Sushila Karki, a retired chief justice will become the first woman to lead Nepal, when she will be sworn in as interim leader later on Friday after violent anti-graft protests took Nepal Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli to step down, the office of the president announced.
The appointment of Karki was announced by the office of President Ramchandra Paudel after a discussion between Paudel, the army chief Ashok Raj Sigdel and the protesters who brought about the worst uprising in Nepal in many years.
The anti-graft protests by the Gen Z movement due to their age, most of them young, resulted in the killing of over 51 people and the injury of over 1,300 this week.
This social media ban that has since been reversed triggered the protest. Only on Tuesday, after Oli resigned, the violence stopped.
The oath of office would be sworn in at 9:15 local time (1530 GMT), said Archana Khadka Adhikari, information officer in the office of the president. Others would also be sworn in alongside her, two other ministers, local TV channels had reported.
Karki who is the only woman who has served as the chief justice is the choice that the protesters give because she is reputed to be honest and uncorrupted and has been standing against corruption.
She worked as the highest ranking judge approximately one year until mid-2017.
RESTORATION OF NORMALCY
The political and economic instabilities in Nepal have been struggling since the abolition of its monarchy in 2008, and the absence of employment opportunities pushes millions of people to find jobs in other nations and remit money back home.
With the nation of 30 million people creeping back to normalcy on Friday – stores were open, motor vehicles were on the roads, police had their guns exchanged with batons since the start of the week, bodies of those killed during the protests were returned to their families.
Certain roads were still barred but fewer troops patrolled the streets than usual.
His friends withdrew (at the protests), but he chose to proceed, Karuna Budhathoki said of her 23-year-old nephew, as she waited to pick him up at Kathmandu’s Teaching Hospital.
They told us that he had been brought dead into the hospital.
Ashab Alam Thakurai, 24 another protester who died had been married just a month before, his family said.
What we said to him last, he told us that he was bound up with the protest. We lost contact after that with him, and at last found him in the morgue, his uncle, Zulfikar Alam.
Chief Justice to Prime Minister.
Sushila Karki is not a politician (73). Her most notable thing is that she was the first female chief justice in Nepal, serving in the same office between July 2016 and June 2017. She spent her tenure at the bench with a no-corruption policy, which brought her both praise and criticism.
Her image as an honest jurist has turned her to the political limelight when Nepal is being struck by large-scale demonstrations on fraud and bad governance. A significant portion of the demonstrations demanded her to be made interim prime minister.
Her choice has already been compared with Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus who was invited to address the interim government of Bangladesh last year following a student-led uprising that dethroned Sheikh Hasina.
Early Life and Education
Sushila Karki was born in 1952 in eastern Nepal as the first born child in a family of seven children who were farmers. Her family was very close to Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala, the first democratically elected prime minister of Nepal in 1959.
In 1972 Ms Karki graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree at the Mahendra Morang Campus and in 1975 earned a master degree in political science at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in India. She got her degree of Bachelor of Laws in Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, three years later in 1978.
In 1985, she took a short-term job as assistant teacher working at Mahendra Multiple Campus in Dharan, and since 1979 she became established in the legal practice of Biratnagar.
Career and Controversy in the judiciary.
The uphill in the field of judiciary started in 2009, as she was designated as a temporary judge in the Supreme Court of Nepal. She was confirmed the following year as a permanent judge and by July 2016, she was made the chief justice.
In April 2017, a group of lawmakers in the then ruling Nepali Congress and CPN (Maoist Centre) filed an impeachment motion against her citing bias over a ruling that invalidated the chief of the influential anti-corruption watchdog. The movement caused her to be suspended at once.
The attempt backfired. There were mass protests in defence of judicial independence, and even the Supreme Court of Nepal interfered and stopped the proceedings. Within weeks, the impeachment motion was withdrawn, and Ms Karki soon resumed her position before retiring a month later in June 2017.
She ruled on several landmark cases in her tenure as chief justice, including the conviction of an Information and communications minister, Jaya Prakash Prasad Gupta, in a corruption case.
The India Connection
She studied at BHU in Varanasi where she met Durga Prasad Subedi who would be her future husband. Mr Subedi was a young leader of Nepali Congress and featured in a dramatic situation: hijacking of a domestic Nepal Airlines on June 10, 1973.
The aircraft, which had been carrying about 4 million Nepal rupees (equivalent at the time to about $400,000), that the state bank of Nepal had sent, was compelled to land at Forbesganj in the Bihar Purnea district. There was also Hindi film actress Mala Sinha onboard.
Reports on The New York Times were that the hijackers had flaunted a pistol to the pilot and ordered them to be diverted to India. No one was injured and once three boxes of money were removed, the plane was permitted to fly on.
The money was given over to Girija Prasad Koirala, who would become a 4 times Nepal prime minister who waited on the Indian side. The funds were also said to have been used to acquire weapons to the Nepali Congress armed resistance against the monarchy.
Indian authorities soon arrested Mr Subedi and others who took part in the hijacking and put them to two years in jail before releasing Mr Subedi back to Nepal earlier than the 1980 referendum.
The Revolutions That Made her the Power.
This week at least 51 people died and over 1,300 were injured after police opened fire on demonstrators who had gone against curfews. The protests started when the Oli government banned social media in the whole country, which was perceived to be an attempt to silencer opposition. That ban has been reinstated, but the turmoil grew out of proportions until the resignation of Mr Oli.
The casualties were confirmed by police and included 21 protesters, nine prisoners, three police officers and 18 others. It is only now that families start retrieving the corpses of their loved ones in Kathmandu hospitals.
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