| December 27, 2007 | Thursday | Zilhaj 16, 1428 |
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Reincarnating a monarch
IF IRNA, the Iranian news agency, is closely watching current events in Nepal, and so are the BBC and Voice of America, there must be something brewing in that otherwise ignored and impoverished country.
On the face of it the Nepali cabinet’s decision last week to abolish the centuries-old monarchy should be a landmark decision of global interest. Yet King Gyanendra’s story is a bit different from that of the world’s other 27 ruling royals, three of them absolute monarchs.
The riveted interest that Iran and the West have shown in the Himalayan kingdom stems perhaps from a higher strategic reality. The landlocked country is cocooned in China’s underbelly. Given Nepal’s off and on turbulence with India too, King Gyanendra’s fate also happened to have got hitched to Pakistan’s miscued strategy.
Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz visited Kathmandu a couple of years ago and offered military support to the unpopular monarch. Unwittingly, just to keep India off balance in Kathmandu, Pakistan’s gambit would have meant shoring up a man who is widely worshipped as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, the Hindu god of sustenance. Backing the discredited Nepali king therefore would have also put Pakistan in the unenviable company of the RSS, the Hindu right-wing parent party that subsumes the BJP, VHP, Bajrang Dal and the works.
As far as the Hindu right was concerned, Gyanendra was more than a rallying point for religious revivalism. He was their global icon and a role model eventually for India. Therefore it was no small irony that Pakistan and the RSS, not any less than the Indian government for a while, were actually working in tandem to boost an incarnation of Vishnu when the country’s Hindu masses were preparing to topple him.
The journey for Nepal’s secular parties thus far has not been easy. It was not until May last year that Nepal’s parliament passed a resolution declaring the only existing Hindu kingdom a secular state and reducing the king to a figurehead leader. The resolution was the first major act of the seven-party interim government under Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala that came to power in April 2006. This was possible because mass protests, triggered by Nepal’s Maoists, forced King Gyanendra to step down. There was a time not too long ago when this had seemed well nigh impossible.
In 2002, for example, a worldwide umbrella organisation of Hindu bodies declared Gyanendra also the “World Hindu Emperor”. Later, Nepal’s attorney general claimed in the Supreme Court that the king was above any man-made constitution and his responsibilities were of divine nature. But the government last year curbed his religious as well as his worldly powers by stripping him of his army command, legal immunity and freedom from paying taxes. Huge crowds across the country cheered the move. The government declared a public holiday.
The state of Nepal exists since 1768. Only in 1962 was it declared a Hindu kingdom. That was when King Mahendra, father of Gyanendra, dissolved parliament, rewrote the constitution and usurped absolute powers. In the census, 85 per cent of the 27 million Nepalese used to be accounted Hindus, though most of the 59 ethnic groups are maintaining their traditional tribal religions, some of them with animist or Buddhist backgrounds.
The myth of a homogeneous Hindu majority was maintained in close cooperation with the palace of ‘Lord Vishnu’ and Nepali cousins of India’s RSS, which was provided huge funds, when the pro-democracy movement gathered momentum. Moderate protest against the declaration of a secular Nepal arose only in two districts bordering India and was obviously inspired by Indian Hindu organisations. The fact that Gorakhpur, the Indian border town near Nepal, has been seething with communal tension, and is today a veritable bastion of the RSS, is not to be missed.
But last week Nepal’s seven most powerful parties agreed that the 240-year-old monarchy will be completely abolished. This became possible because the Maoist former rebels had walked out of the interim government three months ago. The historic decision reverses a clause in last year’s peace agreement, which said a popularly elected assembly would decide the fate of the royals.
Parliament must now change the interim constitution. It will be left to the assembly, once elected, to actually scrap the monarchy — but that many say is looking almost inevitable. Yet the story may not be over for the beleaguered king. And that is why IRNA, the BBC and VOA are glued to it just as they are, let’s say, to Iraq or Afghanistan. The geostrategic power play in Nepal is not any less interesting than other hot spots so to speak. For a republican democracy like the United States, an absolute monarch like Gyanendra should be an ideological misfit. But to translate this into reality would be utopian.
The thriving relationship between dubious monarchs and the overtly republican United States began when Morocco, and not any European power, became the first to recognise George Washington as the head of a newly independent nation. From the Moroccan monarchy to the Saudi kingdom nothing seems to be of more interest to Washington than their peaceful and uninterrupted survival. So much for the ‘project democracy’ underway in South Asia and the Middle East.
IRNA would be watching the events in Nepal with a sense of history and a degree of mistrust of some of the undercurrents. It was Iran after all where a king was overthrown by the people and reinstalled through covert action by Britain and the United States. Therefore it is not as though the Nepali parliament’s writ will inevitably be the last word on Gyanendra’s fate. Another reason for IRNA to be interested in the story is the China-US chessboard that Nepal has more or less become.
To recall Harold Pinter’s acceptance speech at the Nobel award ceremony very little can be judged of a nation’s fate or its ruler’s future if we do not see it through Washington’s prism. “The United State supported, and in many cases engendered, every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War,” Pinter said. “I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador and, of course, Chile…Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries…and they are attributable to US foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quiet clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” And Nepal, from Pinter’s perspective, has a dubious god-king, a turbulent parliament and a crucial neighbourhood, which make it as good an example as any of the vagaries and uncertainties of the new world order.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in New Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
