In the present times, states find it exceedingly hard to resist such claims, which
now find support in both moral and legal theories, on the bases of justice and self-
determination. The international community urges political leaders to agree on
measures of self-government or power sharing, putting both the government and
the insurgents under considerable pressure, as a way to resolve internal conflicts.
Internal conflicts are fuelled by a deep sense of grievance and sustained by easy
access to a supply of arms in international and regional markets. It is difficult
today to suppress ethnic sentiments, demands and organisations – paradoxically,
the more one attempts to suppress them, the stronger they become, with increas-
ing capacity for disruption. In this context Nepal embarked on the making of a
new constitution in 2006 , with reconciliation among the warring political groups,
on the one side Maoists and on the other ‘democratic’ parties committed to a
parliamentary system of government, and the repeal of the 1990 constitution, then
in force.
Nepal has changed much politically from the time the 1990 constitution was
negotiated. At that time, the principal preoccupation of political parties was the
enactment of a ‘multiparty’ parliamentary democracy and constitutional mon-
archy. Democracy was based on universal franchise, even though there were
differences on the question who were entitled to be treated as citizens.
There was broad agreement on the restrictions on the power of the king, on the
inclusion of a bill of rights and directive principles to guide state policy, on
the establishment of an independent judiciary with the power to enforce the
Constitution as the supreme law of the country, and on independent institutions
to discharge politically sensitive functions like elections and the audit of state
accounts.
The Constitution was also preoccupied with maintaining the traditional social
character of Nepal, as a Hindu state (Article 1 ). It stipulated that the king must be
an ‘adherent of Aryan Culture and Hindu Religion’ – at the same time the king
was the ‘symbol of the Nepalese nation and the unity of the Nepalese people’
(Article 27 ). The cow, sacred to Hindus, was declared the national animal and
only Nepali in the Devanagari script was recognised as the official language.
Proposals that Nepal should be declared a secular state, in which the state and
religion are separate, and all religions are treated equally, were rejected. Even the
freedom of religion was restricted in order to preserve the dominance of
Hinduism and traditional practices (such as untouchability): what is guaranteed
to a person is belief or practice as ‘coming down to him hereditarily having regard
to traditional practices’ (which seems both to deter conversion as well as to
safeguard practices which may be offensive to many, adherents and non-adherents
alike). Proposals for minority rights, particularly related to their social advance-
ment, were also rejected, because the commission that drafted the Constitution
feared that their inclusion would promote ill feelings between different commu-
nities, threatening national unity. Instead the constitution enjoined the