Nepal has been known as a peaceful nation where Buddha was born two thousand five hundred years earlier. It has also been known as a country of breathtaking views of the Himalayas containing eight out of ten highest peaks of the world including Mount Everest. Nepal has stood out as a special nation popular with tourists from Europe, North America and Japan.
A bloody massacre of the royal family including King Birendra in June 1, 2001 allegedly by the Crown Prince Dipendra who also killed his mother the queen, brother, sister, uncle and aunt before committing suicide turned out to be an event without precedent in the history of the world. Prince Gyanendra who had once been crowned in 1950 was crowned again after fifty years.
Today Nepal has got another name as a scene of a Maoist insurgency that wants to abolish monarchy and makeita "People's Republic". The insurgents controlled a large part of the country, especially in the western hills and more than 7,000 people were killed by the end of 2002. This insurgency caused a setback to democracy in Nepal that had flourished since a "Popular Movement" in 1990 that resulted in people of Nepal being sovereign. The monarch dismissed an elected Prime Minister in October 2002. He was called "incompetent" for being unable to hold elections within six months of dissolution of Parliament as required under the Constitution promulgated in 1990. However, a cease-fire was agreed between the Government and the insurgents in January 2003 and dialogue between the two parties started in early 2003. Will the Maoists give up their arms and join the political process after renouncing violence and run for elections? However, there are still questions whether the talks will succeed.
Will Nepal turn into another Cambodia, Peru or Afghanistan as the carnage by the Maoists in the remote Western district of Achham in February 2002 had led the American Ambassador to compare the Maoists with Khmer Rouge, Shining Path and Al Quaida?
The author in India, the Netherlands and the United States gave a series of lectures in 2002 and 2003 that were helpful in writing this book. These included United Services Institute, New Delhi, India, the Netherlands and four colleges and Universities in the United States: Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University, Center of South Asian Studies, University of Michigan, Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania and Benedict College in South Carolina.. I'm especially thankful to Norma Jackson and Syed I. Mahdi from South Carolina, Roxanne Gupta from Penrisylvania, Tom Wagner and Michael Lewis from Michigan, Roger Tangri and J.W. Bjorkman from the Netherlands, Lt.
The year was 1950 and the first half of the twentieth century was about to come to an end. A series of far reaching changes were about to star were about to start in the forbidden kingdom of Nepal. The king was leading a revolution against a century old oligarchy known as the Ranas and had fled the country to neighbouring India. He had taken the Crown Prince and his eldest son along with his two queens with him. The Ranas had crowned his second grandson Gyanendra as the monarch. The King was to return triumphantly in February 1951 as the Ranas were overthrown.
Around this time, in far away hills of western Nepal two sons were born in the early 1950's to Brahmin families in the hills in western Nepal. The village of Naudanda is situated in the western fringe of Pokhara valley that had yet to become an important tourist center. There were no roads linking it either with Kathmandu or the Indian border. The valley would attract thousands of tourists few decades later. The village itself would attract thousands of trekkers on their way to Jomosom and Muktinath that was to become the Annapurna trekking area famous not only in Nepal but the world over.
The first child was born in this village. He was the eldest of eight children in a peasant family. By the 1960's malaria had been eradicated in the southern lowlands of Nepal near the Indian border. There was a migration from the overpopulated hills to the Terai, especially the fertile valley of Chitwan. The Dahal family, the first boy's family also migrated from the village on the Western fringe of Pokhara valley to Chitwan on foot in 1963. There were no tourists in Pokhara at that time They migrated to the village of Sivanagar in Western Chitwan close to Royal Chitwan National Park that would later be included in Unesco's Natural Heritage of Mankind list. The new village was more fertile than the village in the hills that they had left behind. The boy went to school there and studied agriculture in a college at Rampur that had been set up under the assistance of USAID. The boy was named Pushpa Kamal Dahal who would later be named Prachanda meaning" the terrible" in Nepali He would later be called "one of the most secretive mass leaders in the world" according to an article published in an Indian newspaper.
The second Brahmin boy was born in 1953 in the village of Khoplang in the district of Gorkha situated halfway between Kathmandu and Pokhara. It was in Gorkha that King Prithvi Narayan Shah first initiated the process of unification of Nepal in 1768. There were at that time more than fifty small principalities and kingdoms of what now is Nepal including the rich and prosperous kingdoms situated in Kathmandu valley. The King from Gorkha conquered the city state of Kathmandu that was to be the first major conquest in the process of unification.
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