The Kot Massacre (14 Sep 1846): How the Rana Regime Was Born

The Kot massacre, known in Nepali as the Kot parva (कोत पर्व), took place on the night of 14 September 1846, which corresponds to 2 Ashwin (Asoj) 1903 BS in the Bikram Sambat calendar. It unfolded in the Kot, the armoury and assembly courtyard beside the old royal palace at Hanuman Dhoka in central Kathmandu, from which the event takes its name.

In a matter of hours, Kaji Jung Bahadur Kunwar (later Jung Bahadur Rana) and his brothers, backed by loyal troops, killed a large part of Nepal's ruling aristocracy at a single emergency gathering. Contemporary and later accounts put the death toll at roughly thirty to forty people, including the sitting prime minister, senior kajis (ministers), generals and palace officers drawn from the great noble houses of the day.

The massacre destroyed the fragile balance of power among rival court factions and left one man, Jung Bahadur, in command of both the government and the army. It is remembered as the founding violence of the Rana regime, a hereditary autocracy of prime ministers that dominated Nepal for more than a century while the Shah kings were reduced to figureheads.

The Kot massacre did not happen in a vacuum. In the decades after the Sugauli Treaty of 1816, which ended the Anglo-Nepalese War and fixed Nepal's borders with British India, real power at court drifted away from the crown and into the hands of competing noble families, the Pandes, Thapas, Basnyats and Chautariya Shahs among them. King Rajendra Bikram Shah was widely seen as weak and indecisive, unable to hold these factions in check.

Into this rivalry stepped Rajya Lakshmi Devi, Rajendra's ambitious junior queen. She wanted the succession secured for her own son rather than for the recognised heir apparent, Crown Prince Surendra, and she looked for a strongman who could impose her will. Her favourite and confidant was Kaji Gagan Singh Bhandari, a rising general who reportedly commanded several regiments of the army, giving him more troops than the prime minister himself.

By 1846 the court was a nest of plots. The queen, the king, the heir apparent and the noble factions were all manoeuvring against one another, and violence between rival kajis was becoming routine. It was the assassination of Gagan Singh that lit the fuse.

On the night of 14 September 1846, Kaji Gagan Singh Bhandari was shot dead, reportedly while at worship in his own house. Because he was the queen's most trusted ally and one of the most powerful figures in the kingdom, his killing was an open political attack on Rajya Lakshmi Devi herself.

The queen reacted at once. Enraged and determined to identify and punish the killers, she ordered the entire administrative and military establishment of the country to assemble immediately at the Kot courtyard, an emergency Bhardari (council of nobles and officials). Summoned in the middle of the night, the leading kajis, generals, chautariyas and courtiers hurried to the armoury, many of them armed but none prepared for what followed.

Jung Bahadur Kunwar, then a relatively junior but rising military officer, had his own troops ready and moved quickly to control the gates of the Kot. According to widely repeated accounts, he ordered that people be allowed to enter the courtyard but not to leave without the express permission of the queen or himself, sealing the assembled nobility inside.

Inside the Kot the assembly descended into chaos. The queen demanded that the murderers of Gagan Singh be named and executed on the spot, while the king wavered and the factions accused one another. Prime Minister Fateh Jung Shah and other senior figures were unable to control the meeting, and armed quarrels broke out among the panicked nobles.

Accounts differ on exactly who struck first, but the trigger is usually placed at the moment when Kaji Abhiman Singh, a powerful noble, tried to force his way out of the sealed courtyard and was cut down. That killing set off a general slaughter. Jung Bahadur and his brothers and soldiers turned on the rival kajis and generals, and by the time the violence subsided a large part of Nepal's ruling class lay dead in the Kot.

King Rajendra, characteristically, took no firm side. He left the scene and is reported to have moved between the British Residency and the palace, effectively abandoning the field to Jung Bahadur. With the king absent and the queen dependent on him, Jung Bahadur was left as the only figure in control of the capital, the treasury and the army.

With her rivals dead and Jung Bahadur's soldiers in control, Queen Rajya Lakshmi Devi appointed him prime minister and commander-in-chief of the army, a move usually dated to 15 September 1846, the day after the massacre. The queen believed she had found the strongman who would crown her son; in fact she had installed the man who would soon sideline her.

Jung Bahadur immediately filled the vacant offices of state with his own brothers and kinsmen, so that the Kunwar family monopolised the government and the officer corps. Having eliminated the Pande, Thapa, Basnyat and Chautariya blocs in a single night, he faced no organised aristocratic opposition. The old system in which the crown balanced competing noble houses was finished.

The queen soon realised that Jung Bahadur would not serve her ambitions and began plotting to remove him. Her conspiracy would give him the pretext for a second purge and the excuse to push the royal family aside altogether.

Only weeks after the Kot, in late 1846, Queen Rajya Lakshmi Devi organised a plot, often linked to surviving members of the Basnyat family, to assassinate Jung Bahadur and his brothers. The conspiracy was betrayed. Jung Bahadur struck first, and its leaders were seized and executed in a second bloodletting at the Bhandarkhal garden near the palace, an event remembered as the Bhandarkhal parva (Bhandarkhal massacre).

A packed assembly of Rana-friendly notables then found the queen guilty of complicity. She was stripped of her powers and sent into exile at the Hindu pilgrimage city of Banaras (Varanasi) in British India. King Rajendra Bikram Shah, unwilling to abandon her, went with her, leaving the throne effectively empty of authority.

In 1847 Jung Bahadur completed the coup. He had Rajendra formally deposed and placed the pliant Crown Prince Surendra Bikram Shah on the throne. When Rajendra later tried to return and rally support in the Tarai, he was captured and kept under house arrest for the rest of his life. From this point the Shah kings reigned but did not rule.

Having crushed both the nobility and the crown, Jung Bahadur set about making his dominance permanent. He was named prime minister for life and secured the hereditary title of Rana. On 6 August 1856 King Surendra conferred on him the grand title of Maharaja of Kaski and Lamjung, two former hill principalities, elevating the prime minister to near-royal rank while the Shah king remained a ceremonial monarch.

Jung Bahadur devised a distinctive rule of succession under which the premiership passed not from father to son but from brother to brother, and then to the eldest nephews in order of seniority, the so-called roll of succession. This kept supreme power inside the extended Rana family for generations. His descendants and relatives added the name Rana to their own in his honour.

The regime Jung Bahadur founded on the night of the Kot massacre endured for roughly 104 years. It ran through a line of hereditary Rana prime ministers and ended only in 1951, when the last Rana premier, Mohan Shumsher, gave way after the revolution that restored the Shah monarchy under King Tribhuvan and opened Nepal to democratic politics. Jung Bahadur himself ruled, with one interruption, until his death on 25 February 1877.