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South Asia: Development and Social Change

A New Era of Political Challenges in

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 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.

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Geography

Nepal is a mountainous nation landlocked between 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 . 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 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. is the capital and also the largest city –by a wide margin– with a population of around 1.4 million. The mountain city of 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: 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

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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 and India,” (Dixit 2013). The country’s first monarch,

King Prithvi Narayan founded the House of Gorkha in the late 18th century, and this Shah 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 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 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).

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■ Following the lead of the Allied powers, Nepal declared war on 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 ’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 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. His apprehension was

that the socialist programmes and approaches of the Nepali Congress Party and the

growing popularity of the prime minister, Mr. B.P. , could be detrimental to the

institutional interests of the monarchy,” (Khadka 1986).

This suppression of socialist ideals would come back to bite the monarch’s family later. Despite his suppression of democracy, King Mahendra did make a number of important changes for the

Nepali citizenry in his time. An article published by the New York Times on the instance of his death in 1972 said, “He broke with tradition in marrying only one wife at time and later forbade any man to take more than one wife,” (I truly wish this sentence had ended there), “Unless his wife were childless for 10 years, or cippled insane blind or a leper,” (NYT 1972).

The Nepali monarchy remained in power through King Mahendra’s death, when power was passed to his son, King Birendra.

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The Maoist Uprising

In 1991 King Birendra allowed the first party-based general elections in thirty years after violent clashes at protests caused the deaths of more than 500 pro-democracy demonstrators.

This change made Nepal into a constitutional monarchy. However, the newly elected government fell time and again, as there was no established democratic basis for rule in Nepal, and as the political parties in government were too far apart in their ideals to create progress. In

February of 1996 this came to a head when (who is affectionately called

Prachanda by his followers), the leader of the (Maoists), launched a worker’s insurrection in order to overthrow the failing constitutional monarchy and establish people’s rule throughout the state.

The political face of the Maoists organization, Dr. , stood before the

Prime Minister on February 4, 1996, and read a list of 40 demands under the threat of civil war

(Rai 2016). He gave the Prime Minister a two week window to meet the Maoist’s ultimatum, but the insurrection began before that time had expired. A group of Maoist guerrillas attacked the

Holeri police post on February 13, 1996, and the ten year Nepali Civil War began. Bhattarai stated soon after, “An armed People’s War has been initiated in Nepal from February 13, 1996 under the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) with the proclaimed aim of establishing a New Democratic socio-economic system and state by overthrowing the present socio-economic structure and state. This should be understood under the background that Nepal has slided to the status of the second poorest country in the world in terms of physical and culture developments,” (Rai 2016).

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In 2002, writing for the Institute of Foreign Studies, Islamabad, Fahmida Ashraf wrote that the Maoists had consolidated power in rural areas by burning land ownership records and redistributing agricultural property, a trademark of earlier communist uprisings in China and

Vietnam. By this time, six years into the ten year war, they had already established parallel governments in five of the country’s westerly districts, and reports put the death toll between

2,000 and 4,000. Many global organizations involved themselves by calling for an end to human rights abuses, with Amnesty International publishing a report stating, “We also urge the leadership of the CPN (Maoist) to put an end to abuses and issue strict orders to its cadres not to attack civilians, take hostages, kill or torture prisoners or recruity children into their ranks,”

(Ashraf 2002).

One of the most visible human rights abuses and tragedies of the Maoist uprising was the

2001 palace massacre. The official report of the massacre states that Crown Prince Shah

Dipendra shot down his father, King Birendra, as well as the Queen and seven others, before shooting himself. Reports differ as to whether he was drunk on the evening of the massacre, or not. There was also speculation that his cousin, Prince Paras, had committed the murders, as

Paras escaped unscathed and later left Nepal to enjoy a lavish existence in Singapore. Nine members of the royal family were killed on the night of the massacre. Due to rules regarding the line of succession, Crown Prince Dipendra Shah became King after his father died, although due to his wounds he was in a coma for his entire three day rule. He succumbed to this injury at that point, which allowed King Birendra’s brother, Gyanendra Shah, to ascend to the throne.

The New York Times wrote, “The palace massacre seems likely to become Nepal's

Kennedy assassination, with people forever diagramming the scene on pieces of paper, graphing the trajectory of bullets, speculating about other gunmen,” (Bearak 2001). The Times also noted:

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“Other matters will be of greater concern to conspiracy theorists, which at present,

include most of this Himalayan country's 23 million people. Where were the palace

guards and aides? How did the right-handed Dipendra manage to shoot himself in the left

temple? Why was Prince Gyanendra, now king, absent from the dinner? And how did his

son Paras also escape? In what way does India, regional bogeyman, figure into this

treachery?” (Bearak 2001).

Regardless of who planned the palace uprising, an unintended consequence was the intensification of the Nepali civil war.

The Maoists placed blame for the massacre on governmental factions, and Prime Minister

Koirala. Chairman of the Maoist forces Pushpa Kamal Dahal (Prachandra) stated, “To think that

King Birendra’s patriotic stand and liberal political ideology were not the reasons for the royal deaths would be very misleading politics. The late King was not in favour of PM Koirala’s plan to mobilise the army against the people’s war,” (Ashraf 2002). In July of 2001 the Maoists and the government were able to reach a cease-fire and begin peace talks, but the three rounds of discussions were unsuccessful. On November 21 of that year, Chairman Prachandra pulled out of the talks, and on November 24 the war was reignited when the Maoists attacked a large group of policemen and soldiers.

The war continued throughout the early and middle 2000s. A 2008 Al Jazeera article summed up a number of the major events: “...

