Forgot your password?
First Advocate Of Making Nepal A Republic Passes Away
By KTM Metro Reporter
September 12, 2012: seventy-seven-year old Ramraja Prasad Singh passed away today morning while undergoing treatment at the Tribhuwan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu.
Thousands of people including Vice President Parmananda Jha, Prime Minister Dr. Baburam Bhattarai and top political party leaders such as Chairman of UCPN-Maoist Prachanda, Chairman of CPN-Maoist Mohan Vaidhya Kiran, and Vice-president of NC Ram Chandra Poudel paid tribute to Ramraja Prasad Singh offering flowers to his body kept for the public reverence at Tundikhel before taking it to cremation at Aryaghat today.
Cremation of his body was done with the full state honor of 13 gun salutes at Aryaghat in Kathmandu today. The cabinet headed by Prime Minister Dr. Baburam Bhattarai made a decision on providing him with the state honor of 13 gun salutes.
Ramraja Prasad Singh was a lawyer by profession and he was doing his profession very well in the late 1960s when the then king opened four slots in the legislature called Rastriya Panchayat for directly electing four persons from among the university graduates. The first elections went smoothly and elected Prayagraj Singh Suwal of NC, and Dr. Prakash Chandra Lohani: an economist and two others for four years. These directly elected four guys had made strong voices in the assembly of sycophants and apple polishers.
Prayagraj Singh Suwal destroyed his political career entering the then Panchayat politics while Dr. Prakash Chandra Lohani made a political fortune. Dr. Lohani is currently Vice-president of Rasriya Janashakti Party headed by one of the notorious politicians: Surya Bahadur Thapa.
In the next election, Ramraja Prasad Singh came up with a manifesto with the agenda of making Nepal a republic, as the monarchy has been responsible for the poverty of the people and backwardness of the country. Immediately, his manifesto became a hot cake and people sought for it for any price just to take a look at it.
Some of his colleagues said that this man must have gone mad presenting such a manifesto; he had destroyed his profession and business and would most probably land in a jail for his whole life. However, he managed to escape to India; he thus avoided jail.
Ramraja Prasad Singh became a hero overnight. Up until his manifesto came to light, nobody knew his name except for his layer colleagues. Thereafter, he was sought by the administration making him even more heroic. The Shah dynastic administration declared him an anti-national, and then the administration abolished the four slots in the Rastriya Panchayat for directly elected graduates, too.
He came back to Nepal only after Nepalis reinstated democracy in 1990. He became the candidate for the first president of Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal in 2008. He lost the election to the current President Dr. Ram Baran Yadav.
