The 20 March passing of Girija Prasad Koirala marks the end of an era in Southasian politics, for he was the lone national-level survivor whose public life reached as far as the Quit India Movement of the 1940s. Born in exile in Bihar to parents who fought the Rana regime in Nepal, 'G P' was, like his elder brother Bisweshwor Prasad ('B P'), groomed in the tenets of classical democracy in the company of Indian stalwarts including Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. While undoubtedly an autocrat who wielded complete control over his Nepali Congress party for the last two decades (after sidelining two seniors), G P was a true democrat as far as the larger polity was concerned. He challenged the autocracy of former King Gyanendra at a time when every other leader of note agreed to compromise. Indeed, his resolute insistence on the reinstatement of the Parliament, dismissed by Gyanendra in February 2005, paved the way for the orderly collapse of the monarchy and the evolution of the new Nepali republic as a democracy.
As five-time prime minister and the person at the helm of Nepali affairs for the last two decades, G P made his share of mistakes in governance. He was also unable to understand and adjust to the pressures of economic globalisation and demographic shifts, and certainly failed to respond as a politician should to the identity-led demands of marginalised communities of the country's hill and plain. Yet he did understand that, above all, it was pluralism that would raise Nepali society from its economic doldrums, and benefit each and every citizen. It was fortunate for the nation that he was prime minister when the royal-palace massacre of June 2001 nearly pushed the nation state off its moorings, and it was mostly G P's stature that kept the opportunists and anarchists at bay at that time. Without him, it would have been far more difficult for the Maoists to come aboveground through the 12-point agreement of the autumn of 2006; while at the same time, without him Nepal may have slid from a 'republic' towards a 'people's republic'.
The 85-year-old Girija Prasad would have died "disconsolate", as one commentator put it, because he was acutely aware that the work of consolidating peace and democracy in Nepal remained unfinished. The country's new constitution is stuck at the drafting stage due to the extreme polarisation between the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the other parties, and the demobilisation of the cadre in the Maoist cantonments is yet to happen. In addition, the Maoists have placed several undemocratic elements into the constitution's draft provisions – based on their insistence on rejecting 'pluralism' while accepting multiparty competition, and a flawed if not prejudiced understanding of the separation of powers in which the judiciary would be kept subservient to the legislature. There are numerous other weaknesses in the various draft articles, from a neglect of local government in which Nepal's own successes are ignored to the proposal to define the country's new federal divisions on the basis of identity, the matter of economic efficiency having been ignored.
The citizenry had looked to G P to use his credibility and stature to find a way out of the morass, both on combatant management and constitution-drafting. As a consistent votary of liberal values and open society, there had been a hope that he could pull it off, but emphysema from lifelong chain-smoking had weakened his body. A man whose entire political capital was based on constant interaction with party workers and feeling the pulse of the polity through incessant travel was thus increasingly confined to his sick bed and oxygenator. His decision to foist his daughter Sujata, a neophyte politician, to lead the Nepali Congress in the cabinet of Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal also weakened, in one stroke, the latter's cabinet and dramatically affected the ageing patriarch's hold on his own party. Overall, this rapid loss of health and stature came as a grievous drawback to Nepal's unique and fast-progressing peace process.