South Asia's royal retreat
Asia:NZ commissioned Vaughan Yarwood, who edits Covering Asia, to write an overview of recent developments in Nepal and Bhutan. Below is the full text of his article. Please note that the views expressed by the author of this feature do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.
In late October 2008 Nepal’s overthrown royals were served notice that they had 15 days to pay more than US$1m in overdue utility bills or face having the power to their homes cut. The Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) claimed that the arrears dated back a number of years and related to power used at 22 palaces and bungalows.
The threat by the NEA was just the latest in a string of humiliations for the former King Gyanendra who was unable to prevent the centuries-old monarchy being abolished by the country’s new Maoist-led government. Even his departing address to gathered journalists four months earlier had been marred by a failure in the sound system, which for a time rendered him inaudible, and by a constant murmur of conversation from the crowd which eloquently conveyed the near contempt in which the country’s monarchy was held.
Within days of Gyanendra’s departure, the main palace in Kathmandu had been nationalised and renamed Narayanhiti Palace Museum. The new museum’s main attractions will likely include the royal crown and sceptre along with Gyanendra’s throne and a 1939 Mercedes Benz car gifted to his grandfather, King Tribhuvan, by Adolf Hitler. Something of a metaphor for the country’s ills, the Mercedes was carried to the capital on its arrival last century due to a scarcity of roads beyond the capital and is now rusting and derelict.
Gyanendra, who these days lives with his wife Kumal in a former royal hunting lodge in a forest near Kathmandu, largely bears responsibility for the collapse of Nepal’s 240-year-old Hindu monarchy — an institution that just eight years ago was revered. Despite his continued denial of involvement, most Nepalis hold him and his son responsible for the brutal palace shootings of 2001 which resulted in the deaths of 10 royals, including his brother, King Birendra. Most are also dismissive of Gyanendra’s claim that his military-backed imposition of absolute rule in 2005 had not crushed people’s rights in the country.
Old-style despot
For years Britain, India and the United States backed Gyanendra against the Maoist insurgency to forestall what they saw as the likely establishment of a Communist state in Nepal. The stance became harder to maintain, however, as democracy wilted under Gyanendra’s rule, which increasingly came to resemble that of an old-style crowned despot.
Things came to a head in April 2006 when more than 100,000 protesters in the capital defied a curfew to march in the streets, angrily demanding the restoration of democracy and an end to monarchy. Soldiers and police opened fire, killing and wounding more than 40. This followed the earlier killing by police of at least 10 people in other towns and cities.
The police themselves proved to have little stomach for such bloodshed, and the mounting public hostility to Gyanendra, along with the previously unthinkable alliance between the Maoists and the country’s democratic opposition parties sealed his fate.
Propitious year for change
In the small neighbouring kingdom of Bhutan, separated from Nepal by an 80 km-wide finger of Indian soil, events took an entirely different course, though essentially with the same outcome — an end to royal power.
While the increasingly besieged Gyanendra was stirring up a hornet’s nest of ill-will in Nepal, Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck was masterminding a plot to abolish himself. Famous for introducing the novel concept of a ‘Gross National Happiness’ index to measure the Buddhist nation’s true wealth, the enlightened monarch in late 2005 declared that the institution of monarchy had many flaws. It was not, he said, the best form of government — after all, no one could guarantee that future kings would rule wisely, or with the country’s best interest at heart. He had therefore decided to initiate the transition to a parliamentary democracy while stepping down in favour of his son, crown prince Jigme Khesar Namgyel who would become the country’s fifth king. Under the new constitution, all future kings will be required to abdicate on their 65th birthday.
The Wangchuck dynasty, which ruled Bhutan since 1907, had shown itself to be cautious, culturally conservative and enduring. Tradition, high moral standards and environmental protection weighed heavily in its policy making. Tourism was late in coming to the landlocked country, as were local newspapers (1986) and television (1999). A flirtation with traffic lights in the capital, Thimphu, was considered an experiment too far, and on the king’s orders the lights were removed.
After consulting astrologers, King Wangchuck chose 2008 as the most propitious year to take the great constitutional leap forward. The transition path was stately and considered. In 2001, the king renounced absolute power, handing over day-to-day work to a council of ministers. His final act of disengagement came sooner than expected when in December 2006, he abandoned the throne early to give his Oxford-educated son some experience in the ways of state.
Despite the king’s proselytising, many of his 630,000 subjects remained uncomfortable with the royal retreat. They had seen the ease with which the democratic experiment in Bangladesh and Nepal had been derailed with the overthrow of elected governments.
The world's youngest monarch
Nevertheless, shortly after King Wangchuck’s abdication, a full dress rehearsal was held in preparation for the parliamentary elections, complete with fictitious political parties, electronic voting machines and international observers. The real thing followed in March 2008, when the nation’s citizens exercised their unfamiliar rights and voted in 47 members of a National Assembly.
Months later, on 6 November 2008, the new monarch, King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, was duly crowned in a colourful palace ceremony attended by thousands of foreign dignitaries, including India’s president, Pratibha Patil. At 28, the new king became the world’s youngest monarch and the head of state of its newest democracy.
Despite the flowering of democracy, problems remain for Bhutan — among them how to resolve the question of the exiled Nepalese on its border. According to the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, in an attempt to protect its cultural identity, Bhutan withdrew citizenship from its minority ethnic Nepalis in 1991 and forcibly exiled them. More than 100,000 now live in overcrowded camps in southeastern Nepal and many are said to have taken up arms alongside Maoist rebels.
However, the situation is more confused and precarious in the secular republic of Nepal, where the post-Gyanendra era has been marked by dissent and infighting among contending power blocs. Shortages of fuel, power cuts, hunger and spiralling crime became so widespread following the overthrow of the monarchy that even to talk of ‘the government’ seemed misguided.
What lies ahead
Among the troubling developments are the increasingly open splits along ethnic and regional lines, especially between hill people and Madhesis in the south of the country.
Much hinges on whether the Maoists can shake off their revolutionary past — and their militant Stalinist and Maoist instincts — and transform themselves into an instrument of legitimate government. The former rebel leader Prachanda (the nom-de-guerre — meaning ‘The Fierce One’ — of Pushpa Kamal Dahal), now reborn as the country’s prime minister, has the job of fulfilling a rather grand promise to turn Nepal into ‘the Switzerland of Asia’. More plausibly, he might build on the progress already made in banishing caste and gender discrimination, and removing injustices in land ownership.
Bickering soon broke out in the huge 601-seat Constituent Assembly over the two-year process of drafting the country’s new constitution, with smaller parties complaining that they were being marginalised by the Maoists whom they accused of wanting to monopolise power. It is likely, however, that in order to govern effectively, Prachanda will need to come to some accommodation with three other significant parties — the Madhesi People’s Rights Forum, the Nepali Congress and the Unified Marxist-Leninist party.
Any protracted squabbling, political backtracking or escalation of violence in the countryside may have the unintended effect of kindling a nostalgia of sorts for the old monarchy — or at least for the monarchy as it existed before the last king drove it into the ground. Nor has Nepal necessarily seen the last of Gyanendra, who may surprise onlookers by rising phoenix-like on the political stage, this time as a commoner — but one with a charisma to rival ‘The Fierce One’.
See also
► Country profiles of Nepal and Bhutan
► Covering Asia media guide on Nepal and Bhutan
