Max's election maps and assorted others

[Ares96]

The first attempt to unite anti-Congress forces into a working government was a dismal failure. The Janata Party had performed well in the 1977 elections, sure, but their only unifying factor was the sense of urgency in preventing Indira Gandhi and her government from retaining power after the Emergency. Once Morarji Desai had come to power and completed the reversal of the Emergency, there were a thousand different voices within his own coalition on how to proceed, and ultimately, none of them would fully emerge triumphant.

Desai's first act in power was to release all those prisoners remaining in Indian jails whose charges were considered political, and to introduce constitutional amendments to strengthen human rights protections and prevent the abuses of power that characterised the Emergency from happening again. To further drive this point home, investigations were launched into leading government figures of the previous parliamentary term, including Indira and Sanjay Gandhi. Sanjay was investigated primarily for his role in running state-owned carmaker Maruti Motors Ltd., which had been started in 1971 with the goal of producing an Indian-made car that would be affordable to India's growing lower middle classes. Maruti had still never produced a single car by this time, but Sanjay Gandhi had made millions off his position as managing director and, given that Maruti had been given an exclusive licence to produce its proposed class of car, he could be expected to make even more if production ever started.

Indira had been offered a comfortable exile by the King of Nepal, but after some consideration declined this and decided to stay in India and fight back. In October 1978, the Lok Sabha seat of Chikmagalur in Karnataka was vacated by its sitting member, D. B. Chandregowda, explicitly to allow Indira to return to parliament. The Janata Party made an attempt to recruit Kannada cinema legend Dr. Rajkumar as their candidate against her, but he declined citing a desire to stay apolitical, and the by-election was a slam dunk for Congress. Shortly afterward, however, Union Home Minister Charan Singh issued warrants for Indira and Sanjay's arrests, charging them with corruption and abuse of power so vague that they would be almost impossible to prove in court - among other things, they alleged that Indira had plotted to have jailed opposition leaders killed. Far from immobilising Congress, the arrests were a huge tactical error, and made it look as though the Janata Party was out for revenge rather than justice. Matters were not helped on 20 December, when two Congress supporters hijacked an Indian Airlines plane between Calcutta and Lucknow demanding Indira's immediate release. This was not granted, but the hijacking ensured that Indira was already a martyr before her trial even began.

By that time, the Janata Party was already splitting down the middle. As mentioned, the party had very little to unite it other than prosecuting Indira and the other key figures in the Emergency, and while Morarji Desai was able to achieve a few things as Prime Minister - notably normalising relations with China and Pakistan (though not to the point of settling border disputes with either country) and appointing the Mandal Commission to identify and propose policies to improve the lot of India's "socially or educationally backward classes" - there was no agreement within the government on how to deal with India's still-ongoing economic crisis. In late 1977, the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act was passed, imposing strict controls on currency exchange and effectively requiring multinationals seeking to do business in India to partner with domestic Indian companies. Economic nationalism was one of few principles shared by socialists, populists and Hindu nationalists, but the FERA failed to achieve its goals in multiple different ways: it did very little to stave off the multinational presence in India's economy in the long run, but in the short run, it caused a large exodus of cash and resources as American conglomerates scrambled to leave the Indian market before the new regulations went into effect. Most famously, Coca-Cola pulled out of India altogether, and for a brief time, the Indian state entered the soda market with a drink labelled "Double Seven" - believed by some to be a reference to the 1977 defeat of Congress, and making the drink immediately controversial.

Beyond selling soft drinks, it's hard to say the Desai ministry had any economic policy whatsoever. If anything, the two sides of the Janata Party - the secular socialists led by George Fernandes and Charan Singh on the one hand, and the Hindu nationalists led by L.K. Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee on the other - were more interested in preventing the other from achieving their goals than they were in advancing their own ones. The issue came to a head in summer 1979, when left-leaning members of the cabinet floated the idea that the Janata Party should ban its members from being part of any "alternative social or political organisation", a fairly direct reference to the RSS, which still counted most of the Hindu nationalist faction including Advani and Vajpayee as members. When Desai, fearing for his majority, refused to go along with this, Charan Singh and several dozen of his followers, including Fernandes as well as Indira's old foe Raj Narain, resigned both from cabinet and from the party, depriving the Janata Party of its parliamentary majority. Charan Singh, despite having been the driving force behind the arrests of Indira and Sanjay less than a year before, reached out to Congress and tried to make a deal whereby his faction of the Janata Party, now styling itself the Janata Party (Secular), would be permitted to govern with Congress support. Indira tentatively agreed on the condition that the charges against her and Sanjay be dropped, but Charan Singh refused to go along with this and was promptly denied confidence by the Lok Sabha. He resigned as Prime Minister after less than a month in office, and arranged to have the Lok Sabha dissolved pending elections in January 1980.

