Talk:Mahendra of Nepal/Archive 1

Untitled
This article is great—as an example of why Wikipedia deserves no respect. You're disseminating this blatantly biased presentation of the life of an important figure on the stage of world history, acknowledging that it "may" not be impartial, but at the same time requesting that people leave it as it is. Pathetic. This is nothing but semi-literate propaganda. Better no article at all than garbage like this. Some "encyclopedia." More deserving of a red-top head on every page, like the London tabloids. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 160.39.48.105 (talk) 22:45, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

There is quite a lot more to be written about Mahendra. In lieu of full democracy, he instituted the "Panchayat" system. "Panchayat" comes from the number five ("panch"). Villages elected councils of five. Village panchayats in turn elected district panchayats, and I think these elected a national panchayat. Unfortunately even the national panchayat had limited power. Ultimately Mahendra called most of the shots.

At age 13, Mahendra fathered a son Rajkumar with a palace servant. He first married Indra Rajya Laxmi Devi and had three sons, Bhirendra Gyanendra and Dhirendra and three daughters Shanti, Sharada and Shobha but Queen Indra died in 1950 while Mahendra was still Crown Prince. Mahendra then married Indra's sister Ratna. Queen Ratna was wounded in a hunting accident in 1972 by a riccochet from Crown Prince Dhirendra's gun, but she recovered and was murdered in the palace massacre of 2000.

The Royal family belongs to the Thakuri caste who are considered Kshatriyas ("Chhetri" in colloquial Nepali), i.e. military-political leaders. They seem to have antecedents both in the Khas peoples who have lived in Nepal's far western Karnali-Bheri river basins for at least a thousand years, and in Rajputs from northwestern India who moved to the hills to escape Muslim invasions during the Middle Ages.

Their most illustrious ancestor was Prithvi Narayan Shah who started out as the hereditary ruler of Gorkha in the mid 1700s, a region of not more than a few hundred square kilometers. Prithvi Narayan raised an army, mostly of Magars, Gurungs and other hill tribesmen, and proceeded to unify the rest of what is now Nepal from as many as a hundred minor pricipalities, by the time the conquests of Prithvi Narayan's successors are counted. Ultimately the expansion of Nepal ended with wars with the British and with the Chinese. Instead of trying to gobble up Nepal, the country was allowed to continue as a buffer state, just as Afghanistan was maintained as a buffer state to avoid direct confrontation between the British and Russian empires.

The family name Shah is really an honorific that they were given or assumed. Whatever the original family name was, it seems to have been discarded along the way.

The royal family, including collateral branches, are rumored to have had a finger in many businesses. Supposedly they controlled most trucking enterprises that serviced trade with India, and a ropeway that transported goods up from the plains across "hills" (up to 3,000 meters high) to the outskirts of Kathmandu. They even ran a monopoly on the production of high-grade marijuana and hashish. Into the 1970s it was possible to buy these substances in an official government store in Kathmandu. They ran prostitution services out of a certain palace and a royal park. The royal family also took a cut of foreign aid. In order to do good works anywhere in Nepal, foreign aid programs first had to pay commissions to the royal family.

HE WAS ONE OF THE GREATEST LEADER OF THE NEPALEASE NATION. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.40.137.196 (talk) 04:21, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

deletions from 2008
Some poorly written content was deleted in 2008 and never replaced. I will paste it here so editors can consider adding it back in a better tone. --YakbutterT (talk) 17:25, 22 April 2010 (UTC)


 * So, this is the man who became king after his son. This put a severe chip on his shoulders. He wanted to be seen as a tough guy. Nepal is a feudal and poor country. Poverty is alarmingly high. There are no basic infrastructure throughout the country and it has been the fault of the ruling people of Nepal that the country is in such a mess.


 * Mahendra was enthroned after a suspicious death of his father. Nepal had just entered a multi party democratic system of governance when he became King of Nepal. He was, however, not a supporter of parliamentary democracy.


 * He wanted to be a strong man of Nepal with all the powers on him. He was a tyrant born into a royal family. He saw himself as an incarnation of Hindu god, someone who was born to rule. He wanted his subjects to populate his country and follow him blindly. He was disdainful of non royal people and anyone whom he deemed as not par to his status in royalty or class. He certainly did not wish to stay quiet while politicians ran the government. He also wished to show himself different than his father, the late king Tribhuvan.


 * The first agenda in his mind was to quash any attempts by the politicians to hold a Nepalese Constituent Assembly election, something his father had promised to Nepali people. Worst still, he staged a coup with the help of Nepal Army, the army he considered to be his private army. He jailed the prime minister and much of the cabinet members, promulgated a constitution in effect banning the political parties. The then prime minister considered Mahendra to be his friend but he soon realized that the notion of friendship between a royal and a commoner is non existent in Mahendra's lexicon.


 * After his sudden death, he was succeeded by his son Birendra.

removing POV tag with no active discussion per Template:POV
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Since there's no evidence of ongoing discussion, I'm removing the tag for now. If discussion is continuing and I've failed to see it, however, please feel free to restore the template and continue to address the issues. Thanks to everybody working on this one! -- Khazar2 (talk) 23:51, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

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