Nepal's seventh constitution: a state built from the ward up

How the current constitution was written

Nepal was declared a federal republic on 28 May 2008, eighteen months after the Comprehensive Peace Accord of 21 November 2006 ended a ten-year civil war. What the new republic did not have on that day was a constitution to be a republic under. The Interim Constitution of 15 January 2007 was a bridge, and it gave the Constituent Assembly a deadline: a permanent text by 28 April 2010.

The assembly missed it. It postponed promulgation by a year, and on 25 May 2011 the Supreme Court of Nepal ruled that the 2010 extension had not been lawful. From 29 May 2011 the interim text was extended again and again, until on 28 May 2012 the assembly dissolved with nothing written, ending four years of drafting and leaving the country in a legal vacuum.

A second Constituent Assembly was elected on 19 November 2013 and its leaders promised a text inside a year, naming 22 January 2015 as the day. They missed that as well, on the same three questions that had blocked the first assembly: what system of government to adopt, how to arrange the judiciary, and how many provinces to carve, where, and under what names. The earthquake of April 2015 changed the arithmetic in Kathmandu, and the constitution came into effect on 20 September 2015, replacing the interim text after eight years of it.

The final vote is worth reading closely. Of 598 assembly members, 538 voted in favour and 60 against, with several Terai-based parties from the southern plains staying out of the process. 90% endorsement is a large majority, and the dissent came from the belt along the Indian border, on the boundary question that had held the assembly up for seven years.

Why so many constitutions came before this one

The 2015 text is the seventh Nepal has been governed under since 1948, in sixty-eight years of constitutional development. The six before it were written for a ruler and issued by one.

Each of the six did a job for the office that produced it. The 1948 act introduced limited democratic elements under a hereditary prime ministership and went nowhere, because the Rana rulers who wrote it had no intention of giving power away. The 1951 act, promulgated at the end of the Rana period, strengthened the king, created the Supreme Court and wrote fundamental rights into Nepali law for the first time. The 1959 constitution set up a bicameral parliament and let the king appoint half the upper house and suspend parliament in defined circumstances; Sir Ivor Jennings advised the commission that drafted it. The 1962 constitution abolished political parties outright and installed the partyless panchayat system, under which the king could amend or suspend the text in an emergency. The 1990 constitution, which followed the first Jana Andolan, lifted the ban on parties and curtailed the king's authority, and its critics argued that a text for a country of many languages and communities had not represented most of them.

The pattern the 2015 assembly inherited was therefore not an absence of constitutions. It was a run of documents that each described a state and none of which had been drafted by a body the electorate chose. That is the difference the seventh was built to make, and it is why the preamble opens in the voice of the sovereign people and closes by saying the text was passed through the Constituent Assembly.

What the constitution says about who governs

Article by article the text is unusually explicit about identity. Nepal is defined as an independent, indivisible, sovereign, secular, inclusive, democratic, socialism-oriented federal democratic republican state, and the word secular is doing work in a country that was the world's only Hindu kingdom until 2008. Nepali in the Devanagari script is the official language, while every language spoken as a mother tongue in Nepal is named a language of the nation, and the government was required to constitute a Language Commission within one year of commencement to recommend criteria for recognising further official languages.

Part 3 guarantees thirty-one fundamental rights, from life with dignity through employment, clean environment, education, health care, food, housing and social security, and the state was bound to pass the legislation those rights require within three years of commencement. Affirmative action is written into the same part, listing women, Dalits, indigenous nationalities, Madhesi, Tharu, Muslim, minority, marginalised, disabled and economically indigent Khas Arya citizens among its intended beneficiaries. The document is largely written in gender-neutral terms.

The executive is capped and constrained. The federal Council of Ministers may not exceed twenty-five members including the prime minister. A candidate defeated in the election to the sitting House of Representatives cannot be appointed a minister during that House's term. A no-confidence motion cannot be moved in the first two years after a prime minister's appointment, and when one is moved it must name the member proposed to take over. Those two rules were written by people who had watched governments in the constituent assembly years last about nine months each.

How the federal parliament is elected

The Federal Parliament has two houses. The House of Representatives holds 275 members elected for five-year terms, of whom 165 are returned from single-seat constituencies by first past the post and 110 through proportional representation. The proportional half runs on closed lists, and the constitution instructs parties to draw those lists from seven named communities, women, Dalits, indigenous peoples, Khas Arya, Madhesi, Tharu and Muslims, together with a category for under-served regions, weighted by population and balanced geographically.

