Ceisler 1 South Asia: Development and Social Change A New Era of Political Challenges in Nepal On May 3, 2020, an agreement was reached between leading members of the Communist Party of Nepal to allow Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli to stay in power, and avoid a breakup of the Nepali parliament’s largest coalition. Unless something else changes, Oli will remain in his position until 2023; his ascension to the position of Nepali Prime Minister in February of 2018 ended the long process to install a democratically elected government in the former monarchical state, a process that was kickstarted by the Maoist insurgency of 1996. Over the past 25 years the country has experienced drastic changes, and this brief will attempt to summarize the most important among these changes, as well as address the current challenges Nepali citizens face. First, the geography and ethnic breakdown of the nation will be explained, which will be followed by a brief discussion of Nepali history through the 19th century. Then, the major changes of the early 1900s will lead to a section about the Panchayat system, and the disappearance of Nepali democracy in the latter half of the 20th century. The second half of this piece will be dedicated to discussing the different stages of the Nepali Civil War from 1996 to 2006, and the transition of the Nepali Communist Party from a group of militant rebels to the nation’s ruling political party. Ceisler 2 Geography Nepal is a mountainous nation landlocked between India to the South, and the semi- autonomous Chinese region of Tibet in the North. The nation boasts three different major environmental regions; from east to west these are the Tarai, the Pahad, and the Himalayas . The Tarai is a fertile region of marshy grassland and jungle that borders and shares part of the Indo- Gagnetic plain with India. The Pahad is a central hill region that features the outer foothills of the Himalayas; this area is often called the Lesser Himalayas, or the Mahabharata range. The final region, the Himalayas, sit in Northern Nepal. This mountain range features the earth’s tallest peaks, with a number of 8,000+ meter mountains in the border region that Nepal and Tibet share, (Kästle 2019, Zuberi et. al. 2020). Years of self-isolation by monarchs throughout the late 1800s and early 20th century have left Nepal as one of the least developed nations in the world. To remedy this, the Nepali government has divided the nation up into five administrative zones to better manage development projects, and these regions are then broken up into zones and districts. The nation’s population is around 30 million. Kathmandu is the capital and also the largest city –by a wide margin– with a population of around 1.4 million. The mountain city of Pokhara is second, and is a popular tourist location for trekkers, although the population is only around 250,000. Nepal is also an incredibly diverse nation. According to information obtained in 1995 by the Demographic and Health Programs survey (an organization funded by USAID): “Nepal is a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual society. The 1991 Census identified 60 caste or ethnic groups and subgroups of population. The percentage breakdown by size of some of these major groups are as follows: Chhetri and Thakuri (18 percent), Brahmins (14 percent), Magar (7 percent), Tharu and Rajbanshi (7 percent), Newar (6 percent), Tamang (6 percent), Kami--a major occupational group that originated in the Hills (5 Ceisler 3 percent), Yadav and Abirs (4 percent), Muslims (4 percent), Rai and Kiranti ( 3 percent), and Gurung (2 percent),” (DHS 1995). There are also 20 different languages used in Nepal, two significant ones of these being Maithili and Bhojpuri, however Nepali is the country’s official language, and is spoken by the majority of the population. Religiously, more than 85% of the Nepali citizenry are Hindu, although there are significant populations of Buddhists and Muslims as well, (DHS 1995). Nepal in the 19th Century Kunda Dixit, the founding editor of Kathmandu’s Nepali times, published a paper in the Duke University Times in 2014 called, “Nepal: Dictated by Geography.” In the paper, he wrote, “Nepal is South Asia’s oldest nation state and was never colonized, but its history has been dictated by its geography. Today, it is the world’s most densely populated mountain nation, its 30 million people sandwiched between China and India,” (Dixit 2013). The country’s first monarch, King Prithvi Narayan Shah founded the House of Gorkha in the late 18th century, and this Shah dynasty ruled until 1850, when the first of a series of bloody coups in Nepal’s history occurred. However, the nation’s position –stuck between two imperial giants– has been a major issue