The campaign for the long awaited Constituent Assembly election began in March 2008. In South Asia, election campaigns are usually marked by a high level of violence. Because of the relative weakness of the Nepalese government, vis-à-vis security matters, the potential for intense and widespread violence was high during the Constituent Assembly election. In an attempt to counter this, the Chief conceived an internal strategy, which consisted of appointing a Maoist-backed commissioner as the head of the election Code-of-Conduct (CoC) monitoring team. Most violations were expected to come from the former rebels, and it was hoped that the Commissioner would be able to pressurise them into adhering to the Code-of-Conduct. Moreover, if the Commission acted on the CoC Head's recommendations, the Maoists would not be able to say that the Commission was biased against them.

However, this strategy failed miserably.

Initially, all seemed well, and the political atmosphere became highly charged as nearly 10,000 candidates from fifty-four political parties geared up to contest what was viewed as a historically decisive electoral competition.

The political parties organised large rallies, cultural programmes, street corner meetings and door-to-door canvassing. They even used motorcades, comprised of open vehicles with loudspeakers, banner paintings and posters. Musically gifted party workers roamed around the cities and the countryside singing songs with catchy tunes and simple words about plausible dreams—that had instant popular appeal. Red, white and green party flags hung inside houses or fluttered from the rooftops of party supporters.