Nepal and Sri Lanka

Nepal was a Hindu kingdom, where the king and the army held real power.

• Popular pressure brought a new democratic constitution in 1990, but the king kept much power.
• From the 1990s, Maoists fought an armed insurrection against the king and the ruling elite, especially in the countryside.
• In 2002 the king abolished parliament and took full control.
• In April 2006, a mass movement, led by the Seven Party Alliance with support from the Maoists, forced the king to restore parliament.
• In 2008, the monarchy was abolished, and Nepal became a democratic republic. A new constitution was adopted in 2015.

Sri Lanka has always been a democracy, but its threat came from ethnic conflict, not the army.

• Politics was dominated by the Sinhala majority, who felt the country belonged to them. The concerns of the Tamil minority, many of Indian origin, were neglected.
• From 1983, the militant LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) fought for a separate Tamil country, 'Tamil Eelam'.

India's involvement: Tamils in India pressed the government to help Sri Lanka's Tamils. In 1987, India signed an accord with Sri Lanka and sent the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka. It got caught in the fighting, became unpopular with both sides, and was withdrawn in 1989 without success.

Later, Norway and Iceland tried to mediate. The war finally ended when the Sri Lankan army defeated the LTTE in 2009.

Even through the conflict, Sri Lanka achieved high human development: good health and education, controlled population growth, and the highest per capita income in South Asia.

Both countries faced very different threats, a powerful king in Nepal and an ethnic war in Sri Lanka, and in both, democracy survived.