The late 1980s and early 1990 will long be remembered as "the time of great upheavals" in the history of democracy and human rights. Mikhail Gorbachev's "New Thinking" Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness) has changed Soviet life and has also worked as a catalyst in transforming the communist world. In eastern Europe - Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia - decades-old orthodoc communist regimes were replaced by multi-party systems (MPS) after the "Velvet Revolution", a remarkably quiet overthrow of communism. Similarly the Soviet Union, the fatherland of communism and Mongolia, the first Asian communist country, have changed their political system from the totalitarian rule of the communist party to multy-party democracy. Only Ceausescu in Romania was toppled by a bloody revolution.
The "winds of change" sweeping the world also touched the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal where the politicised section of society, at large, had been long discontented with the authoritarian partyless panchayat system.
