Rebel leader outlines his vision of a country taking the best of Maoist philosophy to bring prosperity to everyone
Guerilla guards stand anxiously on the balcony and stairway of the nondescript safe house somewhere in the slums of Kathmandu.
When Pushpa Kamal Dahal - better known as Prachanda - enters the dimly lit room, it is with the confidence of a revolutionary at the cusp of assuming political power, tinged with the warm ebullience of a fatherly philosopher.
'Nepal is rich in resources but lacking in political vision,' declares the chairman and supreme commander of Nepal's Maoists. 'Our people are poor so we want to use the resources to build a new Nepal for them.'
While the Maoists have been fighting for a decade, Prachanda was organising and planning the movement at least 30 years ago. Recognising how conditions in Nepal paralleled those of China in the 1920s and '30s - a feudal system of royalists, landlords and a serfdom, with uneven distribution of resources and foreign control over certain aspects of the economy - he saw in Nepal's rural mountain villages and urban slums a fertile nesting ground for socialist aspirations.
Prachanda saw a chance for Maoist ideals and organisational techniques to unite Nepal's rural-based and largely poverty-stricken multi-ethnic society into a single movement and united political force.