There were now two different Janata Parties heading into the election, and two Congresses as well - when Indira announced that Sanjay would be standing for election as the Congress candidate in Amethi, the seat bordering Rae Bareli, regional Congress leaders who hadn't been part of the inner circle during the Emergency balked. Karnataka chief minister D. Devaraj Urs went so far as to break off from the party and found his own, which became known as Congress (Urs) or Congress (U) and attracted support in a number of different states. However, Congress (U) never really became a mass party, and only attracted support in the constituencies of its own leaders. On the whole, the "official" Congress - Congress (I) - was once again the only nationwide force in India, and just about everyone predicted a landslide victory in spite of the still-fresh wounds of the Emergency.

They were right, too. Congress took 353 seats in the new Lok Sabha, a stronger majority than the Janata Party before it, and no other party reached the 55 seats needed to form an official opposition. Although the "official" Janata Party, which was supported by the RSS and its large ground organisation, placed a fairly solid second in the popular vote, both the Janata Party (Secular) and the CPI(M) won more seats than it. Taken alongside their Left Front allies and the tentatively-allied CPI, the communist bloc was the second-largest in the chamber, and candidates endorsed by the Left Front won all but four seats in West Bengal in particular, a sign of the popular groundswell backing Jyoti Basu's state government and its land-reform agenda. The JP(S), meanwhile, achieved great strength in the countryside around Delhi, as well as parts of eastern UP and Bihar, but failed to really break through anywhere else. The opposition to Indira was much more fractured than Congress had been in the previous term, and for all intents and purposes, she now had the run of the country once again.



EDIT: Oh, and the bulk of Assam didn't vote in this election or the next one, due to a massive nativist campaign organised by the All Assam Students Union to prevent the granting of civil rights (including the right to vote) to Bangladeshi refugees living in the state, to the point where adherents attacked polling booths to disrupt any election where Bengalis might be on the electoral rolls. The situation wasn't resolved until 1985, when the central government essentially caved to the nativist movement's demands, and tensions between native Assamese and Bengali migrants continue to simmer to this day.

 

[prime-minister]

snip

Excellent work as always! Also, something I've just thought of- why did they make polling phases more extensive later on, compared to just on a couple of different days for these elections?

 

[Thande]

More excellent work Max.

It is tricky with so many parties using different shades of green or teal. At first I wasn't sure if the Indian Union Muslim League stands out sufficiently from Congress, but then I think they only won those two seats in Kerala?

 

[Ares96]

Excellent work as always! Also, something I've just thought of- why did they make polling phases more extensive later on, compared to just on a couple of different days for these elections?

It's to deal with election violence, which was a really pronounced issue in the 80s and 90s and continues to some extent today. Guarding electoral processes is typically done by police and/or army units not native to the state in question, in order to prevent them from being influenced by state governments, and the division into polling phases is to enable these to be deployed more effectively.

It is tricky with so many parties using different shades of green or teal. At first I wasn't sure if the Indian Union Muslim League stands out sufficiently from Congress, but then I think they only won those two seats in Kerala?

Yes - I'd initially used those green shades for the JP(S), but it was simply too hard to tell them apart, so I was forced to go for the yellow instead. It could be argued that the "official" JP would be a better fit for that given their heavy RSS involvement, but I decided continuity was more important. Even though there's no way on earth I'll be able to keep sets of shades consistent throughout all these elections, having different colours for the same party in two back-to-back elections felt a bit silly.

