Nepal Abolishes the Monarchy
Nepal's constituent assembly abolished a monarchy of 240 years by a vote of 560 to 4 on 28 May 2008. The Shah dynasty had unified the country in 1768 and ruled, with a century-long interruption in which the Rana family held hereditary prime ministership and kept the kings as figureheads, until the end. Two things destroyed it. The first was the Maoist insurgency that began in 1996 in the western hills, which drew on genuine grievances — caste discrimination, landlessness, the near-total absence of the state outside Kathmandu — and killed some 17,000 people over ten years. The second was the palace massacre of 1 June 2001, in which Crown Prince Dipendra shot dead his father King Birendra, his mother, his brother, his sister and five other relatives at a family dinner before shooting himself, reportedly over a marriage his mother had refused to approve. Dipendra was technically king for three days while in a coma. His uncle Gyanendra succeeded, and much of the country never accepted the official account. Gyanendra dismissed the government and assumed direct rule in 2005, which drove the parliamentary parties into an alliance with the Maoists. Nineteen days of mass protest in April 2006 forced him to restore parliament, which immediately stripped the crown of its powers. The assembly elected in 2008 declared a federal democratic republic at its first sitting, and Gyanendra left the palace, which became a museum. A constitution followed in 2015 after long deadlock over federal boundaries. Gyanendra still lives in Kathmandu as a private citizen, and a monarchist movement drew large crowds in 2025 out of frustration with the republic's instability. Nepal has had more than a dozen governments since the abolition.
- Year: 2008 CE
- Category: Political