for the Nepalis since the early 1800s. India’s British overseers felt threatened by the Gorkha Monarchy to the north of their South Asian colony, and invaded the small nation in 1814, kickstarting a two year-long war between the Nepalis and the British East India Company. Although Nepal was unable to win the war, they held out valiantly and so impressed the British with their veracity in battle that the British incorporated a regiment of Gorkha soldiers into their military– a tradition that continues to this day. The war ended in 1816 with the Treaty of Sagauli, in which the Gorkha monarchy Ceisler 4 was forced to cede some of the terai lowlands on the border with India, as well as its territorial acquisitions to the west of the Kali river. In 1846 Jang Bahadur, a member of the Rana family, ascended to the position of Prime Minister and became very powerful, reducing the Gorkha monarchs from the Shah family to figureheads. Bahadur actually rose to power after he killed plotters who were working towards his assination and a coup, which is just one instance of many in Nepal’s history of violence being used to gain political power. The Rana’s ruled for more than 100 years while the nation attempted to grow, but policies of isolation stunted major advancements. In that time a number of significant events occurred, such as: ■ The third Tibetan-Nepali war occurred from 1855 to 1856, and started because of a Nepali desire to acquire more territory. However, opposition against the war mounted in Nepal and the fighting became too costly to continue, so the two sides signed the Treaty of Thapathali in 1856. ■ In 1885 a number of Jang Bahadur’s sons were murdered in a military coup d’etats, which resulted in a different branch of the Rana family (led by Jang Bahadur’s nephews) taking power. ■ From 1914-1918 a number of Nepali soldiers joined the ranks of the British Indian army and fought in World War I against the German Empire in German East Africa. ■ In 1923 the British and Nepali governments signed a treaty of friendship that cemented Nepal’s status as an independent nation, and an ally of the British Empire, (Embassy of Nepal 2019). Ceisler 5 ■ Following the lead of the Allied powers, Nepal declared war on Germany in 1939. Once the Japanese invasion of mainland Asia began, Nepal deployed a number of soldiers to the Burmese front. In the wake of Indian independence in 1947, democratic fervor throughout South Asia was at an all time high. However, it took another four years for the Rana dynasty’s opposition to democratic movements, and their brutal methods of suppressing these activists, to catch up to them. The dynasty began to fall in November of 1950 when the then-figurehead-monarch, King Tribhuvan, fled to India with his son Mahendra. Unrest and uprisings sprung up around the nation, and in February of 1951 King Tribhuvan reclaimed his position as the nation’s leader, and instituted an interim government with power being split between the Ranas, and the King’s Nepali Congress Party. It wasn’t until 1959, when King Mahendra was in power, that a new constitution was ratified, yet that was just the beginning of the long process to create the Nepal of today, (Nepal Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2020). The Panchayat System Despite the new constitution, and the new government that had been formed in Nepal in 1959, King Mahendra was dissatisfied. Narayan Khadka wrote for Pacific Affairs at the University of British Columbia in 1986, “This democratic exercise was hardly eighteen months old when, in December 1960, King Mahendra dissolved the Nepali congress government, jailed all the cabinet members and a large number of workers for all parties, and then proceeded to ban political parties altogether,” (Khadka 1986). Narayan Khadka is also the name of a contributor to Ceisler 6 the Kathmandu times, and a current member of Nepali congress, but I can not confirm whether any of these men are the same person. The panchayat system that King Mahendra instituted comes from a form of village rule popular throughout South Asia, and dating back to ancient times. It is an oligarchic form of government that places rule in the hands of a small council of village elders, normally with a chieftain who has the ultimate say. King Mahendra had complete control of the Nepali military and while instituting the panchayat system in villages, he gutted the middle levels of representative democracy in the country and proclaimed the right to guide Nepal in the way he best saw fit. Khadka wrote further: “It was [the panchayat system] simply King Mahendra’s assertiveness in claiming to be the direct and unchallenged leader of the nation which led him to take the decision to dissolve the democratically elected government in December 1960.