Democracy in Nepal:

 four models DAVID N. GELLNER NOT only does everyone in Nepal today believe in democracy, all politicians too claim to stand for democracy, just as they claim to be building the nation and seeking ‘all-round development’. Even King Gyanendra, when attempting to rule without political parties in order to turn the clock back to the Panchayat days of his father King Mahendra, claimed to be doing so in order to establish democracy on firmer foundations. He pointedly claimed inspiration from his grandfather, King Tribhuvan, ‘the architect of democracy’ while actually following the model of his father. There are and have been competing and radically incommensurable ideals of democracy in Nepal, a clash of visions that led to many deaths and great turmoil in the civil war that wracked the country between 1996 and 2007. Speaking broadly, four main ideologies can be identified, with four different understandings and claims about the implications of democracy: king-led, liberal, leftist, and multicultural. Of these, the first is now moribund, but was for many years powerful and convincing to many. The last is the most recent, but promises to play a large part in the Constituent Assembly that is to be elected on 22 November 2007 – provided all procedures are put in place and some degree of security can be assured. In political and social terms Nepal has travelled a very long way in the last sixty years. In 1947, when India and Pakistan became independent, Nepal was ruled by the centuryold hereditary and autocratic Rana aristocracy. The Hindu caste hierarchy still had the backing of law and the state’s repressive machinery.1 Hinduism of a traditional sort (not the denatured, Muslim-bashing and modernizing ideology of Hindutva) was still the state religion. This meant that, while the other pro-democracy conspirators could be tortured and hung in 1941, the Brahman member of the Praja Parishad, Tanka Prasad Acharya, though expelled from his caste and his property confiscated, could not be killed.