With barely ten days to go before his threatened five-day "Nepal shutdown", Maoist leader Prachanda issued a statement saying his group is willing to announce a unilateral ceasefire, cancel the bandh and resume the negotiations broken off in November. His colleague Baburam Bhattarai sent out faxes on 15 March addressed to "Dear Foreign Tourists" saying they will not be harmed, but that they should avoid travelling to Nepal during the 2-6 April shutdown.

Then comes news that top Nepali Congress leadership has secretly met a Maoist central committee member. Even though we cannot say for sure what all these overtures mean, we can try to predict what the Maoist strategy is, based on these developments.

Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba still feels personally betrayed by the Maoists for breaking off talks and attacking the army in November. He is no mood to talk, but even he seems to be under pressure to hold out a tenuous olive branch. This he may do in the state that gave birth to the Naxalite movement, and where Indian Maoists were ruthlessly crushed by Indira Gandhi.

Our own Maoists may be out of touch with international reality, but they have no qualms about using objective domestic conditions to suit their needs. Even while the Prachanda statement was being faxed to media, the Maoists ambushed an army truck at Kerabari on the Mugling-Narayanghat highway and at Sanghachok on the Chautara road, killing 10 policemen and soldiers.

These attacks may have larger significance, since they occurred on main highways and relatively close to the capital. It is possible that the rebel leadership thinks the time has now come to employ Mao's doctrine of "surround and strangulate". It would be oversight to take these two attacks as only build-up for the forthcoming bandh. The Maoists go by the book, and may be trying to function within their declared game plan of inciting a simultaneous mass uprising and insurgency.

But these very actions point also to a certain defensiveness. The Royal Nepal Army and the Armed Police, after initial defeats, have made dramatic raids recently on rebel training camps and hideouts-an indication of better intelligence and strike capability. All this could be contributing to widening the internal fissures within the Maoist leadership.

If the surprise attacks on the military barracks in Dang and Salleri signified the beginning of the internal disagreement, then the recent overtures for unilateral ceasefire could signal its end. The Maoists may still think they are winning the war, otherwise there is no rationale for offering a unilateral ceasefire now. It could also be that the earlier opponent of the ceasefire, war strategist Comrade Badal, is out of action for one reason or other.

Even if they will never admit it publicly, the Maoists have a credibility and image problem. Their political hold is slipping, there is anarchy in the ranks, and they have been damaged by the perception that the leadership depends on support from India. The same international factors that forced the Tamil Tigers to sue for peace in Sri Lanka may be pushing the Maoists to negotiate. Prachanda and Baburam are now branded terrorists a la bin Laden. Some of the more brutal murders of prominent social activists and teachers in recent months have tarnished their revolutionary image and early populism. The comrades now need to try and restore their political credentials.

This could be why the Maoists are being forced by public opinion to resort to more democratic means of protest such as bandhs and dialogue. And to get there, they will even hold hands with their arch enemy, Girija Koirala. In this game of power, the end justifies any means and no alliance is unacceptable to either side.

The Maoists had anticipated that the army would be deployed against them, but they had not expected that the government would also declare a state of emergency. This complicated their plans to gain propaganda mileage to discredit the army. They now have two choices if they want to reclaim their standing as a political force and also get the government to withdraw the army: continue fighting or talk.

There is a discernible trend in the Maoists overtures for talks-they have done it either before or after every major attack. But the Kathmandu intelligentsia is seemingly unaware of this. The rebels fully know that if there are talks they can regroup and reassess their position. But they have little to lose with fighting on, since they can continue making trouble for the security forces with ambushes.

This is the classic Maoist pincer: in a long-term people's war, legitimate (democratic) protests make up about half the game plan, the rest comprises armed attacks and extortion. These two approaches complement each other. The attacks at Dang and Accham took the war to a new level, but it cost the Maoists public support and damaged the political face of their struggle. Now they are under pressure to strike a better balance between legitimate political protest and armed struggle.

The recent Maoist statements could also be a plan to confuse the Deuba government further, by offering to talk and prying open fissures within the Congress by meeting Koirala. But if our memory still holds, the Maoists did exactly the same with Deuba when Koirala was prime minister last year. That all three rebel tactics-the talks, continued fighting and bandhs-are being used together could be hints (if hints are still needed) that the Maoists understand that the heavy death toll of soldiers in Mangalsen has little meaning unless they are able to show their presence in the streets of Kathmandu.

Even though it is not openly articulated, the main agenda of Deuba's visit to India is the Maoist problem. The possibility of an agreement on joint Nepal-India moves to fight the Maoists also cannot be ruled out. If the Maoists foresee the possibility of India attacking Nepal using the excuse of fighting them, and have reacted to this with their recent overtures, that is a positive development, and doesn't harm their public relations either.

But the Maoists have to articulate this analysis publicly before we can reach any conclusion. Also if they are still rallying around the policy of using the "expansionists" (India in this case) to assuage the goals of the "people's war", then that could prove detrimental to the country. Particularly if they think that drawing India in is in their long-term interest.

(Puskar Gautam is a former Maoist district commander for Okhaldhunga and left the movement three years ago.)