suffered various forms of discrimination and disadvantage. Brahmins dominated
society, and by that token the state. Individuals and communities were defined by
prescribed status and roles, not rights.
The start of the first decade of the twenty-first century posed the greatest threat to
the monarchical and Brahmanic hegemony, which had by then shaped Nepal, to
some extent, as a modern state. One could say with some plausibility that that process
(with intimations of constitutionalism) began with Nepal’s first written constitution
in 1948 – a development influenced by the independence of India. That constitution
was followed by four others ( 1951 , 1959 , 1962 and 1990 ) and an interim constitution in
- The conflict that led to these constitutions did not threaten the fundamentals
of the state; in a sense they were a sort of Nepal Magna Carta, redefining the
relationship between the king and the dominant castes – Brahmins, Chhetris and
Newars – the beginnings of bourgeois democracy. The decade saw the first real
challenge to the incipient and uncertain bourgeois democracy. It started with a
civil war, the ostensible cause of which was the 1990 constitution and its rejection
by the Maoists. By the end of the decade, the 1990 constitution had been buried,
social conflict had become complex, society was disoriented and further fragmented,
and the search for a new constitution and political order had failed.
Issues facing Nepal in the first decade of the twenty-first century include ten
years of conflict in which about 17 , 800 people died and others had disappeared or
were raped, dispossessed, displaced, bereaved or traumatised.
1
Nothing that under-
lay that conflict has been resolved, nor have most of the results of the conflict been
addressed. Poverty; discrimination on the basis of caste and ethnicity, among other
factors; marginalisation by reason of remoteness as well as by the multiple bases of
discrimination; lack of acknowledgment of identity; and humiliation are among
the factors that led some to embrace conflict. Ineffective government, internally
displaced persons, frustrated ex-combatants, and a population suspended between
cynicism and hope were among the consequences. And the period since the end of
the conflict, and the signing of various accords, have done little to enhance faith in
national institutions, or in leaders of any stripe, or a sense of national identity, while
some low-level conflict continues.
Nepal is faced simultaneously with problems of nation building and of state
building. For example, it is undergoing a transition from a hierarchical society,
one in which one’s place in society was dictated by gender, caste and ethnicity, to
one in which human dignity and equality are the underlying principles. Most of
these transitions implicate the ‘national question’ or the place of ethnic communities
in the nation and state. Nepal is also undergoing transitions involving state building:
(a) from monarchy to republic,
(b) from authoritarianism to democracy and human rights,(^1) See nepalnews.com, 18 June 2012 , for the exact number of casualties.