Nepal's Maoist Prime Minister Prachanda resigned on Monday after a crisis sparked by his sacking of the country's army chief, plunging the Himalayan republic into a political turmoil. The one-year-old Maoist-led government fired General Rookmangud Katawal on Sunday, accusing him of disobeying instructions not to hire new recruits and refusing to accept the supremacy of the civilian government. But President Ram Baran Yadav, who hails from an opposition party and is commander-in-chief of the army, called the move unconstitutional. “I have resigned from the cabinet,” Prachanda said in a televised address to the nation. “We made enough efforts to forge a consensus but various forces were active against this and were encouraging the president to take the unconstitutional and undemocratic step (of keeping Katawal in office),” he said. The crisis is a huge blow to a 2006 peace pact that ended a decade-long civil war that pitted the army against the Maoists. The peace agreement ushered the Maoists into the political mainstream and they won an election last year. The immediate political future is unclear but some analysts said Prachanda was pre-empting the inevitable end of his government. Two government parliamentary allies withdrew from the ruling coalition to protest against the army chief's dismissal, leaving the Maoists with a thin majority and possibly leading to a confidence vote in the government. “He has resigned because the government was headed to become a minority,” said Lokraj Baral, head of the Nepal Centre for Strategic Studies think tank. “Now the other political parties will be busy to form an alternative government. But it is too early to say anything definitive now.” Prachanda scored a surprise win in a special assembly election last year but did not get a parliamentary majority. The assembly abolished Nepal's 239-year-old monarchy and declared the impoverished mountain nation a republic. Prachanda led an insurgency against the monarchy in the jungles around the Himalayan foothills. Once he came out of the jungle, Prachanda transformed himself from a revolutionary insurgent into a wily politician, insisting that Maoists are not “dogmatic communists” and that globalization and free markets were facts of life.
