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After a successful consolidation of its territory, despite a humiliating defeat to Chinese Qing Dynasty after a failed invasion of Tibet in the 1790s, Nepal became threatened in the early-nineteenth century by British imperialism and the East India Company. Following the Anglo-Nepalese War (1814–1816), the kingdom retained its independence in the Sugauli Treaty in exchange for territorial concessions equating to a third of the territory then under Nepalese rule, sometimes known as "Greater Nepal". Political instability following the war resulted in the political ascendancy of the Rana dynasty, who beginning with Jung Bahadur became the hereditary Prime Ministers of Nepal from 1843 to 1951, reducing the role of the Shah monarch to that of a figurehead. Rana rule was marked by tyranny, debauchery, economic exploitation and religious persecution.
The mid-twentieth century began an era of moves towards the democratisation of Nepal. The newly independent India would play an important role in supporting King Tribhuhvan, whom the Rana leader Mohan Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana in 1950 had attempted to depose and replace with his infant grandson King Gyanendra, and in supporting a new government consisting largely of the Nepali Congress, effectively ending the rule of the Rana dynasty.
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As a result of the massacre, King Gyanendra returned to the throne. His imposition of direct rule in 2005 provoked a protest movement unifying the Maoist insurgency and pro-democracy activists. He was eventually forced to restore Nepal's House of Representatives, which in 2007 adopted an interim constitution greatly restricting the powers of the Nepalese monarchy. Following an election held the next year, the Nepalese Constituent Assembly formally abolished the kingdom in its first session on 28 May 2008, declaring in its place the establishment of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal.
Until the abolition of the monarchy, Nepal was the world's only country to have Hinduism as its state religion; the country is now formally a secular state.

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