June 2016, he launched Naya Shakti. He went on a nationwide tour to promote his new party, to no avail. The party met a humiliating defeat in the 2017 elections. Bhattarai was the only leader to win a seat in the federal parliament from Gorkha-2, which was largely due to his popularity in his home district.   Ever since, Bhattarai has tried rather unsuccessfully to form and reform several parties.  Since 2015, Maoist chair Dahal, too, has made some major political departures to rebrand the image of his old party, one of former guerillas, not well-versed in the ways of mainstream politicking.    The popularity of the Maoist party seen right after it joined the peace process in 2006 was short-lived. So Dahal decided to merge his party with the UML in 2018 to form the Nepal Communist Party (NCP). But this new party split in 2021, thus the UML and Maoist were revived.  “We both failed in all our news experiments that we did after the promulgation of the new constitution. So we decided to come together to protect the achievements made by the people’s war,” Dahal said at a public program on September 24.  “We recalled the days of the people’s war and reached a conclusion that we two should come together to develop a model of socialism in Nepal.”   Dahal repeated the same thing after filing his candidacy from Gorkha. According to some Maoist leaders, Bhattarai has almost joined the mother party. They say the official announcement could be made after the November 20 elections.  So what led Bhattarai to give up electoral politics at least for now and rejoin his old comrades?  Some say Bhattarai’s influence and image took a serious hit after quitting the Maoist party. This became evident when his new party did not fare well in the 2017 elections.   On 6 May 2019, Bhattarai’s Naya Shakti united with the Federal Socialist Forum, a Madhes-based party led by Upendra Yadav. But the power tussle between Bhattarai and Yadav led to the party split in 2022.  A leader close to Bhattarai says the party breakup left the latter frustrated. It was around the same time some Maoist leaders started urging Bhattarai to mend fences with Dahal and rejoin the old party. After several rounds of talks with Dahal, say some Maoist leaders, Bhattarai has agreed to return to his old party.  It is said that Dahal has agreed to Bhattarai’s condition that he would be allowed to manage some of his leaders and cadres in the Maoist party. One of Bhattarai’s immediate goals is to elevate his daughter Manushi Yami Bhattarai in the party. A JNU graduate, Manushi was involved in student politics from the Maoist party. She is contesting the November 20 parliamentary elections from Kathmandu-7 as a Maoist candidate.  Since Bhattarai is supporting Dahal in Gorkha, he expects reciprocity from the Maoist party to ensure his daughter’s victory in Kathmandu.  Meanwhile, Dahal reckons this is a good time to have his old comrade back to his fold, given he is not pleased with his current senior leaders.   It is said that Dahal is frustrated by the behavior of leaders, such as Narayan Kaji Shrestha, Janardhan Sharma and Barsha Man Pun. These leaders, a Maoist leader says, were opposing and questioning every decision taken by the party leadership, including the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and bill to amend the Citizenship Act. “Dahal wants a senior leader by his side. Bhattarai, meanwhile, has a shot at fulfilling his goal of becoming an influential politician if he were to rejoin the Maoist party,” says the leader.  For a long time, Bhattarai had served as Dahal’s deputy in the Maoist party, which he is likely to retain if he rejoins the Maoist party.  Madhu Sudan Panthi, a senior journalist who has closely followed Dahal-Bhattarai relations, says it remains to be seen how the rekindled relationship between the two leaders will pan out.   “During the insurgency the two leaders were rarely on the same page,” he says. “Though they were in the same party, there was always a clash of personality, popularity and domination.”  Most significantly, Bhattarai and Dahal had divergent opinions on the peace process and constitution drafting process. Bhattarai always stood in favor of drafting a new constitution from the elected Constituent Assembly (CA) while the other leaders in the party, including Mohan Baidya, were advocates of an urban revolt to capture the power.  All the while, Dahal, as the party’s supreme leader, had remained in the fence. Bhattarai’s line prevailed in the end, which propelled his image within the party and in the public eye.  In her memoir, Yami describes the relationship between Bhattarai and Dahal as at times complementary and at others contradictory.  “Basically, Prachanda was a pragmatist and BRB was an idealist. They were like two bands of the same river,” she writes. But after remaining apart for seven years, the two leaders seem to be taking a less confrontational and more reconciliatory approach.  Some analysts say since Bhattarai will not be in the parliament, he will not be in the race to become prime minister, much to Dahal’s respite.  Bhattarai has publicly said that he would not claim for the state positions but will continue to work to shape the party’s ideology, a crisis that the Maoist party is facing.  “Bhattarai has this time made it clear that he is not interested in power politics,” says Panthi. “So, a cordial relationship between two leaders is expected.”  He also sees the Maoist rank and file accepting Bhattarai as their leader.  After the elections, Panthi says Bhattarai will likely plan a way to rebrand and rename the Maoist party. That Bhattarai wants to create a new socialist party without a Maoist or communist tags is known to all, but Dahal wants to continue the party’s identity. In the past, Dahal needed Bhattarai to shape the party’s ideology. Similarly, Bhattarai needed Dahal to implement his ideology.  “Without each other, says a leader close to Bhattarai, “they cannot form a strong party.” Dahal is currently facing a serious ideological crisis while Bhattarai is seeking a powerful organizational strength to support his vision to form a socialist party. “I think the two leaders seem to have realized each other’s necessity.”