April 09, 2008	Wednesday	Rabi-us-Sani 2, 1429

GORKHA (Nepal): In the Gorkha Palace there burns a fire that locals say was first lit when the king who united Nepal under the Shah dynasty 240 years ago was born.

But after elections this week, that flame may go out — with the Himalayan nation choosing an assembly that will write a new constitution and likely throw out the monarchy as the next phase of a 2006 peace agreement.

“The monarchy is like a white elephant,” said Kalyan Gauli, a 34-year-old forestry student who was visiting the royal complex just before the polls.

Nepal’s current monarch, King Gyanendra, was already disliked and viewed with suspicion when he came to the throne after a 2001 palace massacre by his nephew, the crown prince, decimated much of the royal family.

He made himself even more unpopular in 2005 by sacking the government, blaming it for failing to extinguish a long-running Maoist rebellion, and taking direct control.

But he was sidelined by widespread protests, and the Maoists and mainstream political parties went on to sign a landmark peace agreement in November 2006 that saw the rebels end their decade-long rebellion.

Many in Nepal say they are excited at the prospect of the end of the monarchy. “Before the rules were made by the king. Now they will be made by us,” said Chet Prasad Banjara, 33, a teacher and election worker who was helping to take ballot boxes to a village near Gorkha. Gauli also said he would be happy if the assembly turned Nepal into a republic — even while retaining some nostalgia for the monarchy.

“But there were some good kings,” reflected Gauli, as he climbed down the steep stone steps of the hilltop palace that is surrounded by the white peaks of the Himalayan Ganesh and Annapurna ranges.

“Like Prithvi Narayan Shah. He united the nation. If he was not there, there might not be a Nepal now.”

The king who came to the throne of the Gorkha kingdom in 1743 only ruled for little over a decade but it was during his reign that modern Nepal — previously a collection of tiny kingdoms — took shape.

The unification was not easy: one account says it involved trying to starve the inhabitants of Kathmandu valley as well as mutilating the inhabitants of another kingdom after breaking their six-month resistance.

Kathmandu eventually fell when Prithvi Narayan Shah invaded in 1768, taking advantage of the fact that the city was celebrating one of the country’s many festivals to catch its residents of off-guard.

The Shahs have ruled over this new Nepal since then, living in Kathmandu and only visiting Gorkha, just to the west of the capital, at the country’s biggest festival Dashain to make offerings at the Kali temple there.

For now dozens of villagers still take care of the palace, which includes placing new wood on the burning embers in the antechamber before the room where the great king was born.—AFP