Then comes the rule that changes the composition of every party delegation: at least one third of the total members each party has in the Federal Parliament must be women. A party that wins its constituency seats mostly with men has to correct the ratio from its closed list, which turns the proportional half into an instrument for meeting a quota as much as for converting votes into seats.

The National Assembly is a permanent house of 59. Fifty-six of them are elected eight from each province, and at least three of each province's eight must be women. The remaining three are nominated by the president on the government's recommendation, at least one of them a woman. One of the Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives must be a woman, and the same applies to the chairperson and vice-chairperson of the National Assembly.

Why the president holds so little power

Nepal's head of state is elected by nobody directly. An electoral college made up of the members of the Federal Parliament and the members of the seven provincial assemblies chooses the president, and all of those electors are themselves directly elected. The president is head of state and supreme commander of the Nepali Army, and the functioning of government is managed by the prime minister, who is the parliamentary party leader of the majority in the House of Representatives and whom the president is obliged to appoint.

There is also a vice-president, and one constitutional condition on the pair that has no obvious parallel: the president and the vice-president must be of different sex or community. A person already elected twice as president cannot stand again.

The highest offices carry a citizenship test as well. Only a citizen of Nepal by descent may be elected, nominated or appointed president, vice-president, prime minister, chief justice, speaker of the House of Representatives, chief of a province, chief minister, speaker of a provincial assembly or head of a security body. A Nepali citizen holding permanent residence in another country is disqualified from any elected, nominated or appointed office. For a country whose remittances come from hundreds of thousands of citizens working abroad, that clause draws a hard line between earning outside Nepal and governing inside it.

How power was pushed down to the wards

Before 2015 Nepal was a unitary state. The constitution replaced that with three levels, federation, province and local, and enumerated the exclusive and concurrent powers of each in its schedules, leaving residual power with the federation.

Seven provinces were created, each made up of between eight and fourteen districts. Their names and their capitals were left for each provincial assembly to settle by a two-thirds majority of its own members, which is the one large question the drafters declined to answer and handed to the bodies the text created. Each province has a unicameral assembly and a Westminster arrangement inside it: a chief minister who commands a majority, a council of ministers capped at 20% of the assembly's size, and the same bar on no-confidence motions for the first two years. A chief of province, appointed by the president, sits in each one as the federal government's representative. The assembly itself is sized off the province's federal seats, with members equal to twice its first-past-the-post seats in the House of Representatives treated as 60% of the chamber and a further 40% elected proportionally.

Underneath sit 753 local units, 293 of them urban and 460 rural, and within the urban count six metropolitan and eleven sub-metropolitan municipalities alongside 276 ordinary ones. They divide into 6,743 wards. These are not administrative offices of the centre. Local governments hold executive and legislative powers and limited judicial powers in their own jurisdiction, and their composition is specified in the text: each village executive seats four women members and two members from Dalit or minority communities, each municipal executive five women and three from Dalit or minority communities, and every ward sends at least two women to its assembly. A district coordination committee of at most nine, including at least three women and at least one Dalit or minority member, coordinates between them, and its role is a small one.

Disputes of a political nature between the federation and a province, or between provinces, go to an Inter-State Council chaired by the prime minister and seating the home minister, the finance minister and the chief ministers.

Who decides what the constitution means

The judiciary is described in the text as independent, competent and unitary, and it sits in three tiers: the Supreme Court, one High Court in each province, and one District Court in each district. The Supreme Court seats a chief justice and up to twenty other judges, and inside it a Constitutional Bench of five judges including the chief justice hears constitutional questions. The chief justice is appointed by the president on the recommendation of the Constitutional Council; every other judge is appointed on the recommendation of the Judicial Council. The courts hold the power of judicial review.

One clause matters more than its length suggests: any criminal offence carrying imprisonment for more than one year may be tried only by a court, a specialised court, a military court or a judicial body. That closes the route by which an executive agency tries serious cases itself.

Amendment is deliberately hard, and it is hard in a specific direction. No amendment may be made that is prejudicial to Nepal's sovereignty, territorial integrity or independence, or to the sovereignty vested in the people. Any amendment bill that would alter the borders or the powers of a province must be sent by the speaker to that province's assembly within thirty days of introduction, and it can only return to the Federal Parliament if that assembly approves it by majority. Every amendment bill is published for public information within thirty days of introduction. The constitution has been amended twice since promulgation, in 2016 and in 2020.

