At a village health post called Thanti Bazaar, two days walk from the nearest road in western Nepal, a travelling group of troubadours is putting on a display of singing, dancing and theatre.
"The bullet may go in our chest, but we have to defeat the government," a young man who goes by the name Comrade Sangeen (Sharpshooter) tells the mostly teenaged onlookers.
"Dirty Yankee go home," the audience sings, pirouetting in the traditional way and waving red handkerchiefs.
After breaking off a seven-month peace process with the Kathmandu government, Nepal's Maoist rebels have launched a campaign of assassinations in the capital, killing the deputy chief of the country's special forces and attacking several other military and political leaders.
But the fighting, which has cost more than 7,000 lives over the past seven years in the once peaceful Himalayan kingdom, has also erupted anew in the Maoists' western heartland, where lie the roots of Nepal's revolutionary movement. Government forces have been fighting back, including an attack on a rebel bunker that killed at least three dozen Maoists yesterday.
Thirteen years of democracy and foreign aid and a national economy bolstered by Mount Everest tourism has brought little benefit to Nepal's underdeveloped western hills, one of the poorest parts of one of the world's poorest countries. Here, Maoist promises of land reform and free universal health care and education have attracted support against a government that is widely seen as corrupt, indifferent and brutal.
Mixed in with the message are frequent denunciations of "American imperialism," which the Maoists believe is at work in Nepal: The U.S. Congress approved $12-million (U.S.) worth of military aid for Kathmandu last year and Washington has helped the government's cause further by sending advisers and classifying the Maoists as terrorists.
In the village of Alsing, not far from Thanti Bazaar, the Maoists have established a "party school" in a captured police station that would not appear out of place in the former Soviet Union.
The school's 14 students are learning political science, the history of communism, military science, scientific socialism and philosophy. The teachers swap Khrushchev quotes and outline the syllabus -- philosophy includes modules on "anachronism," which is defined as "what is out of rule, out of discipline, like Hitler," and the "sources of knowledge": science, class struggle and obstacles to production.
"I am not dreaming of a happy life. I want to serve the party until I die," says Devkala Adhikari, 25, who teaches political science and sometimes sits on the "people's courts" that punish villagers for crimes ranging from card playing to supporting the government.
"The Nepalese women have always been slaves of their husband and of the culture. Our salvation is the Maoist party. I am not afraid," she says.
Baburam Bhattarai, the chief Maoist negotiator and chairman of the movement's embryonic "People's Government," says his party has a "responsibility to the people" to pursue revolution by whatever means necessary. The work of land redistribution and "voluntary co-operativization" had already begun in Maoist-controlled areas, he said, threatening the United States with "another Vietnam" if the U.S. aid program is expanded.
Battalion Commissar Pratik, who, at 30 is the oldest of the Maoists performing at the remote health post, says 90 per cent of Surkhet district's 300,000 people support the Maoists, and he claims to have 1,000 soldiers.
"We are making a new system and we have confidence. We have worldwide support from the poor and oppressed," he says.
But government sources tell another story.
At Surkhet district headquarters, police superintendent Dhak Bahadur Karki estimates the armed Maoist strength in the district at about 100."
A local man who asks not to be named says that much of the Maoists' support is obtained through the same methods the army has been accused of: violence and extortion.
"Without fear, 5 per cent of the people of this village support the Maoists," he guesses. "With fear, 95 per cent support them."
Since the collapse of the ceasefire, Amnesty International has called for both sides to establish an independent human-rights monitoring system to reduce the widespread cases of torture, summary execution and illegal detention by both sides. But a full-scale return to war would almost certainly bring more suffering.
"The Maoist soldiers came to my village and I thought, 'They are just like me.' I felt courageous and I joined," says Comrade Prabin, 21, describing how he ran away from his home 11 days earlier. Then he breaks down in tears at the thought of his brother, who is a police officer, and the danger his parents now face from armed men on both sides.