KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) -- Moving through his jungle hideouts, the hunted leader of Nepal's Maoist rebels was known only by his fearsome reputation and one old grainy picture.

Now Prachanda has emerged from the mountains to stake his claim as a leader in the country's transition to democracy — looking more like a media-savvy politician than a ruthless guerrilla leader.

And he has surprised his listeners by saying it is time to rebuild Nepal.

People "can be mobilized for construction works. We can use millions of people in building transportation and electrification projects," the guerrilla leader asserted last week in announcing a landmark agreement to make his followers part of the Himalayan kingdom's government for the first time.

Interesting comments from a man whose forces have been blowing up highways, water and electricity projects for years.

Dramatic political transformations are not new for Prachanda, who is able to quickly analyze a political situation and turn it in his favor, said Lilamani Pokhrel of the People's Front Nepal party, who once worked with the rebel leader.

Little is known about Prachanda's early years. He was born Pushpa Kamal Dahal in 1954 near the resort town of Pokhara in western Nepal to a farmer's family.

His introduction to communism came in the early 1970's as a student at an agricultural college in southern Nepal. He became a science teacher at a local high school, volunteering his spare time to the Communist Party, helping to spread its message.

As the party suffered several splits, Prachanda took advantage of the divisions to rise in the ranks.

His former party colleagues remember him as a man with big ambitions.

"Prachanda was good speaker who could easily influence his listeners with his words and dramatic presentation," Pokhrel told The Associated Press in an interview Sunday.

By 1996 he led his own splinter group, forming the Maoist faction of the Communist party, claiming inspiration from the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong. It was then that he disappeared from view, going underground.

At first, Prachanda and his followers were dismissed as a marginal force.

When he presented a list of 40 demands to the Nepalese government in the mid-1990s, asking for improved conditions for peasants and lower castes, he was ignored.

When the group decided to take up arms and bombed police posts in remote mountain villages in February 1996, the government brushed it off as a small law-and-order problem, confident it could be easily crushed. They were wrong.

During a decade underground, Prachanda adopted his nom de guerre, which means "the fierce one," and turned a small band of followers armed with primitive muskets and knives into a feared, well-equipped force of several thousand fighters, who now control a large swath of western Nepal.

Prachanda advocated a new communist revolution he called "Prachadapath" or "Prachanda's Way." Opponents were quickly crushed, with dissenters demoted or placed under house arrest.

He also appointed himself the supreme commander of his People's Liberation Army, but left administrative affairs of the Maoists' parallel government to others.

He spent most of his underground life in remote rural areas or across the border in India, eluding Nepalese troops.

Turmoil in Nepal, culminating in weeks of massive street protests and a general strike organized by an alliance between the rebels and the now-ruling parties forced King Gyanendra to relinquish the absolute power he seized in early 2005 — and set the stage for Prachanda to emerge from the jungles.

When he appeared Friday in the capital Katmandu, it was not in the guise of a military commander who had sparked a decade of conflict that killed 13,000 people and left hundreds more missing, but as an urbane politician.

Troops guarding Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala's house stared at the transformation, some even giving the guerrilla leader a salute normally reserved for top officials.

At the news conference that followed daylong talks with top government leaders, Prachanda quickly apologized to the media, who were kept waiting in the sun for hours.

But while Prachanda and the alliance's leaders agreed to establish an interim government to replace the current national Parliament and the Maoists' "people's government," which rules territory the guerrillas control, many still fear Prachanda and his agenda.

This is a man, many note, with little experience with democracy, who forbade any questioning of his ideas.

There is a danger that he will push for a communist "people's state," said Krishna Pahadi, a rights activist.

"We need to bring them under the mainstream and under a democratic system," he said, of Prachanda and his followers.