From Maoist insurgency to modern unrest, Nepal's enduring struggle for stability

The republican democracy that emerged in Nepal after a decade-long Maoist insurgency now hovers on the brink of anarchy. Following two days of mob rule and mass destruction, former chief justice Sushila Karki has become the 15th prime minister in just 19 years. Major administrative centres across the country were set ablaze, and prominent leaders and their families—including five-time prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba—were assaulted by mobs. More than 50 people were killed, hundreds injured, and thousands of convicts escaped from jails.

Though it seemed sudden, these events of disorder and political instability are not new to Nepalese history. Political upheavals and destruction have repeatedly gripped the country—the insurgency from 1996 to 2006, the royal palace massacre of 2001, King Gyanendra’s coup in 2005, and the wave of regional and identity-based movements that followed the first Madhesh uprising in 2008. Dissolution of parliament, border blockade, party splits and mergers, and revisionist protests demanding a Hindu state and restoration of monarchy have kept Nepal’s democracy in a constant state of flux.

This seemingly persistent instability is rooted in a deeper, unresolved structural paradox—a flawed democratisation process, and a distorted liberalisation model that failed to dismantle centuries of inequity.

Usually, the smaller the polity, the more equitable its relations with its stakeholders. But the modern Nepali state, forged in 1768 through a project of territorial expansion, had the princely state run by the Shah-Rana coalition as its foundation. It was essentially a family enterprise to meet the material and mercantile interests of the ruling class. The state heavily extracted economic resources, concentrating major civil and military positions within a handful of Rana and Shah families, feudal lords and village chieftains.

Newly occupied land was used as a means of extending administrative control. Jagir and Birta land grants to state employees, nobilities and influential families helped consolidate this control.

The concentration of state positions within the Shah and Rana families, and the distribution of such positions were guided by the Hindu caste hierarchy and proximity to the palace. By the 1950s, Rana prime ministers were appropriating 25-30 per cent of government revenue, with mandatory gifts and treasury allowances enriching them further.

The wealth of the ruling class was built at the expense of peasants. They were denied even minimal tenancy rights, access to education, or opportunities for social mobility. Peasants used to bear the expenses of all palace functions, ceremonies and even military invasions. Two centuries of such extractive governance created grave inequalities, leaving the king’s subjects with a sense of deprivation.

In the 1950s, Nepal’s first democratising project required bold redistributive programmes to compensate for the Rana dynasty’s misrule. But the failure to launch such programmes kept alive the structure of inequality, limiting the new liberal state into laissez-faire capitalism with partial political rights.

The reforms of the 1950s and the 1960s abolished different forms of land grants, monetary privileges and the Rana entitlement to state positions. But they could not deconstruct unjust and exploitative agrarian relations, which in the long run resulted in unjust and deformed socioeconomic relations. The land reform implemented in 1964 was rather deceptive, allowing landed elites enough time to transfer entitlements. It only reduced the intensity of questions regarding the agrarian structure. Even though land reform has remained a key topic of protest movements since then, it has never been sufficiently addressed.

Although access to education and state positions were open for all, resource constraints faced by peasants and artisans severely restricted their ability educate their children and make them eligible for government jobs. Besides, during the 30-year panchayat regime that began in the 1960s, the top civil-military positions were filled by the king himself.

The state’s utter neglect of the principle of fairness and equality of opportunity, the abuse of national treasury to manipulate support base, and deceptive distributive programmes resulted in the uneven development of regions, ethnicities, economic classes and genders.

The inheritance of the same state administration after the reestablishment of multiparty democracy in 1990s contributed to erosion of ethical mores of public life. Instead of demarcating dividing lines between them, the three stakeholders of the new liberal regime—state, market and civil society—appeared to build an alliance for extracting state resources. As hopes of development and emergence of an egalitarian society could not be realised even after the peaceful settlement of the Maoist insurgency, public grievances continued to swell.

The misgovernance and apparent seizure of state institutions, politicisation of bureaucracy and academic institutions, mounting cases of corruption at all levels, and continued collusion of business, political and administrative elites in economic rent-seeking further intensified public grievances.

The result of all this—Nepal’s recurring pattern of protests, revolutions, regime changes and political instability.

The author is visiting faculty at the department of public policy and public management, Kathmandu University.