Tribhuvan of Nepal
Tribhuvan was king of Nepal from 1911, when he was five, to 1955, the king who spent forty years as the Ranas' prisoner in his own palace. He ended their century in a week in November 1950 by driving to the Indian embassy with his family and asking for asylum. That is the only coup in the country's history conducted by a king against his own prime minister by leaving. The reign began under Chandra Shamsher and continued under Bhim, Juddha, Padma and Mohan, the hereditary prime ministers who had held the country since 1846 and who kept the king for ceremonies. From the 1930s he was, quietly, the patron of the men who wanted them out. There was the Praja Parishad of 1936, whose four leaders were executed in 1941 and whose royal connection the Ranas suspected and could not prove. Then there was the Nepali Congress, formed in India in 1947 by the elder Koirala and the C-class Ranas the family had disinherited. On 6 November 1950 he took the crown prince and the grandchildren out of the palace on the pretext of a hunting trip and drove into the Indian embassy. The last of them proclaimed the three-year-old grandson Gyanendra king. The Congress rose in the Terai with arms from India. Nehru flew the king to Delhi and refused to recognise the child. In the Delhi compromise of February 1951 the Ranas accepted a coalition cabinet, half theirs and half Congress, under the king's authority. It lasted nine months before the Congress took the whole of it. He came home on 18 February 1951, the day the country calls democracy day. He reigned four more years over a state that had no constitution, a rotation of Congress and royalist cabinets, and an Indian military mission. He died in a Zurich clinic in March 1955, at forty-eight, of a heart condition. His son Mahendra, who took the office, did not share his view of parliaments. He was born in Kathmandu, the son of Prithvi Bir Bikram. The airport at Kathmandu, the university and the highway to India carry his name, which the republic that abolished his grandson's throne in 2008 has not removed. He is the king who left the palace and the one the country agreed to like.
- Lived: 1906 CE – 1955 CE
- Nationality: Nepali
- Roles: king, monarch