 

[Indicus]

The Janata Party has got to be a record in terms of how badly it messed itself up. Granted, it was probably doomed to collapse, but Morarji's ineptitude didn't help.

EDIT: Oh, and the bulk of Assam didn't vote in this election or the next one, due to a campaign of boycotts and societal disruption organised by the All Assam Students Union to protest the inclusion of large numbers of foreign citizens on electoral rolls. I don't know the details of this campaign, but it was a very, very big deal at the time (as evidenced by the fact that they shut down two successive general elections), and tensions between native Assamese and illegal immigrants continue to simmer to this day.

I suspect you're being much too nice to the Assam Agitation here - it was a nativist, supremacist movement obsessed with removing the vote from Bengali refugees (foreigner is a euphemism for Bengali here) fleeing the Bangladesh Liberation War. It was literally impossible to hold a free election because the Assam Agitation just kept attacking polling booths to keep Bengalis out. Assam nevertheless had state elections in 1983 without Bengalis removed from electoral rolls, in which the agitation consistently attacked Bengalis to keep them out of the vote booths, and at Nellie it massacred over 1000 people. In the end, Indira went ahead with holding the election - however, it had less that 20% turnout. The Assam Agitation only ended in 1985 when Rajiv accepted their demands.

The 1980s were a bad decade for India.

 

[Ares96]

I suspect you're being much too nice to the Assam Agitation here - it was a nativist, supremacist movement obsessed with removing the vote from Bengali refugees (foreigner is a euphemism for Bengali here) fleeing the Bangladesh Liberation War. It was literally impossible to hold a free election because the Assam Agitation just kept attacking polling booths to keep Bengalis out. Assam nevertheless had state elections in 1983 without Bengalis removed from electoral rolls, in which the agitation consistently attacked Bengalis to keep them out of the vote booths, and at Nellie it massacred over 1000 people. In the end, Indira went ahead with holding the election - however, it had less that 20% turnout. The Assam Agitation only ended in 1985 when Rajiv accepted their demands.

I had a feeling, but it's hard to be a hundred percent sure about these things.

 

[Ares96]

Edited that final paragraph to make it a bit less wishy-washy - hopefully should now reflect the actual situation.

 

[Makemakean]

Stupid question, but what's up with West Bengal being such a nest of seemingly safe seats for the Communists?

I've heard about Communists being particularly strong in Kerala (our English teacher made us read The God of Small Things in tenth grade), but West Bengal is a story I have yet to look into.

 

[Ares96]

Stupid question, but what's up with West Bengal being such a nest of seemingly safe seats for the Communists?

I've heard about Communists being particularly strong in Kerala (our English teacher made us read The God of Small Things in tenth grade), but West Bengal is a story I have yet to look into.

I don't know for sure, but there was a lot of peasant militancy in West Bengal (it's where the Naxalites got started, after all) long before 1977, which to my mind would indicate that the rural underclass was worse off there than in the rest of India (hard as it is to believe that's possible) and/or that the region had a history of more militant left-wing activism than surrounding areas. And of course you have the dual blows of the incredibly devastating wartime famine in the region plus Partition displacing millions of people in both West Bengal and what would become East Pakistan, both of which left lasting scars.

 

[Thande]

Stupid question, but what's up with West Bengal being such a nest of seemingly safe seats for the Communists?

I've heard about Communists being particularly strong in Kerala (our English teacher made us read The God of Small Things in tenth grade), but West Bengal is a story I have yet to look into.

One thing I have heard, though our Indian members can correct me on this, is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy where the Congress-controlled federal governments refused to build roads and other infrastructure in West Bengal because they weren't voting for Congress they were voting for Dangerous Communist Extremists, and so the West Bengalis kept bloody-mindedly voting in Communists almost on regional-nationalist grounds to spite Congress. Or something along those lines, I only heard this secondhand.

 

[Makemakean]

I'm one day going to have to look into what the Indian Communist parties actually do when they reach power on state levels. I've always been very curious about that. In (Western) Europe, you have of course had many of these fringe communist parties that split over principles of higher theory and the like. Whether they preferred Mao or Khrushchev, whether they supported world-wide revolution or socialism in one country. Perpetual accusations about revisionism and the like. But they were all fringe parties, nobody being anywhere close to a position of power where they actually had to deal with the unpalatable and dirty business of actually running the country, so you could afford to have perpetual debates over matters of no substantive importance.

