He was arrested along with Girija Prasad Koirala and four other National Congress leaders and taken with his fellow agitators to Kathmandu via a 21-day long, slow walk across the hills.

The prisoners' march attracted much attention and helped to radicalise the peasants whose villages lay en route.

The Koiralas along with other detainees were kept in a Kathmandu bungalow but were soon released after a 27-day hunger strike, popular protests, and at the request of Mahatma Gandhi in August 1947.

Only a fragmented parliament was expected, but Koirala's Nepali Congress scored a landslide, taking more than two-thirds of the seats in the lower house.

Koirala led his country's delegation to the United Nations and made carefully poised visits to China and India, then increasingly at odds over territorial disputes.

King Mahendra, on 15 December 1960, suspended the constitution, dissolved parliament, dismissed the cabinet, imposed direct rule, and for good measure imprisoned Koirala and his closest government colleagues.

During that time, King Birendra asked the then Prime Minister Dr Tulsi Giri, a tough political rival of Koirala to recommend to him by the joint meeting of the Council of Ministers and Back to the Village National Campaign Central Committee, whether Koirala should be freed for medical treatment in the USA or not.

Accordingly, the joint meeting recommended King Birendra to release Koirala and provide him with the necessary expense for medical treatment in the USA.

The then Royal Nepalese Embassy in the Washington DC, was instructed to provide all support to the Koirala family for the medical treatment.

[10] King Birendra, educated in England and the United States, succeeded his father in 1972 when the political climate was believed to be gradually improving.

Koirala, however, was arrested immediately upon his return from exile in 1976[11] and charged with the capital offence of attempting armed revolution.

The Prime Minister Surya Bahadur Thapa convinced the king to allow Koirala to proceed to the US for treatment as per recommendation from the royal physician Dr. M. R. Pandey.

The government of Nepal bore a portion of the cost of his medical treatment in the US, while the rest was arranged by his nephew Shail Updhaya, Dr. Shukdev Shah, family and friends.

After returning from a further medical visit to the United States, he had a series of audiences with King Birendra, as he tried for a "national reconciliation".

However, owing to differences in the electoral process to seek membership of class organization as mandatory, Koirala demanded a boycott of the 1981 elections.

He addressed one of Nepal's largest public meetings in recent years in Kathmandu's Ratna Park in January 1982.

While Koirala is considered one of the most charismatic political leader of Nepal, he was also one of the most well-read and thoughtful writers of Nepalese literature.

[12] His first stories were published in Banaras in Hansa, a Hindi literary magazine edited by Prem Chand (India's Tolstoy).

They include: Teen Ghumti (Three Turns), 1968; Narendra Dai (Brother Narendra), 1969; Sumnima (A story of the first Kirata woman), 1969; Modiain (The Grocer's Wife), 1980; Shweta Bhairavi (The White Goddess of Terror), 1983; Babu Ama ra chora (Father, mother and sons), 1989; and an incomplete autobiography Mero Katha (My Story), 1983, and many more yet to be published.

Koirala also has dozens of political essays including the following: "Rajatantra ra Lokatantra" ("Monarchy and Democracy"), 1960; "Thichieka Janata Jagisake" ("The Oppressed People Rise"), 1969; "Rastriyata Nepalko Sandarbhama" ("Nationalism in the Context of Nepal"), 1970; "Kranti: Ek Anivaryata" ("Revolution: An Absolute Necessity"), 1970; "Panchayati Vyavastha Prajatantrik Chaina" ("The Panchayat System is not Democratic"), 1978; "Prajatantra ra Samajvad" ("Democracy and Socialism"), 1979; and "Rastriya Ekata ko Nimti Ahwan" ("A Call for National Reconciliation"), 1980.

Libraries, museums, and archives in Kathmandu, Banaras, Calcutta, New Delhi, London, Paris, Berkeley, Stanford, and many other places have to be visited to collect the materials on Koirala.

He also differed with the capitalists as he thought that unbridled consumerism was immoral, and that the appalling exploitation of the world's resources was short-sighted and unrealistic.

Thus, Koirala presents a passionate plea against the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, which assumes that the world is but an illusion and thus makes life and death a meaningless phenomena and that the observance of one's own duty is the ultimate priority.