Naya Shakti Nepal, which former prime minister and Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai announced last month amid much fanfare, has applied to the Election Commission for registration as a political party.

A group of party leaders and cadres led by Bhattarai reached the EC on Sunday to register the party.

The commission has said that the party would be given official recognition after ascertaining the validity of the documents filed alongside the application. Naya Shakti Nepal was announced on June 12 in a programme attended by thousands of party activists, sympathisers and guests. The party boasts more than 100,000 cadres. Bhattarai, one of the architects of the decade-long Maoist insurgency that claimed the lives of more than 13,000 people, walked away from the UCPN (Maoist) in September last year, soon after the promulgation of the new constitution, to form an alternative political force. Naya Shakti is on a nationwide party-building campaign.