- http://www.tehelka.com/story_main17.asp?filename=op042906Finally_the.asp

Finally, the Emperor in his New Clothes

Gyanendra’s despotism has brought the Nepali monarchy close to extinction

By Manjushree Thapa

"Have you heard?" Rumors are rife that Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah will flee to India any day now. Or he'll go to Dubai; he's got a bank account there. "Don't you know?" He arranged a hiding place for himself on his tour of Africa last year. No, he's planning to abdicate to the jungles of far-western Nepal. No, no. He'll go to one of the gulf states. He's keeping a helicopter on standby. The details of where he'll go are sketchy. But Nepalis are all telling each other that he will go; and with undisguised excitement they are asking each other: "Is it true? Can it be?"

From October 2002 on, when he first effected direct rule, it has been difficult for us to predict Mr Shah's moves, as we, in our naïve enlightenment-era civility, had not imagined that he—or anyone, in this day and age—might operate with such a dark-age mindset. It was as though he leaped, daftly anachronous, from our history books.

Many mysteries reside at the core of each individual. But most people are restrained—in their behavior, if not their inmost thoughts—by civil norms and a social contract. Mr Shah has broken all of these in the past year.

Presumably he feels entitled to do so because he is a king. Maybe he even feels that due to the volatility of democracy the heavy burden of ruling Nepal has fallen on his shoulders; an avatar of Vishnu must not shirk from absolutism. And what for are the state coffers if not to effect divine will? Fire up that bullet-proof Jag….

But even the deeply Hindu ethics of 'Ram Rajya' oblige a king to be fair to his subjects. When, instead, a king wages war on his subjects, even the subservient begin to realize that this fellow is no Ram.

And not many Nepalis are feeling subservient just about now.

So here we are. Here we go. What used to be widespread but untargeted discontent has now coalesced to a massive movement that has shut down the public and private sectors and knocked the wind out of Mr Shah's government. The movement is not entirely united in its goals. Which mass movement ever is? Those involved are fueled variously by hopes for peace, democracy, stability, prosperity, justice. Some want to save a ceremonial role for the monarchy, others would like to dance through the halls of the Narayanhiti palace upon its evacuation by the Shah dynasty. Yet others may still be plotting a Maoist takeover. The one thing everyone agrees on, though, is that Mr Shah is part of the problem, not the solution.

Incredibly, till Mr Shah met the Indian, American and Chinese Ambassadors on April 16, there had been little indication that he even knew that his government's hold was eroding outside his sheltered milieu. Cloistered in Pokhara at a makeshift camp, he met only a few loyalists, who out of fear, sycophancy, ignorance and the need to bow and scrape in court, might not have been able to tell him the truth. Or maybe they did tell him the truth, but he ignored them. Until April 16 Mr Shah remained an utter enigma at the very center of Nepal's crisis.

Now, at last, we see that Mr Shah has understood the gravity of the situation—and the peril to himself and to his crown. He has begun to reach out to the few constitutional monarchists within the democratic flanks, angling, quite transparently and in bad faith, to split the mass movement by reaching a compromise with the constitutional monarchists in order to isolate the liberal republicans. This would render the mass movement a shambles, and save the crown—at least for another day.

Into this fraught scenario India has sent Karan Singh, and on his heels Shyam Saran. Both men are very experienced in statecraft. But they have very different profiles in Nepal.

Mr Singh is viewed—rightly or wrongly—as part of the extended Shah family due to his marriage links into the Rana family (who intermarry extensively with the Shahs; Mr Shah is mostly of Rana blood). Mr Singh's Hindu sympathies, too, jar with the Nepali democrats' secularism. While he may be able to talk to Mr Shah more frankly than an 'outsider' could, any move he might persuade Mr Shah to make—short of conceding to a constituent assembly—may lead to charges that India is favoring a repressive monarchy over democracy in Nepal (as it did in 1960).

Mr Saran, by contrast, is trusted by Nepal's democrats. Still, Nepalis will be wary. For the mass movement now is unmistakably republican, and there is immense popular pressure on the leaders of the Seven Party Alliance to refuse anything less than the offer of a constituent assembly by Mr Shah. India can only really help to resolve Nepal's crisis by convincing him to give in to this demand.

Otherwise, one day not far into the future, it might find itself having to offer Mr Shah asylum—in a nice plot of land in Kashmir, maybe.

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A very good analysis of the situation.