The Bullet and the Ballot Box: The Story of Nepal’s Maoist Revolution, by Aditya Adhikari (Verso, £20)

Aditya Adhikari has written an exciting, analytical and well-researched account of the rise of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) from operational obscurity in the mid-1990s to a modicum of state power by 2008.

In his exploration of the objective and subjective factors involved in such an ascent, Adhikari provides both a diplomat’s eye-view of the big, geopolitical tectonics at work and compelling eye-witness accounts of working and fighting for the party by those on the front line.

This latter element is only slightly diluted by the fact that few of these accounts are actually in the first person, having been rather bizarrely transferred into the third by the author.

Extensive use is also made of contemporary leftist works of literature which both illuminate the impoverished state of much of the Nepalese population in the face of their feudal, religious and liberal democratic oppressors but also their exciting and accelerated political awakening and action.

Pursuing a “people’s war” in the countryside with a view to militarily and politically encircling the country’s towns and capital, the Maoist approach shifted constantly and effectively according to the relative positioning of the other four main players — the monarchy, the established mainstream parties, China and India.

The tactical adroitness of the party is shown in its swift refocus onto workplace justice issues once the Maoists had made peace with the parliamentary opposition.

Even so, the book is rather light on the relationships between the Maoists and the respective communist parties of China and India outside of their formal state roles.

Adhikari demonstrates how the Maoists were “lucky” people’s generals. Notwithstanding the occasional military blunders and tensions between leading comrades Prachanda and Baburam Bhattarai, they faced an authoritarian but inept king, squabbling parliamentarians — including the decidedly reformist Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) — and the mutually irreconcilable, and hence playable, competing interests of Nepal’s giant neighbours.

But the author also makes it clear that the 2006 collapse of the monarchy owed as much to the broad-based street protests in Kathmandu and the other major settlements as to the pressure applied to the traditional system by the Maoists as they captured territory and implemented the janabadi, or economic justice, system in the rest of the country.

The experiences of the Maoists since the signing of that year’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement have been mixed. The monarchy has been removed, a Constituent Assembly is the dominant legislative force and there have been some powers devolved to the regions away from the centre.

But the party had to make considerable compromises elsewhere and having been the dominant parliamentary force up to 2013 it has since suffered considerable electoral reverses.

Much of the energy of the people’s war has been dissipated in the samsadiya bhas — “parliamentary quicksand” — and a breakaway Maoist faction has renewed its commitment to a more militant approach to change.

The Bullet and the Ballot Box suggests that in spite of the considerable achievements of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) over the last 15 years, this is a revolution still only in its earliest stages.

Paul Simon