ABSTRACT
King Birendra’s partial surrender on 8 April was not a great victory for Nepal’s Jana Andolan and the ecstatic celebrations on the streets of the capital on 9 April were premature. Birendra had promised to lift the ban on political parties but the basic structures of the Panchayat System remained intact. Sections of the Jana Andolan viewed this compromise with the palace as a sell-out. As far as radical political activists were concerned, the Movement had been betrayed. Their bitterness, and the demands of disenchanted urban youth and a frustrated, economically chastened population, therefore continued to feed a spiralling radicalism. It was pressure from these sections of society which forced the king to make further concessions in the subsequent weeks (M.Bhandari, interview). He did so, however, very reluctantly and the months between the apparent triumph of democracy and the promulgation of a democratic constitution in November 1990 were marked by a constant jockeying for power, not only between the palace and the Jana Andolan, but also between the conservative and radical wings of the Movement.
