Coup Atlas Research Database
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79012151960SuccessfulAuto-coup

Nepal, 1960 — auto-coup

Nepal (NPL)South Asia, AsiaDecember 15, 1960

Event Summary

On December 15, 1960 King Mahendra of Nepal carried out a royal auto coup against his own elected government. Invoking emergency powers under Article 55 of the 1959 constitution, he dismissed Prime Minister B.P.

Koirala's Nepali Congress cabinet only 18 months after it took office following Nepal's first general election, arrested the ministers, the presidents of both chambers, and party leaders, suspended the constitution and parliament, and banned political parties, taking direct control with army support. Koirala, the country's first democratically elected prime minister, spent eight years in prison and much of the rest of his life in prison or exile. Mahendra went on to institute the partyless Panchayat system, formalized in a new constitution in December 1962, which endured until the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1990.

Declassified US commentary read the coup as driven less by Mahendra's stated charges of corruption and communism than by fear for his own position.

Researched Details

Researched

Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.

Target identified in Coup Atlas research: Prime Minister B.P. Koirala, dismissed and imprisoned. He was not physically harmed but spent eight years in prison and later lived largely in imprisonment and exile.
RESEARCHED NAME
Key figures
Mahendra (king of Nepal, coup leader)
B.P. Koirala (deposed prime minister, imprisoned)
Allen Dulles (CIA director whose NSC briefing assessed the coup)
Henry Stebbins (US ambassador whose cables assessed Mahendra's motives)

Sources

The 1960 Nepal coup was led by King Mahendra on 15 December 1960; the same day he dismissed the cabinet of B.P. Koirala and imprisoned Koirala, and on 13 April 1961 he introduced Panchayat, a partyless political system.
SOURCE REVIEWED Wikipedia, 1960 Nepal coup d'etat open source ↗
A dispatch by Swiss ambassador Jacques-Albert Cuttat dated December 20, 1960 recorded that the king, using Article 55 of the constitution, suspended almost all of the constitution, arrested all the ministers of the Koirala cabinet, the presidents of the chambers, the heads of ministries, and the leaders of all the parties, and took over direction of the country with the support of the army.
SOURCE REVIEWED The Record (Nepal), A worried monarch, quoting the Cuttat dispatch open source ↗
A week after the coup CIA Director Allen Dulles told the National Security Council the coup owed to Koirala being seen as too progressive and having too close relations with India, while US Ambassador Henry Stebbins cabled that Mahendra was guided less by corruption or communism than by a growing fear that his own position and prestige were dwindling.
SOURCE REVIEWED Nepali Times, America, Nepal and the Royal Coup open source ↗
B.P. Koirala, Nepal's first democratically elected prime minister, held office for 18 months before being deposed and imprisoned on the orders of King Mahendra, and spent the rest of his life largely in imprisonment and exile.
SOURCE REVIEWED Wikipedia, B. P. Koirala open source ↗

Editorial Note

Auto coup by the sitting monarch, so the deposed executive is the elected prime minister rather than the head of state. The Panchayat constitution followed on December 16, 1962. Dataset fate deposed; not physically harmed matches Koirala's imprisonment without physical harm.

Cross-Reference

Only one dataset carries it. One of the three reference datasets we check against carries this event; the others do not list it. That is not a contradiction — the datasets cover different periods and use different thresholds — but it means the record has had less outside corroboration.

Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:

Cline Center id
79012151960

How the match is made is described in crossref-report.md.

Outcome and Target

Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: Prime Minister B.P. Koirala, dismissed and imprisoned. He was not physically harmed but spent eight years in prison and later lived largely in imprisonment and exile..

Baseline coding: Incumbent executive removed from power. Recorded leader fate: deposed; not physically harmed. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.

Baseline Dataset Citation
Cline Center Coup d’État Project Dataset, v2.2.2
Peyton, Buddy, Joseph Bajjalieh, Michael Martin, and Andrea Gerald. 2026. Cline Center Coup d’État Project Dataset. Cline Center for Advanced Social Research. V.2.2.2. February 17. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. doi: 10.13012/B2IDB-9651987_V10
Open dataset DOI ↗
⚑ This citation establishes the coded baseline record; use the claim-level sources above for the researched narrative.

Baseline Source-Document Entries

CSP

Named in the baseline source document; no article citation was recorded.

Luttwak

Named in the baseline source document; no article citation was recorded.

Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahendra_of_Nepal

New York Times

“2 Ex-Premiers Nominated To All-Nepali Conference,” June 5, 1962
“King Mahendra of Nepal Dead; Hindu on Throne for 15 years,” January 31, 1972

This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →

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