Long View of Political History of Nepal

I remember reading with some surprise and deepening respect Nepal’s eminent political analyst and committed liberal democrat Professor Lok Raj Baral’s audacious pragmatism in defending violence as necessary to disrupt the then Hindu kingdom, entrenched status quo politics of hill khas Nepali upper caste domination and exclusion in a polity comprising multiple marginalized minorities. It was in an Op Edit piece in The Kathmandu Post when the Maoist-led Peoples War (1996-2006) was at its peak. But that promise of revolutionary disruption—of federal de-centring of the control of Kathmandu elites, and the vision of representative inclusion of the marginalized majority—did not outlast the subsequent Peace Agreement, the collapse of Monarchy and the Republic’s dream Constituent Assembly (2008-2012).