Nepal has been often presented as a single vision; one of idyllic villages, with mountains for those who dare climb them. Those who pay particular attention to the news may have had this singular vision disrupted in 2001, when the Himalayan kingdom’s King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah was killed in a massacre at the Narayanhiti palace. Following his death, the country plunged into chaos, and thousands of lives were lost to a violent Maoist insurgency. Manjushree Thapa explains in the novel Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy (2005),
In this period it wasn’t easy for Nepalis to trace what was going wrong, because so much was…Yet if we in Nepal were unable to understand our present, so too was the rest of the world—or those segments of the rest of the world that were paying us any attention. The last anyone knew, this was a pre-political idyll, a Himalayan Shangri-La good for trekking and mountaineering and budget mysticism. Suddenly, the news out of here jarred: Maoists? In this day and age? In a Hindu Kingdom full of simple hill folk? (Thapa 2005, 1–2)
Despite Nepal’s geographically significant position between the two Asian giants of China and India, it remains largely outside of mainstream media. However, it recently again received international attention for a freak blizzard that hit the Thorong La pass on the popular Annapurna Circuit trekking route, killing forty people by burying them under at least thirty-five feet of snow (Barry and Bhandari 2014).[1] The economic politics of tourism in a developing country, where trekking agents work for roughly ten dollars a day and are ill-prepared to meet developed nations’ expectations of safety, remained in the media for a few days, with little being discussed on Nepal’s political history.
Nepal, as a state, has only existed in its current geographic form since the Gorkha Kingdom, based eighty miles west of the Kathmandu Valley, took control of the Himalayan foothills and a strip of North Indian plain in the eighteenth century. From 1846 to 1951, the Shah dynasty remained on the throne, with effective political power in the hands of the Rana Family. In the 1950s, the Hindu Kingdom removed its policy of seclusion and, with the backing of the monarchy and newly independent India, experiments with parliamentary democracy continued through the decade (Whelpton 2005, 2). In 1960, the royal palace banned party politics, centralising power once again until the mass protests of 1990. In 1980, student protests forced the King to hold a referendum where the panchayat system (partyless framework) won over a multiparty system amid suspicions of electoral rigging. In 1991, elections were held and the National Congress party won. In 1994, internal strife within the party led to mid-term polls, and the Communist Party of Nepal emerged as the single largest party. In 1995, National Congress leader Sher Bahadur Deuba became prime minister with the support of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (a pro-monarchy outfit). In 1996, the Communist Party of Nepal launched a ‘People’s War’ (Jha 2014). The instability continued, with Nepal unable to see a Prime Minister last a year. Journalist Thomas Laird described the atmosphere in 2001 when Crown Prince Dipendra massacred King Birendra and his immediate family as follows:
After ten governments in ten years, the corruption of the elected politicians surpassed anything of the past, at least in the minds of the people. With few reliable internal news sources and no investigative journalism, suspected corruption—like the back-room deal that led to elections in 1991—remains the subject of shadowy rumors. Ghosts guiding reality. By 2001 the corruption and blatant inefficiency had so tarnished democracy that the king and queen had never been so popular.
King Birendra was shot at a moment when Nepal teetered between left and right. As a Maoist revolt seized more than 20 percent of the countryside, people in Kathmandu wondered aloud if the army, kept in the barracks by squabbling political factions, was conspiring with the palace for the return of absolute monarchy. In the months before the massacre two questions hovered in the air. Who controls the army? Why hasn’t it been deployed against the Maoists? (Laird 2001)
The Maoists’ People’s War would rage on for another five years, ending on 21 November 2006 when a peace pact was struck between warring forces. As one source notes:
The promise of a new Nepal has collided with the entrenched power structures and the decadent political cultural of old Nepal. Instability has remained the norm, with a government changing every nine months. A multi-class, multiparty alliance enabled Nepal to defeat the monarchy and restore democracy. (Jha 2014)
The insurgency left 16,000 dead; today, the Maoists face the political battle to remain relevant to those who feel they have not lived up to their revolutionary politics (Pattisson 2013).
These revolutionary politics, which sought to demolish the feudal system, continue to play out as the high-caste Hindu Brahmans and Chetris of Indian descent (Aryans) continue to control the government, economy, and own much of the best farmland, while lower-caste Hindus are marginalised. The mountaineers and hill tribes of Tibeto-Burmese descent (including Sherpas), who have animist or Buddhist beliefs, still resent the arrival of the Hindus centuries ago for imposing their culture and religion upon them (Symmes 2001). Meanwhile, tensions over overpopulation, deforestation and corruption have left many economically and socially displaced.
The decade-long civil war persuaded many skilled and un-skilled labourers to seek work in the Gulf states, India, Malaysia, etc. Nepali men have long chosen to work overseas, including the infamous Gurkha warriors who fought in the British Army during the Anglo-Nepalese War in 1816, through both world wars to today. Remittances now make up 28.8% of Nepal’s gross domestic product, according to the World Bank (Balch 2014). This conscription and migration has led to large recruitments of child labourers, with factory owners taking advantage of parents sending their children into the urban areas so not to be conscripted by the Maoists (Balch 2014). The tourism sector, in contrast, only comprises 3% of gross domestic product, with 600,000 foreigners visiting in 2012. However, the rapidly expanding volunteering or ‘voluntourism’ industry has seen the creation of dozens of agencies, with over 80% of the country’s orphanages placed in tourist hotspots. An investigation by UNICEF found that 85% of children in the orphanages they visited had at least one living parent. Many of the children had been trafficked from impoverished villages under the false pretence that the children would receive an education (Pattisson 2014).
Nepal lives in the shadow of regional superpower India and therefore relies on China to balance its economic dependen. So long as Kathmandu continues to stay silent on the struggles of the tens of thousands of Tibetan refugees living within its borders, Beijing will continue to support Kathmandu.
[1] Please note, this exegesis was written before the devastating earthquake that killed over 8,000 people and destroyed over 500,000 homes on 25 April 2015. While not covered in this research, I returned to Nepal in June 2015 to document how the devastating effects of the earthquake would affect Nepali women and their ability to seek care during pregnancy and childbirth (“Death Toll from Second Nepal Quake Rises as Relief Efforts Spread Thin” 2015).