IN THE NEWS
Turmoil
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RITA MANCHANDA documents the constant struggle between the monarchy and democratic forces in Nepal.
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REUTERS
As the world sees it, it is a tussle between the royalty and the democrats.
HISTORY is for winners, goes the old adage. And so the Shah kings of Nepal have wrested power back from the "usurpers", the hereditary Rana Prime Ministers, after a century of being symbolic figureheads. They have sought to reinvent the Shah dynasty and a "modern" Nepal. It was Prithvi Narayan Shah, predecessor of the present 11th king, who 21/2 centuries ago, from his fiefdom in Gorkha, united the petty feudal principalities — 22 (baises) and 24 (chaubaises) — and established a Hindu kingdom. (At its zenith, it stretched from the Teesta to the Sutlej. The meta-narrative inscribed in text books seeks to instil pride in one nation under the divine (avatar of Vishnu) rule of the Shah kings. Geographically entrapped between India and China — a "yam between two stones" — the nationalist anxiety has generalised the motto of the king's army — Desh-Naresh to become a "truth" of the bourgeoisie in Nepal; that Nepal without the monarchy would lose its distinct identity — an identity that has resisted colonial conquest — only to be gobbled up by India. That without the stabilising fulcrum of the institution of monarchy, Nepal would slip into anarchy and chaos and become a Cambodia and the staging ground for Maoist insurgencies in South Asia.
The argument the West buys
It's a "truth" that the international community appears to have accepted and what King Gyanendra is banking upon to see him through in his ultimate gamble of direct rule following the royal coup on February 1, 2005. That other "truth" — that the stability of Nepal's polity is anchored in the "twin pillars" of constitutional monarchy and multi party democracy — has come crashing down. However, a long view of "modern" Nepal would reveal the constant and continuing struggle between an autocratic monarch and democratic forces in which the February coup evokes memories of the 1960 royal coup and the then smothering of democracy. Then too, the international community, including an ambivalent India, got pulled into backing the wrong side of history.
Our royal narrative begins with King Tribhuvan, Gyanendra's grandfather, a titular head under the ruling Ranas. Taking advantage of the intensifying political struggle between the Nepali Congress and the Ranas, he managed to persuade a republican Jawahar Lal Nehru, to retain a key role for the monarchy back in the new political set up of Nepal. In 1951, King Tribhuvan, who had escaped to India, returned three months later to claim the throne as a constitutional monarch in what was the start of a fatally flawed democratic set up. Many of the weaknesses in that first democratic experiment of nine governments from 1951 to 1960 — were to reappear in the next interregnum 1990 to 2004, 30 years later. Eating away at the democratic core was the Palace and its capacity to exploit the inexperience, greed and egos of the nascent democratic forces and the vulnerability of the political leaders to being manipulated. M.P. Koirala was played against his brother B.P. Koirala. The democratic forces backed anti democratic laws that rebounded on them, The Communist party was banned.
Politics and the army
As the founding figure of democratic politics in Nepal, B.P. Koirala in his autobiography acknowledged — that a fatal flaw was the failure of political leaders to bring the Royal Nepal Army (RNA) under their physical control. By 1955, the shrewd and ambitious King Mahendra had begun to bite off chunks of democratic governance. In 1959, he conceded the first of Nepal's three constitutions, ensuring that it acknowledged the supremacy of the king, placed him above law and made him head of the army. A year, and democratic elections later, Prime Minister B.P. Koirala was jailed and Mahendra invoked the powers vested in him by the Constitution to take over to save the country from corruption. It was the beginning of 30 years of a repressive and autocratic party less Panchayat rule that was defended as in keeping with the indigenous genius of the Nepali people. From citizens, the Nepali people had again become subjects.
Democratic forces went underground. The open border between India and Nepal has traditionally provided refuge for dissent and democratic forces to take root. Indeed the stirrings of democratic sentiment among the Gorkha soldiers following the two world wars and the winds of freedom of Indian independence inspired Nepal's political leadership of the left and the centre. The All India Nepali Congress was founded in Benares. In Darjeeling, ex-Gorkha soldiers raised the banner for political mobilisation in Nepal. Thus, India holds the key. But as B.P. Koirala in Attmabritanta concluded, the Nehru government's support was equivocal as it was geared to maintaining a twin pillar approach that was derailed by the iron fist of King Mahendra and his assumption of direct rule.
The blockade by India
Matters came to a head in 1989 when the Rajiv Gandhi government imposed a blockade on Nepal. The high politics theory has it that India was punishing Nepal for opening an arms supply line with China. The low one suggests that the then Indian Ambassador insisted that the Prime Minister had been slighted by the King during the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit. The blockade fed into Nepali paranoia about India wanting to Sikkimise Nepal. Nonetheless, the pressure turned the scales in favour of democratic forces.
Royal `intrigue'
Inside Nepal, the mild mannered King Birendra was behind the high walls of Narayanhiti Palace, and apologists for the monarchy speculated that the king's liberal inclinations were being subverted by the "underground gang" — i.e. a hard line Palace clique led by the King's brothers Gyanendra and Dhirendra and Queen Aishwarya.
