The extreme privation of his childhood spurred Prachanda's interest in far-left ideology (File) Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal lived in seclusion directing Nepal's guerrilla war but emerged from the jungle to lead the Himalayan republic when his cadres laid down their arms and joined mainstream politics. Still widely known by his nom de guerre Prachanda ("The Fierce One"), Dahal on Friday lost a parliamentary vote of confidence that will force him to relinquish the nation's revolving door premiership for the third time. The civil war he launched in 1996 drew disaffected Nepalis into his Maoist rebellion with a rousing call to end centuries of feudal inequality, ultimately claiming more than 17,000 lives and leaving thousands more still missing to this day.
With a peace settlement that abolished Nepal's monarchy and brought the Maoists into government, Dahal was able to claim victory when the conflict ended a decade later. "We believe that the country has adopted the agenda of the Maoists," he said in a 2022 interview with local broadcaster Kantipur. Dahal was born into a high-caste Hindu family in 1954 but grew up in the poverty endemic to rural Nepal at the time, and spent his childhood herding goats and buffalo.
The extreme privation of his childhood spurred an interest in far-left ideology and he joined a communist party in 1980 at the age of 25. He worked as a teacher but gradually became convinced that an armed insurgency was the only way to bring radical change to on.