An old-fashioned monarch stages an old-fashioned coup
INVOKING his ancestor, Prithvi Narayan Shah, the 18th-century founder of his dynasty and unifier of the nation, Nepal's King Gyanendra on February 1st came close to reimposing absolute monarchy. He sacked the all-party government and suspended constitutional freedoms of expression, assembly and movement, the protection from preventive detention and the rights to information and privacy. The next day he unveiled a new cabinet of cronies, chancers and nobodies, which he will chair. As dictators usually do these days, the king pronounced himself a democrat and promised to restore multi-party rule within three years.
Democracy under a constitutional monarch was introduced in 1990, and suspended by the king in 2002. But never before has he taken power so directly. Oddly, since he himself appointed the ousted government only last year, the change of government was more of a putsch. The prime minister was detained at his residence with some of his ministers. His deputy was taken into custody. Political leaders were put under house arrest. One, the head of a moderate communist party called the UML (Unified Marxist-Leninist), was yanked away from the television cameras as he was making a statement about the coup. Some intellectuals, human-rights activists and journalists went into hiding. Most now seek anonymity.
Nepal's front-line teachers
Jan 27th 2005
Human rights
The Nepal Home Page provides information on the country's politics, economy, society, history and more. Human Rights Watch also reports on Nepal.
Katmandu airport was shut for a few hours and flights turned back. Armoured vehicles appeared briefly in the capital, but within a day the soldiers and riot police were lolling idly on their batons and rifles. There was little chance of organised opposition. Local telephone lines, mobile networks and internet access were all cut. Gossip, the lifeblood of the Katmandu elite, meant going out and finding people. The king's press secretary called in newspaper editors and told them he could not help if the army decided to ?disappear? them for a few hours. Censorship was absolute. One effect of this was that a three-day bandh, or general shutdown, called by Nepal's Maoist rebels in protest at the coup, was, unusually, ignored.
The Maoist rebellion, which has killed some 11,000 people since 1996, and now affects every part of the country, provided one of the two related pretexts for the royal takeover. The king complained about the lack of progress in reopening peace talks with the Maoists. Then he criticised the government for not making a sincere effort to hold elections by this April, to replace the parliament the king dismissed in 2002. Both pretexts are spurious. The Maoists refused to talk to the old government because it ruled at the whim of the king, who retained control of the army. Similarly, the idea that a free and fair election could be held was fanciful. The police and army have withdrawn from most of the countryside, leaving it prey to Maoist terror.
King Gyanendra assumed the throne in 2001, after a massacre in the royal palace, in which many of his family, including his brother, King Birendra, died. Gyanendra has never been a popular king. His family is accused of corruption and his son, Paras, the present crown prince, is feared and loathed. Yet Kanak Dixit of Himal, a Nepali journal, says he would be forgiven if he could restore peace. But that would mean either successful talks with the Maoists or winning the war. Neither seems likely.
Although the Maoists had said they wanted to talk to the king, they were not advocating a coup. Their call for a strike was accompanied by a diatribe against ?feudal autocracy? and a call for a united front with the constitutional political parties. On the military front, most observers do think the army could try much harder to defeat the Maoists. But few think it capable of a decisive victory.
It will become even less capable if foreign governments cut off assistance. King Gyanendra can hardly have been expecting an international round of applause. But he must have been taken aback by the severity of the reprimands he received from governments such as Britain's and, especially, India's. Reluctance to honour the king with a prime ministerial handshake was one reason India decided to stay away from a forthcoming regional summit, leading to its postponement. There is real alarm in Delhi at the prospect of continuing anarchy in Nepal, with its effects spilling across its border with India, which has a big Maoist problem of its own.
Nepal's political parties, such as the UML and the Nepali Congress, have an exasperating record of incompetence, corruption and infighting. For this reason some foreign governments have been sympathetic to the king's authoritarian instincts. But the parties are not going to vanish, and must remain the core of the multi-party system the king says he wants.
It is the monarchy that may be in greater danger. ?Forget Katmandu: An elegy for democracy?, a new book on Nepal by Manjushree Thapa, a novelist, recounts a story about King Prithvi Narayan Shah. He once met a god disguised as an ascetic who, to test his loyalty, offered him some curd he had vomited. Had the king eaten it, his dynasty would have lasted forever. Instead he tossed it aside, and some fell on his feet. So the dynasty would only last ten generations, one for each toe. King Birendra was the tenth Shah king.
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