Alongside the courts the text creates a bank of standing commissions, several of them named for the communities the drafting fight was about: the National Women Commission, the National Dalit Commission, the National Inclusion Commission, the Indigenous Nationalities Commission, the Madhesi Commission, the Tharu Commission and the Muslim Commission, together with a National Natural Resources and Fiscal Commission. They join bodies that already existed, among them the Election Commission, the National Human Rights Commission, the Auditor General, the Public Service Commission and the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority, which investigates and prosecutes corruption and abuse of office and reports to no minister.

How Nepal handles its two neighbours and the world

What balanced relations means in practice

Nepal is landlocked between India and China and its stated doctrine is balanced relations with both. The two relationships are built differently.

With India the arrangement is the 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship and an open border. People move across it freely, Nepalis may own property in India, Indians may live and work in Nepal, and religious, cultural and marital ties run through the same crossings. Nepal buys all of its oil and gas from India. Territorial disputes have complicated the relationship, and in 2015 an economic blockade imposed by India showed what a single land route means for a country with no coast.

With China the relationship is younger and narrower. Diplomatic relations were established on 1 August 1955 and a Treaty of Peace and Friendship followed in 1960, since when the two have conducted relations on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. Citizens of either country may cross the border and travel up to thirty kilometres without a visa. Nepal holds to the One China policy and restricts anti-China activity among Tibetan refugees on its territory. After the 2015 blockade China granted Nepal access to its ports for third-country trade and Nepal joined the Belt and Road Initiative, which is the clearest thing balanced relations has produced.

Nepal takes no side in disputes between the two. That is a policy, and for a state with no seaport and one land route to each neighbour it is also an arithmetic.

Where Nepal stands in the multilateral bodies

Nepal joined the United Nations on 14 December 1955 and the World Trade Organization on 23 April 2004. It maintains bilateral diplomatic relations with 167 countries and the European Union, keeps embassies in 30 countries and six consulates, hosts 25 resident embassies in Kathmandu and deals with more than 80 further countries through non-resident missions. Its multilateral memberships run from the Non-Aligned Movement and the Group of 77 to the Colombo Plan, the Asian Development Bank and the Asian Cooperation Dialogue.

Two commitments stand out. Nepal pushed for the creation of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and hosts its permanent secretariat in Kathmandu, which puts the permanent machinery of South Asian regionalism in Kathmandu. And Nepal has contributed more than 119,000 personnel to 42 United Nations peacekeeping missions since 1958, from an army of fewer than a hundred thousand, almost entirely ground infantry, on a military budget of 398.5 million dollars in 2018, about 1.4% of gross domestic product.

It was the first South Asian country to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. It also voted in favour of recognising Palestine at the United Nations and against recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Non-alignment in Nepali practice has meant voting on the question and declining to join a camp.

What the constitution has not settled

The Terai parties that stayed out of the 2015 vote objected to the provincial boundaries, and the amendment clause hands each provincial assembly a veto over changes to its own borders, which means the objection and the remedy are locked against each other by design.

Citizenship is the other open seam. A foreign woman married to a Nepali citizen may take naturalised citizenship. A person born to a Nepali woman married to a foreign citizen may only take naturalised citizenship, and only if domiciled in Nepal and holding no foreign nationality. A child of a Nepali mother whose father cannot be traced receives citizenship by descent, which converts to naturalised citizenship if the father is later found to be a foreigner. Nepali law discriminates by gender against foreign nationals married to Nepali citizens, paternal lineage is required in legal documents, and many provisions on the books go unenforced. That sits against a legal code that has abolished the death penalty, recognises marital rape as a crime and supports abortion rights.

External assessments disagree about what to call the result. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Nepal a hybrid regime in 2022, while the Polity data series in 2018 classed it as a democracy.

The institutions themselves were only filled in stages. The first general election since the end of the civil war was held in 2017, along with the provincial and local elections that gave the three tiers their first officeholders, and the second general election followed in 2022. In September 2025 a ban on a number of social media platforms brought protests that widened into a movement against political corruption, the prime minister resigned on 9 September, and a former chief justice was sworn in on 12 September as interim prime minister, the first woman to hold the office. Parliament was dissolved at her request and a general election followed in 2026. The history article takes up how the country reached that point.