India may well be the world’s largest democracy, but according to Nepal’s Maoist leadership, the Indian democracy is far from perfect and their model for Nepal would be an improved one. In the presence of representatives of all major Indian political parties barring the BJP, Baburam Bhattarai, second in command to CPN (Maoist) chairman Prachanda, gave the Indian democracy some stick saying it had not been able to abolish poverty, exploitation and discrimination.

“If we don’t improve upon this model of democracy, we won’t be able to solve our problems (in Nepal),” said Bhattarai, among the top Maoists who led party cadres over a decade-long armed insurgency in Nepal. In his view, several bold experiments were on the cards in his country to develop the model that would help in removing “all forms of exploitation”. Bhattarai later went on to elucidate the point, saying Nepal would not emulate Indian democracy even though it had some notable highlights like a multiparty system and timely elections.

Instead, Nepal’s Maoists have put forth a theory of “multiparty competitive democracy”, which they said was required even in a "proletarian democracy". They have denounced Stalin for “philosophical, ideological, metaphysical and mechanical mistakes” and held up Lenin's concept of “socialist competition”, to say had the leader of the October Revolution lived a few years more he would have developed multiparty competition in the socialist system.

None of the Indian leaders, who had come together as part of a nine-party Nepal Solidarity Committee, India, responded to Bhattarai’s candid assessment of Indian democracy or were asked to by senior NCP member D P Tripathi, who was conducting the proceedings — Prachanda and Bhattarai had been invited to a political meeting at the NCP headquarters. On the dais was also India’s top Left leadership — the CPI(M)’s Prakash Karat, the CPI’s A B Bardhan and the Forward Bloc’s Debabrata Biswas — while the two Maoist leaders occupied centrestage.

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