Less than quarter of a century after the fall of the Soviet Union, Nepal joined the modest list of nations where a revolution from the Left had seen success. When the Maoists began their guerrilla insurgency in 1996, Nepal appeared to be firmly on its way to the Fukuyaman “end of history,” with a newfound halo of parliamentary democracy, a liberalized economy, and a constitutionally constrained monarch.

Things didn’t go as planned. By 2005 — the year Nepal’s king Gyanendra Shah suspended parliament and took direct control of the government — nearly thirteen thousand lives had been lost to civil war. The royal coup also had the effect of alienating parliamentary parties, who were until then allied with the king in the conflict against the rebels.

With the king’s suspension of democratic government, these parties — led by the two big rivals of electoral politics, the liberal Nepali Congress (NC) and the Communist Party of Nepal–Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML) — found the opportunity to align with the Maoists and mount a common front against the authoritarian rule. The parliamentary parties would begin a popular movement demanding the reinstatement of the parliament while the Maoists continued their armed conflict with the state forces.