King mahendra

Birendra spent eight years studying at St Joseph's School , a Jesuit school in Darjeeling , with his brother Gyanendra. On 13 March , their grandfather King Tribhuvan died and their father succeeded the Nepalese throne. With his father's ascension, Birendra became the crown prince of Nepal. After studying at Eton until , he returned to Nepal where he began to explore the country by traveling on foot to the remote parts of the country where he lived humbly with what was available in the villages.

He was also an art collector and supporter of Nepalese craftspeople and artists and learned to fly helicopters. Birendra was diagnosed with coronary artery disease and had undergone angioplasty in United Kingdom as per reports in the late s. Birendra ascended to the Nepalese throne on 31 January , at the age of 26, after the death of his father, King Mahendra.

However, his coronation was delayed until 24 February , when he was 29, since the first year was considered to be a mourning period for death of king's father and the second year was deemed to be inauspicious by religious astrologers. On his ascension to the throne, Birendra was effectively an absolute monarch , as he inherited a country where political parties were banned and he ruled through a system of local and regional councils known as panchayats.

In an attempt to maintain the panchayat system of government, prominent leaders of the Nepali Congress Party were arrested frequently.

Gyanendra shah

During, referendum options were given for a multi-party system or a Panchayati system. After the national referendum, he divided the nation into 5 development regions in order to create balanced development and visited each division once a year; the visits were discontinued after his status as a constitutional monarchy in In , a series of strikes and pro-democracy riots broke out in Nepal.

Due to the riots, Birendra lifted the ban on political parties and agreed to become a constitutional monarch in April He appointed an independent Constitution Recommendation Commission to represent the main opposition factions and to prepare a new constitution to accommodate their demands for political reform. The new constitution would make Birendra head of state of a constitutional monarchy with a system of multiparty democracy.

The draft constitution was approved by the Prime Minister Krishna Prasad Bhattarai and his cabinet and so, on 9 November , Birendra promulgated the new constitution transformed Nepal into a constitutional monarchy.