The splinters of the original Maoist party that waged an insurgency for a decade are now engaged in diverse ways to reinvent themselves. The radical left-wing faction led by Netra Bikram Chand has reverted to the tenets and tactics of the past, including most recently senselessly destroying base stations of the Ncell mobile phone service.

It is its refusal to acknowledge any mistakes in the old Maoist ideology and strategy and its commitment to continue armed struggle that distinguish the Chand group.

On the other hand, one of the Maoist movement’s senior-most leaders Baburam Bhattarai is engaged in a very different kind of experiment. He has completely moved away from the old Maoist ideology and its emphasis on class warfare. Instead, it has been replaced by an overarching emphasis on economic development, which Bhattarai and his colleagues in Naya Shakti Nepal now believe is the remedy to most of our ills.

Since the new party’s inception, Bhattarai has been very keen to gain the support of constituencies that were never attracted to the Maoist cause, the urban middle classes in particular. In recent weeks, the new party has launched a widespread publicity campaign, including YouTube videos, full front-page advertisements in major newspapers, on radio and television networks and even in high-end cinema halls. The use of commercial media and the aesthetic of the advertisements would have been vehemently condemned as a ‘bourgeois’ practice by the Maoists of the past. The advertisements thus offer an indication of the distance that Bhattarai has traveled since the end of the conflict in 2006.

 Bhattarai’s attempt to forge a new party, which he hopes will drastically change Nepal’s political culture, is an intriguing experiment. It demonstrates a degree of creativity not readily apparent in the other Maoist factions. Both Chand and Baidya remain beholden to a sterile old ideology. The Maoist Centre led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal has now become entrenched in the established political order. In comparison, Bhattarai’s new party appears as a breath of fresh air.

However, it is also a fact that Naya Shakti is still an experiment in the making and many of its internal tensions remain to be reconciled. In his attempt to reinvent himself, Bhattarai seems to have swerved too far away from the original impulses that drove the Maoist party. His agenda of economic development does not seem to be very different from that held, for instance, by the Nepali Congress, which in the 1990s posited economic growth within a liberal political structure as the major remedy to the country’s ills.

For many of his old supporters, Bhattarai appears to have no answer to crucial questions that he raised as a Maoist ideologue on issues of inequality and social marginalisation. If Bhattarai’s new force is to gain credibility beyond a group of urban classes, he will need to find ways to respond to the demands of these groups and address questions of deeply entrenched inequalities. All this while, he is also trying to court support of the urban middle class where established parties have firm support and patronage networks.