Mahendra of Nepal
Mahendra was king of Nepal from 1955 to 1972, the son of the king who had brought the Ranas down. He was the king who took the government his father had given the parties and kept it for the crown, by the coup of December 1960. He then built the partyless panchayat state that lasted thirty years. The first five years were the ones in which the promise of 1951 was kept, slowly. There was the constitution of 1959, drafted by a British constitutional lawyer at his invitation, which made the king the source of the constitution rather than the people. There was the election of February 1959, the first the country had held, which the elder Koirala's Nepali Congress won with two thirds of the seats. For eighteen months the country had an elected prime minister who wanted land reform, taxes on the Ranas' estates, and a foreign policy of his own. On 15 December 1960 the king had Koirala and his cabinet arrested at a youth rally. He dissolved the parliament, banned the parties, and announced that parliamentary democracy had failed the country. The constitution of 1962 gave it the panchayat instead, councils from the village up to a national assembly, all partyless, all under the palace. There were the king's own men in the ministries, the Back to the Village campaign, and the Nepali language and the Hindu monarchy as the state's identity. There was the land reform of 1964 that the Congress had planned and the palace carried out more gently. There were the political prisoners held for eight years, Koirala among them, who was released in 1968 and went to India. The foreign policy was the balance between the two neighbours that the country has kept since. There were the Chinese boundary treaty of 1961 and the road from Kathmandu to Tibet the Chinese built, which Delhi minded, and the Indian aid taken anyway. There were the membership of the non-aligned movement, and the diplomatic relations opened with everyone. He was born in Kathmandu. He was a poet under a pen name whose verses the radio played, and a hunter. He died of a heart attack at the Diyalo Bungalow in Chitwan in January 1972 on a tiger hunt, at fifty-one. His son Birendra took the panchayat state he had made and held it until the people took it back in 1990.
- Lived: 1920 CE – 1972 CE
- Nationality: Nepali
- Roles: king, monarch
