The 12 teenagers wearing the green fatigues of the People's Liberation Army pulled curved daggers from their belts, raising them above the heads of the seated crowd. Under red flags fluttering in the breeze, they stood still for a second before jerking to the thumping bass of Nepal's Maoists' latest political weapon: pop music propaganda.
Having fidgeted their way through turgid speeches, the crowd of peasant farmers who till the wheat fields around Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha, swayed to the refrain: "In the villages are poor people. For you the sun will rise very soon... as the king digs his own grave."
Today sees Nepal's first nationwide elections in almost a decade, a poll that will almost certainly end the 240-year rule of the Shah dynasty, the world's last Hindu monarchy. King Gyanendra, once considered a living god, was stripped of his powers in 2006 after weeks of protest at his bruising, autocratic rule.
Instead of palace intrigue, the country of 27 million people is being offered historic elections to an assembly that will rewrite the constitution. More than 70 parties are taking part, but having traded the bullet for the ballot box it is the Maoists who have taken centre stage. This is in part because the leftwing leadership has stepped out of the shadows to canvass for votes. These once reclusive, unsmiling guerrilla leaders, who swore to flatten social hierarchies from their jungle hideouts, have taken to the hustings.
Ten years of "people's war" - which left 13,000 dead - was hardly the best training ground for non-violent politics but the former rebels say that democracy is not "an alternative to armed struggle but a logical conclusion".
No person represents this profound shift in thinking more than the Maoist chairman and founder, Comrade Prachanda ("fierce one"), or Pushpa Kamal Dahal, as he is known on the ballot slip. In an interview with the Guardian, Prachanda said he would respect the result of the election even if the Maoists lost. "If anybody tries to disrupt the peace process then we would create a mass movement against any acts of sabotage. But we will respect any verdict of the elections."
For one-time advocates of a single-party state, this is a significant turnaround. In the past, the Maoists simply shot people who disagreed with them. But democracy, said Prachanda, was the ultimate lesson of the 20th century.
"Look at all the great revolutions and counter-revolutions in the last century. We came to the conclusion that multi-party competition is a must for a vibrant society, even a vibrant socialist society."
Poverty
The former insurgent said that although they remained ideological heirs to Marx, Lenin and Mao, Nepal's former rebels had decided to contribute their own version of leftwing thinking: the Prachanda path out of poverty and underdevelopment.
In a landlocked nation pressed against the Himalayas and not much bigger than England, 10 years of communist insurgency has produced one of the poorest countries in the world. Per capita income is about £145 a year, a little more than Rwanda. Creating wealth is a priority, say the Maoists, echoing their communist cousins in China. The party's economic plan calls for a mixture of Himalayan hydropower, horticulture and high-end tourism to create a rich and ethnically diverse country abutting the roof of the world - in the words of one diplomat, "a kind of Switzerland in the Himalayas".
To achieve this, Prachanda said, Nepal needed "a capitalistic mode of production". Under his party's guidance, he promised, incomes in Nepal would reach £1,500 in a decade.
"In south Asia we are the richest country in terms of natural resources and hard labouring masses but our root cause of poverty is a feudalistic political system, feudal way of thinking. We want to change this."
Getting rid of the king, said Prachanda, was the first step in this social revolution. Already references to the monarch have been erased from the national anthem and the word royal removed from the army and the national airline. Gyanendra's face will also soon disappear from banknotes.
However more than 4,000 troops loyal to the throne have refused to leave the king's Kathmandu palace, raising fears of a bloody showdown between royalists and republicans. Prachanda does not shy from talking about a final battle between "masses and monarch that would only last one or two days. It will only be a minor incident."
There is evidence to suggest the Maoists have not relinquished violence completely. Although 30,000 Maoist guerrillas have remained in UN-supervised demobilisation camps, the party's Young Communist League has a thuggish side - handing out beatings as well as extorting money from businesses.
Prachanda admitted to "some incidents that we are trying to control" but said the Maoists were more sinned against than sinning. He said that in the last month nine Maoist party workers had been killed. "We have not retaliated. Our army is disciplined and restrained."
Yesterday UN monitors began investigating the killings of six Maoist party workers, apparently shot dead by security forces, and the death of another party's candidate in the west of Nepal.
The party's critics say that the international community has been lulled into a false sense of security.
"All this talk of elections is just a carefully constructed facade," said Kamal Thapa, who heads the Rastriya Prajatantra Party Nepal, the only party to openly support a constitutional king. "First Maoists will abolish the monarchy and then they will abolish democracy.
"Prachanda wants a totalitarian communist state. Some politicians are under the illusion that by engaging with Maoists they can change them. I don't agree."
The US, too, has remained wary of the Maoists. Although the former guerrillas have been met by officials from Nepal's biggest neighbours, India and China, as well as shaking hands with British ministers, Washington still lists the group as terrorists. The Maoist party chairman said this was a blip. "Ultimately we want to have good diplomatic relations [with Washington]. We are not going to fight with the US. It is not possible and we are not so stupid."
Outcome uncertain
What is clear is that no one seriously thinks the Maoists will win the elections outright. The two traditional large political parties, the Nepali Congress and the mainstream communists, known as the UML, are too well entrenched.
However, diplomats say predictions are difficult, as the system has not been tried before. Nepal's new assembly will have 601 members, of whom 240 will be directly elected, 335 will be seated under proportional representation and the remainder will be nominated. There are caste and gender quotas, too.
"You are not going to get anyone making seat predictions this time," said Rhoderick Chalmers of the International Crisis Group, a conflict analysis organisation. "I think the Maoists won't do as well as they say but they will not be humiliated. They are going to be in the top three."
Backstory
The elections are a dramatic break with the past. For the first time the country will use quotas to include ethnic and caste groups historically left of out power. There are more than 6,000 candidates and parties must field at least 33% women. Dalits, the untouchables at the bottom of Hindu society, are guaranteed 13% of the proportionally elected seats, while "oppressed and indigenous" peoples will get 37% of the allocated places. There are 60 indigenous peoples, who constitute more than 35% of the population. Criss-crossing these identities are caste and gender. So the Indo-origin people of the plains, the Madhesi, also have their own internal stratification, with untouchables at the bottom of the pile. Until 2006, power was in the hands of the Hindu elite, dominated by two castes, the Brahmins and the Chettris. Whether the palace or the parliament was supreme was largely irrelevant. The result was that the Brahmin-Chettris, who make up 30% of the population, occupied two-thirds of the top positions in the security forces, judiciary and civil service.