India's Communist parties would appear to follow the same basic trajectory, but as this series has made clear, perpetual splits in parties appears to be standard course for Indian political parties in general, in other words, this doesn't appear to be a Communist-thing as much as an India-thing.

But we then come to the question of how do these Communist parties actually govern? When a Communist party gets into power in India, do we immediately see large waves of nationalizations in industry and collectivization in agriculture and an attempt to establish a command economy? Or have the Indian Communist Parties for all intents and purposes become akin to the old Canadian provincial Social Credit Parties, which actually did try to introduce Social Credit in Alberta in the 30s, but after discovering that, no, such an overhaul of the banking and currency systems would be highly unconstitutional, just went and became generic centre-right parties, paying lip service to the notion that if they ever got power on federal level, then of course they would implement all of C. H. Douglas' ideas, but in the meanwhile, they were just trying to provide "good governance" or whatever nonsense in the provinces.

Is that sort of how the Indian Communist parties work? There being some notion that they would introduce a fully planned economy if they ever got a majority in the Lok Sabha, but while until then, on state level, they'll try to work within the framework of a mixed economy?

 

[Indicus]

I'm one day going to have to look into what the Indian Communist parties actually do when they reach power on state levels. I've always been very curious about that. In (Western) Europe, you have of course had many of these fringe communist parties that split over principles of higher theory and the like. Whether they preferred Mao or Khrushchev, whether they supported world-wide revolution or socialism in one country. Perpetual accusations about revisionism and the like. But they were all fringe parties, nobody being anywhere close to a position of power where they actually had to deal with the unpalatable and dirty business of actually running the country, so you could afford to have perpetual debates over matters of no substantive importance.

India's Communist parties would appear to follow the same basic trajectory, but as this series has made clear, perpetual splits in parties appears to be standard course for Indian political parties in general, in other words, this doesn't appear to be a Communist-thing as much as an India-thing.

But we then come to the question of how do these Communist parties actually govern? When a Communist party gets into power in India, do we immediately see large waves of nationalizations in industry and collectivization in agriculture and an attempt to establish a command economy? Or have the Indian Communist Parties for all intents and purposes become akin to the old Canadian provincial Social Credit Parties, which actually did try to introduce Social Credit in Alberta in the 30s, but after discovering that, no, such an overhaul of the banking and currency systems would be highly unconstitutional, just went and became generic centre-right parties, paying lip service to the notion that if they ever got power on federal level, then of course they would implement all of C. H. Douglas' ideas, but in the meanwhile, they were just trying to provide "good governance" or whatever nonsense in the provinces.

Is that sort of how the Indian Communist parties work? There being some notion that they would introduce a fully planned economy if they ever got a majority in the Lok Sabha, but while until then, on state level, they'll try to work within the framework of a mixed economy?

Indian communist governments are radically different depending on which part of the country you are talking about. The Kerala Communists are, of course, far more moderate than their name would suggest and rooted in state politics (Kerala had a communist rebellion in 1946) and they exist in a stable two-party system at the state level, with their base being the low Ezhava caste which benefited greatly from land reforms. There are many criticisms you can levy against Kerala's Communists - for instance, their resistance to new technologies is, I suspect, a major reason why the state missed out on the tech boom and didn't get anything like Bangalore - but they're a normal party, and the criticisms levied against them are the ones you can give to any other democratic party. Probably more of a normal party than most Indian state parties. And their Ezhava base has allowed them not to be swept by the rise of caste-based politics

In stark contrast, West Bengal's communists came to power much later (in 1977) and rose to power both on promises of land reform and because Congress was in freefall post-Emergency. They quickly established a dominant-party system where, despite successes on land reform early on, they quickly became quite corrupt. They inspired capital flight from the state and, in general, industry did quite badly - you can see the statistics, they aren't good. And they were fairly autocratic and normalized political violence, and their ideology quickly became hollowed out as they were in control with no interruptions from 1977 to 2011. The West Bengal communists also failed to consider the rise of caste politics, preferring to subordinate the issue to class, which definitely hurt them. When they lost power in 2011 to the Trinamool Congress (the personal outfit of Mamata Banerjee), they went into a cataclysmic decline - however, their autocratic politics and electoral violence are just part of the political scene of West Bengal, and Mamata's hardly a nonviolent democrat. Representative of the degree to which they got hollowed out is that a massive number of West Bengali communists have joined the BJP.

