Maoist ideologue becomes Nepal's new PM

Nepal's new Prime Minister, Baburam Bhattarai, is a Maoist party ideologue who played a key role in transforming the rebel guerrillas into a political set-up that won elections in 2008.

The 57-year-old engineer from rural western Nepal, is the vice chairman of Maoist party, which waged a decade-long "People's War" that ended in 2006 after the deaths of 16,000 people.

His brief stint as finance minister in the Maoist-led government that fell in May 2009 earned him accolades for a rise in revenue collection in one of the world's poorest countries.

Bhattarai, who studied in India, has worked for a long time in the shadow of Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal -- better known as Prachanda ("the fierce one").

But Prachanda proposed Bhattarai as the party's prime ministerial candidate after the resignation of Jhalanath Khanal, leader of the Unified Marxist Leninist (UML) party, earlier this month.

Born in the family of priests in Gorkha, a hill district from where Nepal's erstwhile Shah rulers hailed, Bhattarai persistently campaigned for the end of monarchy, which was deposed in 2008.

In the late 1970s, while studying engineering in Delhi, he was also schooled in Marxist ideology by Nepal's veteran politicians who were in exile, fearing persecution.

In 2005, when the Maoist insurgency was at its peak, Bhattarai argued for an alliance with parliamentary parties, which paved the way for mass protests in 2006 and the end of the monarchy two years later.

"I believe that the country's future is very bright and we can accomplish the task of constitution drafting and complete the peace process," Bhattarai told parliament on Sunday.

But some expressed scepticism over his ability to lead a coalition government, saying Bhattarai, who spent years justifying the Maoist insurgency, may flounder in Nepal's fractured political environment.