Shailaja Acharya

Panchayat regime On 18 February 1961, she showed a black flag to King Mahendra in protest of the latter suspending democracy in Nepal and imprisoning the democratically elected prime minister BP Koirala who was also her uncle. She spent a total of five years in prison during her struggle against the Panchayat system. She, along with Bhim Bahadur Tamang and Chakra Prasad Bastola, was instrumental in re-organising Tarun Dal, the youth wing of the party, in 1973-74. The three oversaw the logistics of the Tarun Dal meeting at a school in Baburi village of Varanasi. She was also the Chief Editor of Tarun, which was published from Varanasi during the same period. She was instrumental in collecting arms and ammunition — along with Nona Koirala, and Chakra Prasad Bastola, another veteran Nepali Congress leader who was also her brother-in-law — in an effort to smuggle arms into Nepal to conduct an armed revolution. Some of the arms were later used in the 1973 Nepal plane hijacking. After the party abandoned the ides of armed struggle, the arms and ammunition were donated to the Bengali people who were fighting against the government of East Pakistan.

She returned to Nepal in 1976 along with BP Koirala,

1990s After the reinstatement of democracy in Nepal in 1990, she won two terms to parliament from her home district of Morang. from Morang-5 constituency. She chose the ministry of agriculture and forests

She won her second term in parliament in the 1994 election, again from Morang. In 1997, she became the minister of Water Resources,

In 2007, she was appointed Nepal's ambassador to India, succeeding Karna Dhoj Adhikari.

Philanthropy Acharya was involved with several NGOs and other charity work, mainly in the field of women empowerment and welfare. She had donated 1.5 bigha of land for the construction site of the institute, and later negotiated a partnership with CTEVT to provide accessible skills training to poor women and girls in the community. at the age of 65.

Legacy Acharya has been remembered as an inspiring figure and "a rebellious personality" by senior Nepali Congress leader Ram Chandra Paudel. Former minister Mohan Bahadur Basnet has characterised her as a lifelong devotee to democracy with a "clean image". Her showing the black flag to King Mahendra in 1961 for which she spent three years in jail, is considered a landmark event in the history of Nepalese struggle for freedom and democracy.

Despite her success, she is considered to have underachieved. Even labelled the "most famous nobody of Nepal", However, Acharya herself attributed it to sexism, claiming that she was not taken seriously because of her gender, and her contributions and sacrifices were undervalued or ignored. Shailaja Acharya Adarsha Samaj promotes Acharya's ideals.