So I think we have to consider state-level communist parties separately from one another, though in general they did at least attempt far-ranging programs of agrarian-centred reform. I can't help but think a communist party able to win the centre democratically would be different from both since its base would, after all, be Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and the like by sheer population. Kanpur had a large active communist party, so it would look like that, and I'm sure the vibe of the socialist politics of figures like Ram Manohar Lohia would be influential as well. And regionalism would be as much a thing in a communist India. Also, I suspect it would have the exact same foreign policy as OTL India to the frustration of everyone involved.

 

[Makemakean]

What kind of agrarian reforms are we talking in Kerala? From my understanding of the Wikipedia articles, the ones they carried out in West Bengal mainly seemed to nationalize an awful lot of land, establishing a partially nationalized agricultural sector. Of course, the kind of agricultural reform carried out in the early Soviet Union and early Communist China was pretty redistributive in nature. Then of course, both the Soviets and the Chinese Communists concluded that redistributive policies were bad, because they fundamentally recognized private ownership of land as a legitimate thing, and that was just bad socialism, and so we got Collectivization instead.

 

[Ares96]

Indian communist governments are radically different depending on which part of the country you are talking about.

Very good summary, thanks for stepping up. West Bengal always did give me Eastern Bloc vibes, albeit their communist government was at least somewhat fairly elected.

What kind of agrarian reforms are we talking in Kerala? From my understanding of the Wikipedia articles, the ones they carried out in West Bengal mainly seemed to nationalize an awful lot of land, establishing a partially nationalized agricultural sector. Of course, the kind of agricultural reform carried out in the early Soviet Union and early Communist China was pretty redistributive in nature. Then of course, both the Soviets and the Chinese Communists concluded that redistributive policies were bad, because they fundamentally recognized private ownership of land as a legitimate thing, and that was just bad socialism, and so we got Collectivization instead.

It mainly consisted of giving tenants ownership of their land and imposing a ceiling on the amount of land any family could own, so definitely closer to the NEP than to the Stalinist model.

 

[Makemakean]

Indian communist governments are radically different depending on which part of the country you are talking about. The Kerala Communists are, of course, far more moderate than their name would suggest and rooted in state politics (Kerala had a communist rebellion in 1946) and they exist in a stable two-party system at the state level, with their base being the low Ezhava caste which benefited greatly from land reforms.

The Congress Party in Kerala, what is their base? Are these fundamentally people who vote for Congress for the Lok Sabha also, or are they mainly the sort of people who vote BJP? Looking at an electoral map for the most recent federal election, the BJP certainly has a respectable presence among Keralan voters, but most often they are a (strong) third party. I can only make out two BJP-Congress marginals, Thiruvananthapuram and Kanniyakumari. Otherwise the Communists are strong runners-up. Yet in the most recent Keralan state election, the BJP gathered a total of zero seats (and 11.3% of the popular vote).

 

[Indicus]

The Congress Party in Kerala, what is their base? Are these fundamentally people who vote for Congress for the Lok Sabha also, or are they mainly the sort of people who vote BJP? Looking at an electoral map for the most recent federal election, the BJP certainly has a respectable presence among Keralan voters, but most often they are a (strong) third party. I can only make out two BJP-Congress marginals, Thiruvananthapuram and Kanniyakumari. Otherwise the Communists are strong runners-up. Yet in the most recent Keralan state election, the BJP gathered a total of zero seats (and 11.3% of the popular vote).

The BJP generally does better in the centre than in the states (you can see this pattern elsewhere as well), which has generally to do with Modi's personalistic appeal though I don't think that's a factor in Kerala.

