Shree Panch Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev (Nepali: वीरेन्द्र वीर विक्रम शाह देव; 29 December 1945 – 1 June 2001) was King of Nepal from 1972 until his assassination in the 2001 Nepalese royal massacre.
Birendra was the first son of King Mahendra and crown princess Indra. He inherited the panchayat system from his father when he acceded the throne in 1972, ruling as Nepal's absolute monarch. Following the 1990 revolution, he disbanded the system, lifted the concurrent ban on political parties and promulgated a new constitution in which he served as head of state of a democratic constitutional monarchy. The Nepalese Civil War began in the latter part of his reign when the Communist Party of Nepal launched an insurgency in 1996.
Birendra was born at the Narayanhiti Royal Palace in Kathmandu as the second son of the then Crown Prince Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev and his first wife, Crown Princess Indra Rajya Lakshmi Devi. Despite Birendra not being the eldest son of Mahendra, he was made crown prince and heir apparent due to Mahendra's first son, Rabindra Shah, being born when he was unmarried, and was born to a Gurung woman which made him an "illegitimate child."
Birendra spent eight years studying at St Joseph's School, a Jesuit school in Darjeeling, with his brother Gyanendra. On 13 March 1955, their grandfather King Tribhuvan died and their father succeeded the Nepalese throne. With his father's ascension, Birendra became the crown prince of Nepal.
In 1959, Birendra was enrolled at Eton College in the United Kingdom. After studying at Eton until 1964, 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 later completed his education by spending some time at the University of Tokyo, before studying political theory at Harvard University from 1967 to 1968. Birendra enjoyed travelling in his youth, and went on trips to Canada, Latin America, Africa, many parts of India, and a number of other Asian countries. He was also an art collector and supporter of Nepalese craftspeople and artists and learned to fly helicopters.
Birendra was married to Aishwarya Rajya Lakshmi Devi from the Rana family, his second cousin, on 27 February 1970. The wedding, which was billed as one of the most lavish Hindu nuptial ceremonies in history, cost $9.5 million to stage.
Birendra ascended to the Nepalese throne on 31 January 1972, at the age of 26, after the death of his father, King Mahendra. However, his coronation was delayed until 24 February 1975, 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. As a Hindu monarch, he had to follow Nepalese tradition.
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. During the 1980s the restraints that had been imposed on political organizations were eased, and liberal student-led groups started to demand constitutional change in Nepal. Because of the growing pro-democracy movement Birendra announced that a referendum to decide between a party-less or a multi-party system would be held. During, referendum options were given for a multi-party system or a Panchayati system. The referendum was held in May 1980 with the party-less system winning by a margin of 55% to 45%. The result of the election led the king to make mass restructuring of country both economically and politically. 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 1990.
In 1990, 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 1990. 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 commission presented him with the draft of the proposed constitution on 10 September 1990. 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 1990, Birendra promulgated the new constitution that transformed Nepal into a constitutional monarchy. As a constitutional monarch, Birendra became more popular than he had been as an autocratic ruler attributing to his democratic views and behaviors as well as the inability of the political parties. Birendra, however, could not prevent the Nepalese Civil War, a conflict between Maoist rebels and government forces, which lasted from 1996 until 2006.
On 1 June 2001, Birendra and his immediate family were massacred by his son, Crown Prince Dipendra, during a dinner event at the Narayanhiti Palace, the residence of the Nepali monarchy. After shooting himself, the comatose Dipendra was proclaimed King. He failed to regain consciousness and was declared dead a few days later. Birendra's younger brother Gyanendra was then made king.
Notable works and improvements
He managed to maintain Nepal's independence despite encroaching influences by India, China, and the Soviet Union. His first trips abroad as king were to India in October 1973 and China two months later. He prevented the breaking up of Mustang from Nepal and Tibet from China during the Mustang revolution. The disarmament of Khampas rebellions working against China brought Nepal-China relations to a new height. His compatriots remember him for his extensive campaign and contribution for the establishment of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and South Asian food reserve. During his reign, he was also able to set up the SAARC Secretariat in Kathmandu. He was able to establish diplomatic relations with additional 46 countries taking the total number of countries for diplomatic relations from 49 to 96. He further strengthened Nepal's policy of neutrality by promoting Nepal as zone of Peace in the UN. He believed that Nepal, sandwiched between the two Asian powers, should have good relationship with both.
He proposed Nepal to be declared a zone of Peace in the United Nations meeting, taking into consideration Nepal's historic peace status, birth of Gautam Buddha and its historical policy of Non-alignment to any foreign powers. This proposal was supported by 116 countries in the UNO. He later established a "Peace Keeping Training Camp" in 1986. This was later restructured into a training institute in 2001 for training peace keeping forces. It was later renamed as Birendra Peace Operations Training Centre. This institute, was later restructured as the training organization through which Nepal started sending trained, peace-keeping forces in cooperation with the UN and became an active member of it. In 1974, King Birendra was successful in peacefully disarming the Khampas rebellions, settled in the northern Himalayan region, by giving land, money and citizenship to those who surrendered their arms, and by confiscating weapons as well. Thus who did not surrender would be prohibited from moving toward the Tibetan region. Birendra is also credited with blocking the use of the army for suppressing the Maoist revolution in the country, which would've further aggravated the situation and disturbed the peace in the nation.
King Birendra was regarded as a lover of nature and a great supporter of nature conservation. The trend of nature conservation from the government started during his reign. The dramatic decline of the rhinoceros population due to massive Terai migration and the extent of poaching prompted the government to institute the Rhino Patrol force (Nepali: गैडा गस्ती ) of 130 armed men and a network of guard posts all over Chitwan. To prevent the extinction of rhinos through a legal system, National park law was introduced which gazetted the Chitwan National Park in December 1970, with borders delineated the following year and established in 1973.