Nepal

Nepal is majority Hindu, around 81 percent per its national census and reflected in Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, with a Buddhist minority near 9 percent concentrated among Newar, Tamang and Himalayan ethnic communities, alongside smaller Muslim, Kirati and Christian populations; Hindu and Buddhist practice in Nepal have long overlapped closely, sharing temples, festivals and deities in ways that make strict statistical separation somewhat artificial in daily practice.

Nepal is the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, born in Lumbini in the sixth century BCE according to tradition, a site now a major pilgrimage destination and UNESCO World Heritage listing. The Kathmandu Valley's Newar civilization developed a distinctive syncretic religious culture blending Hindu and Vajrayana Buddhist elements over more than a millennium, visible in shared temple complexes such as Pashupatinath, one of Hinduism's holiest Shiva shrines, and Swayambhunath and Boudhanath, major Buddhist stupas. Nepal was the world's only constitutionally Hindu state until 2006, when the monarchy's absolute power was overturned amid a decade-long Maoist insurgency, and the country was formally declared a secular republic under its 2015 constitution following the monarchy's abolition in 2008.

Nepal's transformation from the world's only Hindu monarchy to a secular federal republic unfolded across a turbulent decade: a Maoist insurgency beginning in 1996 sought to abolish the monarchy and traditional Hindu state structure, a 2001 royal massacre killed King Birendra and much of the royal family under still-disputed circumstances, and mass 2006 pro-democracy protests forced King Gyanendra to relinquish absolute power, leading to a peace accord with the Maoists and the monarchy's formal abolition in 2008.

The 2015 constitution declares Nepal a secular state while explicitly defining secularism as the protection of the ancient religious and cultural practices existing since time immemorial, a formulation that Hindu nationalist groups have criticized as insufficiently protective of Hinduism's former special status and that religious minorities, including Christians and some Muslims, have criticized from the opposite direction for retaining restrictions such as a criminal law provision against religious conversion by inducement or allurement, which rights groups argue is applied in practice to restrict Christian evangelism specifically. Calls to restore Nepal as a Hindu state have persisted among royalist and Hindu nationalist movements, occasionally producing street protests since the republic's founding.