Blighted Hopes of Inclusion: Nepal’s Promising Restructuring Betrayed

Professor Lok Raj Baral, one of Nepal’s most respected liberal public intellectuals, in an op-ed article in The Kathmandu Post wrote of violence as necessary to shake up the Himalayan kingdom’s entrenched structure of domination by hill upper castes, the Bahun-Chettris, so as to bring in institutionally excluded social groups such as the Janajatis, Dalits and Madheshis.
It was a time when Nepal was convulsed by a decade of the Maoists’ Peoples War from 1996-2006. The countrywide revolutionary armed struggle shook the old monarchical order and fired people’s imagination about the possibility of an inclusive and equal Naya Nepal.