Pushpa Kamal Dahal
Pushpa Kamal Dahal, known by his war name Prachanda, the fierce one, was prime minister of Nepal three times, in 2008-09, 2016-17 and 2022-24, the Maoist who had launched the people's war from the hills of Rolpa in February 1996 with a few rifles and led it for ten years from hiding in Nepal and India, until his army of twenty thousand held most of the countryside and the war had killed seventeen thousand. He then came out of the jungle in 2006 to sign the peace accord with Koirala. He took his party to first place in the constituent assembly election of April 2008 that nobody had predicted. He became the first prime minister of the republic in August 2008, resigning nine months later when the president overruled his dismissal of the army chief, which was the question the war had been about. The party's fighters were put into cantonments under UN supervision and, in 2012, fourteen hundred of them into the army and the rest paid off. The revolution became a parliamentary party that has governed with everyone. He was born in Kaski in 1954 into a poor Brahmin family that moved to Chitwan, studied agriculture at Rampur, and taught school. He joined the underground Communists in the 1970s, rising to lead the Maoist faction from 1989. He took it to war when the parliament of the 1990s ignored its forty demands. The second and third governments were coalitions with the Congress and with Oli's Communists in turn, in which he traded the office for support and gave it back on schedule. In them the constitution of 2015 was defended against the Madhesi protests and the Indian blockade, the earthquake of 2015 rebuilt, and the corruption of the parties made permanent. The 2022 government survived four votes of confidence in two years by changing partners and fell in July 2024 when Oli and the Congress united against him. The Gen Z uprising of September 2025 burned the parliament, the supreme court and the leaders' houses, his among them. The interim government that followed excluded them all. He has said that the war was right and its deaths regrettable, which is the position the transitional justice law of 2024 was written to accommodate.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: Nepali
- Roles: prime minister, revolutionary, politician
