Nepal’s Mini Revolution

‘Nepal is an area on the political evolu­tion of which not enough is known as yet,’ says the author; and to meet this gaping need he sets out to make his own contribution. What sort of treatment he renders to the subject is indicated in the title itself —Nepal: Year of Decision. It is the ‘contemporary upsurge’ in Nepal, unleashed by the student move­ment of April-May 1979 which is the prime focus of the book, and provides the .hook on which the 200 odd pages volume hangs. The events in Nepal which began with a student demonstration in the capital, Kathmandu, on April 6—‘the date is important because it will always afterwards be regarded as marking the turning point in the history of Nepal’, says the author—have been pieced to­gether, meticulously, in a manner which keeps alive the spirit of the April 1979 days in Nepal. The vivid unfolding of the happenings in Kathmandu—in the streets, in the corridors of power in the Palace, and in the politicians’ ante-rooms—in the period April 6 to May 24,