Kanyakumari is in Tamil Nadu (and the BJP's presence there has to do with religious tensions), while I believe Thiruvananthapuram has to do with the Sabarimala temple dispute which stoked tensions there.

 

[Ares96]

Moving aside slightly now, because 1984 doesn't have a PDF available on the Wayback Machine (at least not as easily-found as the 1977 and 1980 ones). So let's instead take a look at one of the neighbouring countries, and I should note that this map is done to the same scale as the Indian state elections, so could easily be integrated if, for some reason, that should be useful.

So Nepal is a country whose general vibe I would summarise as "75% India, 25% Tibet". There are several Sino-Tibetan cultures in the mountainous parts of the country, and it's home to the Gautama Buddha's birthplace in Lumbini, but the majority of its 30 million people follow Hinduism and speak Nepali, an Indo-Aryan language related to (and sharing a lot of Sanskrit-derived vocabulary with), but not mutually intelligible with, Hindi. In fact, Nepal is the most Hindu country in the world by percentage, and until the abolition of the monarchy in 2008, Hinduism was the state religion.

The whole "abolition of the monarchy" thing is key to Nepal's recent history, because whereas India was under direct British rule and moved to rid itself of its feudal rulers soon after independence, Nepal was a more independent protectorate and never really had to fight for independence - the British simply left, keeping only a few diplomats and the army recruiters in Gorkha country, and India took over a lot of their role as the hegemonic regional power. The Nepalese monarchy was allied with India for the most part, and while its absolute rule was ended by the 1950s, a confrontation between the royal court and the left-leaning Nepali Congress government led to a coup in 1960, whereupon King Mahendra decided liberal democracy was all wrong for Nepal and should be replaced by a more "homegrown" system of nonpartisan, indirectly elected local assemblies of elders (panchayats) that sent delegates to a national legislature (the Rastriya Panchayat). This lasted, with some modifications, until 1990, when a mass movement (the Jana Andolan, or People's Uprising) forced Mahendra's son Birendra to abolish the Panchayat system and reintroduce partisan elections.

The Communist Party of Nepal, which had been a leading force behind the uprising along with the Congress, split in half over whether to participate in the new constitutional monarchy - the moderate faction, the CPN (Unified Marxist-Leninist), participated in elections and became one of the three major parties alongside Congress and the right-wing monarchist Rastriya Prajatantra Party, while the radical Maoists led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal (better known by his nom de guerre Prachanda, meaning "fierce" in Nepali) continued to oppose the government and eventually began an armed insurgency. The resulting civil war lasted a decade, from 1996 to 2006, and ended with something of a victory for the insurgents - on the one hand, their armed units were demobilised and their parallel institutions (local courts and governing committees) set up during the civil war were disbanded, but on the other hand, the monarchy (which had become thoroughly discredited between suspending democratic government once again and that time in 2001 when Crown Prince Gyanendra shot up the palace and killed the bulk of the royal family, including both King Birendra and himself - I am not making this up, look it up if you don't believe me) was abolished, and elections were held to a constituent assembly that would work out a form of government for the new Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal.

That was the idea, anyway. In the event, the situation in the country was so chaotic that it took until April 2008 before constituent assembly elections could be held, and then the assembly lasted its entire four-year term without managing to draft a constitution. Another assembly elected in 2013 (after yet another one-year delay) was a bit more successful, and at long last, the new Constitution of Nepal was passed and came into effect in September 2015. Alongside abolishing the monarchy, secularising the state, providing ironclad guarantees of civil rights and freedoms and establishing special commissions to safeguard the rights of women, Dalits and ethnic minorities, the Constitution also declares Nepal to be a federal state, with more power than ever being delegated from Kathmandu to the country's regions. The previously existing 75 districts and 14 development zones were grouped into seven new provinces, each of which was given an elected assembly with some devolved powers and a responsible provincial cabinet. The provinces were initially given numbers rather than names (insert Prisoner reference here), with the idea being that the provincial assemblies would choose whatever names they deemed appropriate, but it took until March 2023 before the second elected assembly of Province No. 1 could agree to rename it to Koshi Province, removing the last numerical designation from the map.

