ABSTRACT
In 1990 Nepal’s Jana Andolan celebrated the humbling of an absolute monarch and the legalisation of multi-party democracy. But although the Jana Andolan has repeatedly been portrayed as a glorious revolution which gave birth to a ‘people-oriented’ democratic era, the new political system has failed to alter the lives of ordinary people. In the mid-1990s Nepal practises the formalities of representative parliamentary democracy, but the rights and freedoms which the political parties won after decades of struggle have yet to make Nepalis citizens in a democratised society.
