NepalThe Panchayat System under King Mahendra
The twelve-armed Black Bhairav at Kathmandu is admired and
revered as a form of Shiva.
Courtesy Harvey Follender
On December 26, 1961, King Mahendra appointed a council
of five
ministers to help run the administration. Several weeks
later,
political parties were declared illegal. At first the
Nepali
Congress leadership propounded a nonviolent struggle
against the
new order and formed alliances with several political
parties,
including the Gorkha Parishad and the United Democratic
Party,
which had been strong critics of the Nepali Congress when
it ran
the government. Early in 1961, however, the king had set
up a
committee of four officials from the Central Secretariat
to
recommend changes in the constitution that would abolish
political
parties and substitute a "National Guidance" system based
on local
panchayat led directly by the king. By late 1961,
violent
actions organized by the Nepali Congress in exile began
along the
Indian border, increasing in size and number during early
1962.
The political situation changed completely when war
broke out
between India and China on October 20, 1962. In a series
of rapid
movements, Chinese troops occupied mountain areas east and
west of
Nepal in an attempt to resolve border disputes with India
by simply
occupying disputed territories. The reversal suffered by
Indian
forces took the leadership in India by surprise and forced
it to
reevaluate the strategic situation in the Himalayas.
Because India
needed strong friends rather than insurrections in the
region, it
withdrew support from insurgents along the border with
Nepal and
established closer relations with the king's government.
In Nepal,
King Mahendra extended the state of emergency
indefinitely. The
army trained by India during the 1950s proved itself
capable of
handling guerrilla warfare. In the midst of increasing
desertions
from his cause, the leader of the Nepali Congress, Subarna
Shamsher, called off the armed struggle.
Adopted on the second anniversary of the royal coup,
the new
constitution of December 16, 1962, created a four-tier
panchayat system. At the local level, there were
4,000
village assemblies (gaun sabha) electing nine
members of the
village panchayat, who in turn elected a mayor
(sabhapati). Each village panchayat sent a
member to
sit on one of seventy-five district (zilla)
panchayat, representing from forty to seventy
villages;
one-third of the members of these assemblies were chosen
by the
town panchayat. Members of the district
panchayat
elected representatives to fourteen zone assemblies
(anchal
sabha) functioning as electoral colleges for the
National
Panchayat, or Rashtriya Panchayat, in Kathmandu. In
addition, there
were class organizations at village, district, and zonal
levels for
peasants, youth, women, elders, laborers, and ex-soldiers,
who
elected their own representatives to assemblies. The
National
Panchayat of about ninety members could not criticize the
royal
government, debate the principles of partyless democracy,
introduce
budgetary bills without royal approval, or enact bills
without
approval of the king. Mahendra was supreme commander of
the armed
forces, appointed (and had the power to remove) members of
the
Supreme Court, appointed the Public Service Commission to
oversee
the civil service, and could change any judicial decision
or amend
the constitution at any time. To many of the unlettered
citizens of
the country, the king was a spiritual force as well,
representing
the god Vishnu upholding dharma on earth. Within a span of
ten
years, the king had, in effect, reclaimed the unlimited
power
exercised by Prithvi Narayan Shah in the eighteenth
century.
The first elections to the National Panchayat took
place in
March and April 1963. Although political parties
officially were
banned and the major opposition parties publicly refused
to
participate, about one-third of the members of the
legislative were
associated with the Nepali Congress. Support of the king
by the
army and the government bureaucracy prevented opposition
to his
rule from developing within the panchayat system.
Real power
came from the king's secretariat, and in the countryside
influence
rested in the offices of zonal commissioners and their
official
staffs or the parallel system of development officers. The
Nepali
Congress leadership made increasingly conciliatory
statements and
began to announce its faith in democratic ideals under the
leadership of the king. In 1968 the king began to release
political
prisoners, including B.P. Koirala, who was freed on
October 30. At
this point, a three-way split developed in the Nepali
Congress.
B.P. Koirala went to India, where he headed a wing
committed to
democratic revolution and violent overthrow of the
panchayat
system. He was a symbol for youth but powerless
politically.
Subarna Shamsher's wing continued to advocate local
cooperation
with the king outside the panchayat system. A third
wing
tried to work within the panchayat system in the
expectation
that it would evolve into a democratic system. The
disunity of the
political opposition left King Mahendra to do as he
wished.
Under the direct leadership of the king, the government
implemented some of the major projects that were initiated
under
the previous democratic regime and oversaw further steps
toward the
development of the country
(see Constitutional Development
, ch. 4).
Land reforms led to the confiscation of large Rana
estates.
Rajya reform abolished special privileges of some
aristocratic elites in western Nepal. A new legal code
promulgated
in 1963 replaced the Muluki Ain of 1854. A major land
reform
program launched in 1964 essentially was a failure. The
new
panchayat system managed to bring 50,000 to 60,000
people
into a single system of representative government in a way
that had
been rendered impossible for the elite-based political
parties.
Nepal was able to carry out its second plan (1962-65) and
third
plan (1965-70), and to begin the Fourth Five-Year Plan
(1970-75).
Eradication of malaria, construction of the Mahendra
Highway, or
East-West Highway, along the southern foot of the hills,
and land
settlement programs contributed to a massive movement of
population
from the hills into the Tarai, resulting in a large
increase in the
area devoted to agriculture
(see Population
, ch. 2;
Agriculture
, ch. 3).
The death of Mahendra in January 1972 and the accession
of
Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev allowed the possibility of
turmoil.
The new king was associated with young, educated,
administrative
experts who were dedicated to economic development, but
not to
sharing power with political parties. Students at
Tribhuvan
University went on an indefinite strike in August to
support a
ten-point charter of demands. That month, 100 armed men
attacked an
eastern Tarai village and killed a constable in a
revolutionary
action supposedly linked to the policies of B.P. Koirala.
In June
1973, terrorists hijacked a Royal Nepal Airlines airplane
to India
and escaped with 30 million Indian rupees (approximately
US$4.6
million). Other armed attacks and assassination attempts
occurred
into 1974. These isolated incidents had relatively little
impact on
a government that the army and the bureaucracy supported
and that
monopolized the allocation of all resources to local
development
projects.
In 1975 the king appointed a seven-member Reform
Commission to
investigate making changes in the panchayat system,
but
during that year Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi
declared a
state of emergency in her country, jailing members of the
opposition and curtailing democracy there. In this
climate, the
recommendations of the Reform Commission in Nepal led to a
1975
constitutional amendment that made cosmetic changes in the
panchayat system but only increased its rigidity.
The
changes included the establishment of five development
regions to
promote planning and the increase in membership of the
National
Panchayat from 90 to 134 persons. The king was to nominate
20
percent of its members.
Data as of September 1991
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