Girija Prasad Koirala
Girija Prasad Koirala was prime minister of Nepal four times, in 1991-94, 1998-99, 2000-01 and 2006-08, the youngest of the three Koirala brothers who led the Nepali Congress for sixty years, the trade unionist who organised the jute-mill strike at Biratnagar in 1947 that began the party's history. He spent seven years in the king's prisons after the royal coup of 1960 and eight in exile in India. He led the first elected government after the people's movement of 1990 restored parliament. In his last government, at eighty-one, he led the second people's movement of April 2006 that took King Gyanendra's powers from him in nineteen days of strikes. He signed the comprehensive peace accord with the Maoists in November 2006 that ended a ten-year war of seventeen thousand dead. He presided over the constituent assembly's vote of 28 May 2008 that abolished the two-hundred-and-forty-year monarchy and made Nepal a republic. After that he was the head of state for two months until a president was elected. He was born in 1924 in Bihar, where his father was in exile from the Ranas, and the family's politics were the country's. His brother B. P. Koirala was the first elected prime minister in 1959 and the one the king jailed, his brother Matrika the first Congress prime minister in 1951, and his daughter Sujata his foreign minister. The first government, of 1991-94, made the market economy and the liberalised press and fell to a split in his own party. The governments of 1998-2001 were the Maoist insurgency's growth and the Lauda Air aircraft-lease scandal. There was the palace massacre of June 2001 in which Crown Prince Dipendra shot the king, the queen and seven others, after which Gyanendra took the throne and, in 2005, the government, which made Koirala and the Maoists allies. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008 for the accord and did not get it. He was the party's president until he died, in Kathmandu in March 2010 at eighty-five, of a lung disease he had had for years, before the constitution he had promised was written; it took another five years.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 2010 CE
- Nationality: Nepali
- Roles: prime minister, politician
