This Constitution, both in its broad outline and in its detail, must therefore emphatically perform three roles vital for any democracy. It must be a founding document which sets out the basic and fundamental principles around which the New Nepal will be built. It must be a guiding document which sets out the ground rules for regulating social and political life. And it must be a trumping document that, in a situation of dispute, becomes the final arbiter.

If the deliberations in the constituent assembly recognise this historic task of producing such a document, both in letter and in the new public imagination, then it will have made the defining moment into a new dawn. It will have protected the new Nepal from not just the politics of the palace but also from palace politics that plagues so many of our democracies, especially those in South Asia. The first big symbolic step has been taken today. The king has become a citizen.

The writer is director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Views are personal