The most important thing to watch will be the political forces that will come into play as the 2008 elections in Bhutan draw near. A politically stable Bhutan is obviously in the interests of the country and the region. It is pertinent to recall, here, that the Indian and Bhutanese security establishments were stung when they learned about the launch of the Bhutan Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) on April 22, 2003, the 133rd birth anniversary of Lenin. The BCP circulated pamphlets in the Bhutanese refugee camps in Nepal and in areas inside Bhutan that revealed that the new party’s objective was to ‘smash the monarchy’ and establish a ‘true and new democracy’ (‘new democracy’ is an euphemism for one-party communist democracy) in Bhutan. This led both New Delhi and Thimphu to put the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation (KLO), one of the three Indian separatist outfits operating from Bhutan at that time, under the scanner. Security agencies soon came to the conclusion that the KLO, a pro-Maoist outfit, was active and had pockets of influence in the strategic North Bengal areas of West Bengal and could act as a bridge between the Maoists guerrillas in Nepal and the newly emerging Maoist force in Bhutan. Formed on December 28, 1995, by some radical members of the Koch-Rajbongshi tribe, the KLO has been fighting to achieve a separate Kamtapurstate by carving out territories from Assam and adjoining West Bengal, where the community has a sizeable population.