Calcutta, Aug. 28: The Nepal Maoists’ new-found love for democracy is unlikely to herald peace in India’s Naxalite belt.

The Indian rebels have no plans to learn from their Nepalese comrades, whom they accuse of betraying the cause of an armed “people’s war”.

The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has decided to abandon armed struggle and join the new interim government and the Constituent Assembly.

While bottlenecks persist over disarming the Maoists’ “army” and dissolving the “parallel government” in rural areas, the rebels have promised to carry these out gradually if the peace process stays on track. They have also agreed to a ceasefire code under UN supervision.

To top it all, CPN (Maoist) boss Prachanda has rejected “the old concept of communism”, denounced Stalin and said his party prefers multiparty democracy to Mao’s “people’s democracy”.

To the main Indian Naxalite party, the CPI (Maoist), such heresy amounts to abandoning revolution and thus undermining the Indian Maoists’ programme.

In an interview to People’s March, the Indian Maoist organ, Azad, a spokesman for the CPI (Maoist), has described Prachanda’s moves as “dangerous”.

He has attacked the Nepal Maoist boss for “hobnobbing with the CPM”, which has urged the Indian rebels to learn from their counterparts in the neighbouring country.

The spokesman has described the CPM as a “party of the Indian ruling classes, with its primary task to bring the Nepali Maoists into the parliamentary mainstream”.

“They (the CPM) have used the worst form of state terror against us, as in West Bengal,” Azad added. “Their aim is… to pacify Maoists in India with bullets and do the same with the Nepalese Maoists with sugar-coated bullets.”

Azad branded CPM politburo member Sitaram Yechury, whom Prachanda has recognised as the key Indian interlocutor with the Nepal Maoists and the alliance of seven mainstream parties, as the “true Chanakya and a stooge of Indian expansionists’’.

In recent interviews, Prachanda has said he and his comrades are “not the communists of traditional type” and had taken up arms “just as a form of politics”.

He has stressed that his party would “always (be) ready to accept the people’s verdict through the Constituent Assembly elections” — even if that verdict was “in favour of the king or monarchy’’. And if “Mao’s ‘people’s republic’ cannot fulfil the needs of today’s world”, neither can the Stalinist practice of maiming political opponents.

“In the USSR, Stalin gave no place to competition and went ahead in a monolithic way. What was the result?’’ Prachanda has asked.

He has refused to allow the economy “a free run in the name of a free market”, though, and advocated “a middle way”.