According to Nepali writer Manjushree Thapa in Forget Kathmandu, "in the popular (bourgeois) imagination, they were held responsible for all that was wrong. The Queen controlled all foreign funds, while the royal family monopolised business. Gyanendra had acquired the reputation of misusing his royal privileges for business gains in tea estates, tobacco companies and luxury hotels. His brother was linked to reports of idol theft.
In the end King Birendra resisted the hard line and conceded before the massive peoples' movement for democracy. The 1990 Constitution was a compromise as Daman Nath Dungana, one of those who drafted it, acknowledges. Hidden amidst the layers of intrigue, is the "truth" that the Royal Nepal Army generals held the Constitution hostage and gave in only when ambiguity was deliberately inscribed into the Constitution about control of the army and wherein does sovereignty lie with the King or the people. Dungana claims that the constitutionalists had hoped that the practice of democracy would strengthen democratic forces. It weakened them enabling the Palace to constantly subvert a whirligig of 13 governments in 14 years from the left to the right, of self-seeking politicians grabbing power and pelf.
Other "truths" of Nepal were also coming unstuck — of "a garden of four castes and 36 ethnicities".
The democracy movement had politically mobilised the voiceless, but post-multi democracy, the representational pyramid remained even more restricted than under the Panchayat regime. Bahuns (Brahmins) and Chettris (including Ranas, Shah-Thakuris) made up 29 per cent of the population and monopolised 70 per cent to 90 per cent of the jobs and political representation.
Many of the 69 indigenous nationalities which fought for multi-party democracy, would turn to the Maoist revolution for their liberation. Indeed the insurgency is a testament to the failure of Nepal's experiments with (autocratic and) democratic governance to make a real difference to the desperate poverty and plight of the vast majority of Nepal's 24 million people. Forty-two per cent of them remain under the poverty line ... .
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The Maoist challenge
THE Maoist challenge, at first, was politically ignored and when confronted with their spread from two remote districts to a controlling presence in a third of Nepal's 75 districts, the government's effort at ceasefire and political negotiations lacked all seriousness. Militarily, the government was held back from using the army depending upon a police force armed largely with .303 rifles. Was it King Birendra's reluctance to have Nepali fight Nepali (a civil war) or was there a bigger conspiracy? King Birendra and his entire family were killed in a grisly massacre in June 2000. His successor, his brother King Gynaendra was a known hardliner. A month later the Koirala government called out the army in Holeri. The RNA did not act and misled the public and him. Koirala resigned. The RNA was mobilised in November 2001 under a state of emergency. The RNA has made no secret of its contempt for the democratic process and made clear that it will not be subject to the "whims" of the political leaders.
From then on, it was a quick slide towards autocracy — the suspension of Parliament, dismissal of the elected government and on October 4, 2002, when King Gyanendra assumed executive authority. A fig leaf of puppet governments was maintained. The major political parties took to the streets agitating against the "regression" of the king and "republicanism" entered the discourse of mainstream political parties. While the top political leaders continued to fall prey to the blandishments of the king and the possibility of holding power, again, the leadership and cadres in the district got radicalised. The deepening crisis among the constitutional forces produced a split in the political parties with younger cadres in particular, supporting the Maoist demand for a constituent assembly that would decide the fate of Nepal's monarchy.
On February 1, 2005, King Gyanendra assumed full powers, imposed an emergency, suspended fundamental freedoms and unleashed repression on democratic forces and smothered dissent. Meanwhile, the Maoists appealed for a united front against feudal autocracy. Will the democratic forces re-emerge as a third front around the demand for a constituent assembly, as political leaders like Pardeep Giri hope? Will the ageing political leaders currently under arrest eventually compromise and push the rank and file faced with stark choice of Monarchy or Maoist- "peoples'rule", to align with the Maoists? The radicalisation of the democratic forces could break the current military stalemate between the Maoists and the RNA.
A distant monarchy
King Gynanendra, like his grandfather before him will need to reinvent himself and Nepal under an absolute monarch Already, the difference is noticeable. The new Council of Minister took their leave of the King bowing deeply. Their democratic predecessors had dropped the feudal practice. The King had reintroduced the ceremonial horse and carriage and tails requirement for Ambassadors presenting their credentials. Conspiracy theories about Gynanendra's role in the Palace massacre and his road map to absolute power, are again doing the rounds. Gyanendra has a reputation to live down and more so his son Crown Prince Paras. Nepal's has always been a distant monarchy (though King Birenda occasionally humanised it, once walking unescorted down a Thamel street with the Queen) and made more fragile after the Palace massacre. King Gyanendra's image is one of being arrogant, cold and forbidding. His army is repressive.
He needs the international community to support him and after the initial shock and opposition, pragmatism, he hopes, will sway them, because of the "truth" that monarchy keeps at bay the Maoists and chaos. But what about that earlier truth of "twin pillars" of stability in Nepal? Those twin pillars of "constitutional monarchy" and multi party democracy have proved incompatible in Nepal. And what about the "truth" of a widow in the mid-west whose "innocent" son and daughter-in-law were killed by the security forces who chant "My truth has been destroyed", in Thapa's Forget Kathmandu.
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