NEWS ANALYSIS : Resignation May Work in Nepalese Leader’s Favor : Asia: Girija Prasad Koirala retains power as caretaker premier while peddling his platform to the voters.

For three years, a septuagenarian workaholic who suffers from fainting spells served as prime minister of Nepal as the poor, isolated Shangri-La experimented with parliamentary democracy.

This week, assailed by lawmakers he thought were his allies as well as by opposition Communists, the beleaguered Girija Prasad Koirala resigned. Elections have been called for Nov. 13.

The jury is still out on Koirala’s performance. But the leader from the Nepali Congress Party would have done well to heed the old French nobleman’s prayer--”God protect me from my friends, I’ll take care of my enemies”--for it was Koirala’s supposed party buddies who did him in.

The moment of truth came Sunday. During a crucial parliamentary vote on his government’s program, 36 dissident Congress legislators abstained. Koirala was able to muster only 74 “yes” votes in the 205-seat House of Representatives. “I have no moral authority to stay in office,” Koirala announced, then tendered his resignation to Nepal’s king.

Delighted by his fall, hundreds of people staged a victory march through Katmandu’s streets, chanting, “Democracy, hi, hi, Giriji, bye-bye!”

The cheering, though, was premature. As the painful story of the infancy of Nepalese democracy continues to be written, it may well be Koirala who has the last laugh.

Until recently, Nepal, a land the size of Arkansas, was ruled by a Hindu absolute monarch, Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev. In 1990, after a long political struggle in which up to 500 people died, the Eton- and Harvard-educated king gave in, delegating sovereignty to his subjects.

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The next year, after creation of a constitutional monarchy and Parliament, the Nepalese were able to vote in multi-party elections for the first time in three decades. On May 29, 1991, as a result of the election victory of the Nepali Congress, Koirala, 71, the brother of two former prime ministers, took over the reins.

As a seasoned leader of the Congress, spearhead of the popular movement that successfully campaigned for the establishment of European-style democracy, Koirala vowed to deliver immediate relief to his 20 million fellow citizens.

But within three months of the premier’s swearing in, his comrade in arms, Ganesh Man Singh, commander in chief of the 1990 pro-democracy movement, was calling loudly for his resignation. One reason, it appears, was Singh’s failure to get a cousin appointed to the Planning Commission; another was the failure of the now-ailing “supremo” of the Congress, unlike Koirala, to be one of his party’s 114 members elected to the House of Representatives.

The third powerful party figure, Nepali Congress President Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, also proved incapable of winning election. His most recent bid, when he was beaten by the widow of a Communist leader this February, was a fiasco.

This month Koirala buried the hatchet with Bhattarai. But that wasn’t enough to snuff out the mutiny by party dissidents who accused him of sabotaging Bhattarai’s campaign and who withheld support last weekend. According to Koirala’s own analysis, the root of his problems lay in the fact that although Congress campaigned for free elections, it never concerned itself about what to do if it won. “We had not done our homework and we were not psychologically prepared,” he said recently.

But his government also came to be widely accused of incompetence and corruption, and symptoms of the same post-democratic hangover that has affected the ex-Soviet Union became chronic in Nepal.

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“Shangri-La” is the evocative nickname often given to Nepal, with its majestic, snow-clad Himalayan peaks and emerald valleys. But for most who live there, it is no Eden. More than four-fifths of the Nepalese eke out a living through subsistence farming. Public health is still so poor that each year 45,000 children die of diarrhea.

Political scientists, such as Prof. Lok Raj Baral of Katmandu’s Tribhuvan University, see Nepal as in an uneasy transitional phase in which institutions from the old absolute monarchy coexist with democracy. “The bureaucracy is intact, it’s the same army and police,” Baral says. “The only new people are the ones in Parliament.”

He accuses Koirala and his colleagues of having been too slow and timid in asserting their authority, both in government and over the fractious Nepali Congress.

Koirala’s foes on the left also became near-permanent sources of concern. Communist support gave the pro-democracy movement a crucial boost, and the Communists won 81 seats in Parliament. But when Koirala’s government was only 29 days old, the Communists began leading strikes and protests.

After Koirala’s resignation, both the Communists and Bhattarai on behalf of the Congress demanded the chance to form a new government. But the route out of the governmental crisis that was unexpectedly chosen by King Birendra has given Koirala a second chance.

A royal communique issued Monday said Koirala had been asked to stay on as Nepal’s caretaker premier and organize the November parliamentary elections. So instead of having to hand power over now to a successor government, Koirala gets to wield the perks of his office for four more months, then to appeal directly to voters for their support.

He now seems keen on doing so. “I don’t see any other alternative to going to people and seeking their fresh mandate,” he told reporters.

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Dahlburg, The Times’ New Delhi Bureau chief, recently was on assignment in Nepal.