■ Feb 2005– King Gyanendra takes absolute power vowing to crush the Maoists.

■ Sept 2005– Maoist rebels announce a unilateral ceasefire but the royalist

government rejects it.

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■ Nov 2005– Maoists join a loose alliance with the seven main political parties to

end royal rule.

■ Jan 2006– Rebels end the ceasefire.

■ Apr 2006– King Gyanendra gives us absolute power after widespread protests.

Veteran politician is sworn in as prime minister and invited

rebels for talks.

■ Jun 2006– The new government agrees with Maoists to dissolve parliament and

form an interim administration that includes rebels.

■ Nov 2006– Prime Minister Koirala and rebel chief Prachanda sign a peace deal,

ending a civil war which killed more than 13,000 people.

■ Jan 2007– Parliament scraps old constitution and adopts a new interim

constitution. Maoists control 84 seats in the 329– member interim legislature.

■ Dec 2007– The ruling alliance and the Maoists agree to abolish the monarchy

after the elections. (Al Jazeera 2008).

Nepal Today

Unfortunately, the end of the war and the removal of the Nepali monarchy have still not been enough to bring about long standing stability. Scholar Pramod Jaiswal wrote a 2015 report for the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies which begins, “Since the end of the decade-long

Maoist insurgency in 2006, Nepal has struggled with the difficult transition from war to peace,

Ceisler 11 from autocracy to democracy, and from centralised state to a more inclusive and federal one. The newly-formed federal, democratic republic has also been struggling for a constitution since then,” (Jaiswal 2015). Thankfully, in late 2015 a constitution was agreed upon and ratified, and the Constituent Assembly was decided upon. After the 2017 elections, a coalition of different communist parties held the majority of the 59 seats in the upper house of parliament, represented most strongly by the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist), with 27 seats

(Penying 2018).

As mentioned in the introduction of this piece, a crisis was averted earlier this year when a settlement was reached regarding disagreements between leading members of the Nepali government. Former rebel commander Prachanda is still heavily involved in the country’s politics and serves as Chairman for the ruling political party: the .

Prachanda and a number of his supporters, chiefly party vice-chair Bamdev Gautam, had called for current Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli to resign. This was largely due to Gautam’s desires to become Prime Minister, and Prachanda’s desires for more control over party affairs. However, this was thankfully resolved when it was announced that Gautam would become a member of the

House of Representatives, and as the Kathmandu Post reported, “Oli and Dahal [Prachanda] agreed to share the order of precedence, with Oli to focus on the government and Dahal on party affairs with executive authority.” The article in the Kathmandu Post also stated, “Analysts say since infighting in the ruling party was largely over power-sharing rather than governance issues, when everyone’s interests were served, the crisis came to its logical end,” (Pradhan 2020).

An issue of equal importance for the current is their standing with neighbors China and India. In Pramod Jaiswal’s work for the Institute of Peace and Conflict

Studies he also wrote another report, called “Caught in The India-China Rivalry– Policy Options

Ceisler 12 for Nepal.” The piece explores some of the historic relations between the three nations, including an interesting discussion of the former Chinese support of Nepal’s monarchy, because this had given China a military ally on the southern border of the semi-autonomous Tibet region.

Although there was an ideological alignment between the Chinese Communist Party and

Communist Party of Nepal (Maoists) throughout the Nepali civil war, Jaiswal writes,

“Interestingly, China supported the Maoist party only after they emerged as the single largest party in the Constituent Assembly election of April 2008. In fact, China was the only country to supply arms to King Gyanendra to quell the Maoist insurgents when India, the US and the UK had refused to provide help of that nature,” (Jaiswal 2014). The Chinese have also invested in a number of major infrastructure projects in Nepal, such as the Birendra International Convention

Centre in Kathmandu, and the Chinese government has undertaken projects to extend highways and railways across the Tibet region to the Nepal border. India has attempted to match this influence, with less success, but has also undertaken similar railway building projects. Jaiswal concludes, “For stability, economics should over ride the politics in Nepal and both India and

China should come forward for economic development of Nepal by investing in hydro-electricity and tourism. Probably, trilateral cooperation between India, China, and Nepal can be in the interest of the region,” (Jaiswal 2014).

However, there is still much work that Nepal must do for itself. The Nepali adult population remains one of the world’s most undereducated and illiterate (UNESCO 2017). Over the past thirty years a drastic amount of work has been done to promote education, and things have only gotten better since the end of the civil war, but there is still a gap between Nepal and its neighbors. Economic issues such as constant worker’s strikes, called bandhs, hurt the tourism industry and cause lines at fuel stations to stretch for miles, which also promotes the stockpiling

Ceisler 13 of goods in major cities (if a family has enough money to do so). Of the 30 million people comprising the Nepali population, around 8.1 million still live in poverty (Oxfam 2019). As with other nations in South Asia, gender inequality is another major issue in Nepal, who only outlawed the outdated practice of chaupaudi (the isolation of women in menstruation) in the past few years. The COVID-19 crisis has also drastically affected the economy of this small nation where so many workers rely on foreign tourism to make a living. As the world recovers from this pandemic and enters a new decade, the Nepali government must ensure a continuation of peaceful democratic processes to avoid a return to the warlike conditions of the late-90s and early-2000s, it would benefit them to remain close to their British, Indian, and Chinese allies, and it will absolutely benefit the greater Nepali population if their economy can be injected with newfound life and stability. That may take the form of hydro-electric power, or something else entirely, but from here in Eugene, Oregon, I only hope I can go visit this interesting country one day and see those results for myself.

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