Nepal: Between Dictatorship and Anarchy

Abstract

By any measure, Nepal's experience with democratization has been a tragic failure. Despite a 1990 popular revolution and the king's subse- quent embrace of what looked like a serious attempt to introduce multiparty competition to the world's only officially Hindu divine- right monarchy, recent Nepalese history has been fraught with instability and strife. A decade-old Maoist insurgency has left more than 11,000 people dead and effectively denied the government's writ across huge swaths of the kingdom's 140,000 square kilometers. Throughout the 1990s, one frail government after another fumbled while the country's economic and political problems grew worse. The royal household suf- fered a tragic blow in 2001 when the crown prince gunned down ten relatives including the king before killing himself. Then in February 2005 the current holder of the throne, Gyanendra, carried out a self- coup. His dismissal of the legislature and seizure of power mean that Nepal now finds itself, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, mired that much more deeply in a strange and bloody battle between the op- posed and yet similarly antidemocratic ideologies of communism and royal absolutism. While Nepal has long been among the world's poorest nations, is home to an array of distinct ethnolinguistic and religious groups, and is wracked by a violent insurgency, neither the country's poverty nor its diversity nor the armed Maoist campaign suffices to explain Nepal's failure to make serious progress toward liberal democracy. Neighboring India is a variegated society where widespread want has long been a Sumit Ganguly is director of the India Studies Program and Rabindranath Tagore Professor of Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University. He is the author of Fearful Symmetry: India and Pakistan in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons (with Devin Hagerty, 2005). Brian Shoup is a doctoral candidate in political science at Indiana University.