ABSTRACT
It looks like the onset of Maoist insurgency has finally brought the political parties, civil society, ethnic minorities and the people together for the establishment of a democratic Nepal – a political mission that has been interrupted quite often. Over the last 50 years, Nepal has had two brief periods of parliamentary democracy, both of which ended with royal interventions. The first democratic government formed by the Nepali Congress party with a two-thirds majority in the parliament in 1959 was dismissed by the king in 1960. A popular uprising in 1990 compelled the king to allow a multiparty system to replace the no-party Panchayat system imposed in 1962 (Khadka 1993). The most puzzling aspect about the multiparty democracy introduced in the 1990s was that the democratic government failed to address the grievances of Nepal’s rural/village population. In time, it was this population that came to provide the secure support bases necessary for revolutionary insurgency. If, as Goodwin and Skocpol (1989: 495) have argued, “the ballot box . . . has proven to be the coffin of revolutionary movements,” then Nepal’s transition to democracy in 1990 should have inoculated that nation against the outbreak of revolutionary insurgency. People were optimistic that the democratic change would give them a central role in the political process by bringing them economic opportunities and a social justice. Even after its transition to democracy, the Nepali state remained an extractive patrimonial state that institutionally neglected people living in rural Nepal. The Maoist insurgency challenged the status quo and rendered the Kathmandu-centric government machinery dysfunctional. King Gyanendra seized this opportunity to dismiss the democratic government in October 2002 and to eventually assume executive power himself in February 2005.
