Nepalese Monarchy

Nepalese Monarchy

The Kingdom of Nepal (Nepali: नेपाल अधिराज्य) was formed in 1768 by the unification of Nepal. Founded by King Prithvi Narayan Shah, a Gorkhali monarch, it existed for 240 years until the abolition of the Nepalese monarchy in 2008. During this period, Nepal was formally under the rule of the Shah dynasty, which exercised varying degrees of power during the kingdom's existence.

After a successful consolidation of its territory, despite a humiliating defeat to China after a failed invasion of Tibet in the 1790s, Nepal became threatened in the early-nineteenth century by British imperialism and the East India Company. Following the Gurkha War (1814–1816), the kingdom retained its independence in the Sugauli Treaty in exchange for territorial concessions equating to a third of the territory then under Nepalese rule, sometimes known as "Greater Nepal". Political instability following the war resulted in the political ascendancy of the Rana dynasty, who beginning with Jang Bahadur became the hereditary Prime Ministers of Nepal from 1843 to 1951, reducing the role of the Shah monarch to that of a figurehead.

The mid-twentieth century began an era of moves towards the democratisation of Nepal. The newly-independent India would play an important role in supporting King Tribhuhvan, whom the Rana leader Mohan Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana in 1950 had attempted to depose and replace with his infant grandson King Gyanendra, and in supporting a new government consisting largely of the Nepali Congress, effectively ending the rule of the Rana dynasty.

The 1990s saw the beginning of the Nepalese Civil War (1996–2006), a conflict fought between government forces and the insurgent forces of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). The situation for the Nepalese monarchy was further destabilised by the 2001 Nepalese royal massacre, in which Crown Prince Dipendra reportedly shot and killed ten people, including his father King Birendra, and was himself mortally wounded by what was allegedly a self-inflicted gunshot.

As a result of the massacre, King Gyanendra returned to the throne. His imposition of direct rule in 2005 provoked a protest movement unifying the Maoist insurgency and pro-democracy activists. He was eventually forced to restore Nepal's House of Representatives, which in 2007 adopted an interim constitution greatly restricting the powers of the Nepalese monarchy. Following an election held the next year, the Nepalese Constituent Assembly formally abolished the kingdom in its first session on 28 May 2008, declaring in its place the establishment of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal.

Until the abolition of the monarchy, Nepal was the world's only country to have Hinduism as its state religion; the country is now formally a secular state.