The democratic revolution also meant some changes to the lower level of government. The Kingdom of Nepal had had 58 municipalities, all in urban areas, and much less powerful village development committees (VDCs) covering the country's rural areas, but this imbalance was done away with by the new constitution, and today most of Nepal's surface (excepting a few uninhabited nature reserves, depicted in grey on the map) is covered by some form of municipal body.
- The six largest cities in Nepal - Kathmandu, Pokhara, Bharatpur, Lalitpur, Birgunj and Biratnagar - all have at least half a million inhabitants, and are each governed by a metropolitan municipality (mahanagarpalika). This is the most prestigious type of municipal body, and these cities are depicted in red on the map.
- Another eleven cities between 250,000 and 500,000 inhabitants are designated sub-metropolitan municipalities (upamahanagarpalika), which have almost but not all the powers of the previous category. These are marked in pale red on the map.
- A total of 276 smaller urban areas, including all pre-existing municipalities, are designated urban municipalities (nagarpalika), a category that covers most of the lowlands and valleys of Nepal and governs the bulk of its population. These are marked in beige on the map.
- Finally, the VDCs that weren't given municipal status or grouped into a body with it were grouped into rural municipalities (gaunpalika), of which there are 460 (or possibly 481, sources conflict and I haven't bothered to count them on my own map). These cover most of Nepal's surface area, but tend to have low populations - the biggest ones have around fifty thousand inhabitants, while the smallest have around a thousand (and one only 538 people). Unlike the VDCs that preceded them, rural municipalities have most of the same powers as their urban counterparts, but in many cases are kept from implementing them by underdevelopment. To account for this, a large number of local government powers are exercised concurrently with provincial or federal governments, allowing underdeveloped rural areas to seek assistance from more well-equipped levels of government.

Each municipality has an executive (called a Mayor in urban municipalities and a Chairperson in rural ones) elected by FPTP, alongside a deputy elected by the same method and an elected chairperson in each ward - in rural areas, each former VDC is guaranteed at least one ward to represent it, and bigger ones are split as necessary. The wards also elect members to the municipal assembly, which is made up of four representatives per ward, two of whom must be women, in addition to the ward chairs. Finally, the assembly elects women and Dalit representatives to the executive, the latter of whom also get to speak and vote in the assembly itself - effectively a kind of alderman role, which ensures that these communities are represented in local government even if no candidates from them win election.

 

[Alex Richards]

Very nice work there

 

[Thande]

Very good work Max.

@Indicus ' description of the Keralan Communists makes them sound more like traditional peasant reformists (seen through a British lens, I think of Luddites and Chartists, though there are plenty of other comparisons) who are just using Communism as a flag of convenience because it was the big anti-establishment ideology of the time.

 

[OwenM]

The whole "abolition of the monarchy" thing is key to Nepal's recent history, because whereas India was under direct British rule and moved to rid itself of its feudal rulers soon after independence, Nepal was a more independent protectorate and never really had to fight for independence - the British simply left, keeping only a few diplomats and the army recruiters in Gorkha country, and India took over a lot of their role as the hegemonic regional power. The Nepalese monarchy was allied with India for the most part, and while its absolute rule was ended by the 1950s, a confrontation between the royal court and the left-leaning Nepali Congress government led to a coup in 1960, whereupon King Mahendra decided liberal democracy was all wrong for Nepal and should be replaced by a more "homegrown" system of nonpartisan, indirectly elected local assemblies of elders (panchayats) that sent delegates to a national legislature (the Rastriya Panchayat). This lasted, with some modifications, until 1990, when a mass movement (the Jana Andolan, or People's Uprising) forced Mahendra's son Birendra to abolish the Panchayat system and reintroduce partisan elections.

Just as a note on this, my understanding is that whilst Nepal was effectively an absolute monarchy until 1951, it was not the Shah monarchs for the previous century, but the Hereditary Prime Ministers, the Ranas, until the Shahs allied with India to get rid of them and (initially) open things up a bit as you say.
(In other Not Making Things Up cases, the process involved most of the Shahs fleeing into the Indian Embassy whilst heading out for a family picnic ahead of their bodyguards when it's gates were briefly opened and then shut again by prior arrangement).