Nepal: First Steps Towards Redressing HIs?

Abstract

Located high in the Himalayan mountain range and having avoided colonization as a classic ‘buffer state' between (British) India and China, Nepal is marked in its political history by unique institutions and practices, including a hereditary prime ministership — the Rana dynasty between 1846 and 1953 (Whelpton 2005); a formally institutionalized caste hierarchy — the Muluki Ain, also abolished in 1953 (Höfer 1979); and, until 2006, a unique status as the world's only officially Hindu state. But its landlocked, mountainous terrain has provided less than fertile ground for development: with a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of around US$200 in 1996, at the start of the conflict, and with poverty rates in excess of 40 per cent, Nepal ranks as one of the poorest countries outside of Sub-Saharan Africa. With such an unusual political history, it is perhaps less surprising that, in the mid-1990s, when post-Cold War liberal euphoria was at its peak and conflicts around the world were increasingly being seen as ‘ethnic' instead of ‘ideological', it was Nepal that saw the outbreak of an apparently ‘old-fashioned' Maoist insurgency.