• While the military fights rebels in the Himalayas, the Kathmandu Valley descends into lawlessness. A group of children loot the Ministry of Agriculture.
  • A protest against King Gyanendra turns violent when the crowd marches toward Narayanhiti Royal Palace.
  • A boy looks on after a street battle between protesters and riot police.
  • Riot police fire tear gas at a pro-democracy crowd.
  • A man is beaten for violating a daylight curfew in Kathmandu.
  • A protester sits in between riot police and an angry crowd in order to stop a street battle in Kathmandu.
  • Maoist youth assert their newfound power on the streets of Kathmandu after King Gyanendra abdicates.
  • Maoists rally in Kathmandu, declaring victory after King Gyanendra relinquished power.
  • Boys gather outside a Maoist rally in Kathmandu to hear their plan for rebuilding the government.
  • Terai women from Nepal’s southern plains march to Kathmandu to demand rights.
  • Cremation rites are administered at Pashupatinath. The civil war claimed 17,000 lives.
  • The promise of creating a new nation faces Nepal’s daily reality on the ground: widespread poverty and endemic corruption.

NEPAL: CIVIL WAR

A few millennia of Nepalese feudalism came to an abrupt end in 2006.

The revolution started so quietly that few saw it coming. Long neglected by Kathmandu elites, rural communities in the remote Himalayas fed a violent Maoist insurgency that gradually swept across the country. A series of nationwide strikes, curfews, and mass arrests paralyzed the capital city, forcing the resignation of King Gyanendra, the world’s last Hindu monarch, in 2006.

Nepal’s civil war claimed over 17,000 lives.

A new republic was born. But it would take a decade of instability to ratify a constitution affirming Nepal as a secular democracy.

Today, Nepal is the world’s only republic run by a communist party.