GYANENDRA’S TEST
NEPAL’S MONARCHY IN THE ERA OF DEMOCRACY

By HOLLY GAYLEY

Holly Gayley is a Ph.D. candidate in Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the role of religion in national identity and state formation in the Tibetan and Himalayan regions. Several of her articles and translations of Tibetan texts are pending publication.

Political uncertainties have plagued Nepal since the events at Narayanhiti Palace on the fateful night on June 1, 2001. The royal massacre that claimed the lives of King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev and his heirs sent a shock wave through the nation. In the days that followed, angered Nepalis rejected the official version of events which stated that Prince Dipendra gunned down his family in a drunken stupor after a quarrel over his choice of bride and then committed suicide. On June 4, Gyanendra, the slain king’s brother, was hastily enthroned. In a grief-stricken rage, rioters took to the streets of Kathmandu shouting “Death to Gyanendra” and threw rocks at the palace.1 A curfew was immediately imposed, and the military, with unwavering loyalty to the new king, took control of the capital.

Instability ensued. Arrests followed an article published in Kantipur, a Nepali-language daily, which compared the royal killings to the bloodiest coup in Nepal’s history, the Kot Massacre of 1846. Meanwhile, the Maoists, a home-grown guerilla movement, escalated their six-year effort to overthrow the constitutional monarchy. The Nepalese Maoist movement models itself after the Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, and it is not affiliated with the Communist government in China, a faithful supporter of Nepal’s monarchy. Nepal became a multiparty parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy in 1990 after significant pressure on King Birendra. Democratically elected governments have had a high turnover since then, and in mid-July following the palace massacre the prime minister resigned, tarnished by corruption charges and criticized for his passivity during palace investigations

The new prime minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, ushered in a brief interval of normalcy. He took immediate action and initiated negotiations with the Maoists, who agreed to a ceasefire. To his credit, Deuba succeeded in brokering a series of three peace talks, which took place between August and November. Though negotiations remained on friendly terms, none of the Maoist demands were met, even when they dropped the most thorny one from their list: the end of the constitutional monarchy, officially Hindu, in favor of a secular communist republic. The four-month cease fire shattered at the end of November in what was conjectured to be a split between hawks and doves among the Maoist ranks. Guerilla attacks resumed at an unprecedented level.

On November 26, King Gyanendra successfully garnered support for a state of emergency and de facto civil war against the Maoists by adopting the international rhetoric against terrorism. The state of emergency has an unsettling precedent: his father, Mahendra, invoked emergency powers in 1960. Mahendra effectively ended the nascent democracy, established less than two years earlier, and assumed absolute power for the monarchy. Moreover, he arrested government leaders and banned political parties; it took thirty years for multiparty democracy to reemerge. Under the present state of emergency, King Gyanendra is getting his first taste of power. He has received international support for his anti-terrorism stance, most recently from Colin Powell during a January visit to Nepal. Gyanendra will most likely push to extend the emergency. His attitude towards democracy is yet untested, but his commitment to end the Maoist threat to national stability once and for all seems firm. If political parties are unable to gain consensus to support a continued state of emergency, there could be a contest between the elected government and the palace. Under the circumstances, the survival of Nepal’s eleven-year-old democracy could be at stake. The following is a brief survey of the monarchy’s role in Nepal, which will demonstrate both its historic importance and its capricious relationship with democracy.

SYMBOL OF UNITY

The Shah dynasty has been the unifying force in Nepal since the 1768 conquest of the Kathmandu Valley by Prithvinarayan Shah. The Shah kings were the leaders of a tiny hill state called Gorkha,2 but Prithvinarayan Shah and his successors conquered vast tracts of rugged Himalayan terrain, from the Teesta River in the east to the Sutlej in the west. The final defeat of three Malla kindgoms, which had dominated the Kathmandu Valley for much of the medieval period, took twenty-three years of scrupulous and unyielding tactics and gained the Gorkhas their reputation as fierce and rugged soldiers. The period of expansionism ended abruptly with the Anglo-Nepali war of 1814-1816, which cost Nepal 40,000 square miles of territory but secured for it sovereign status and a hand-offs policy from the British.3

The religious basis of the king’s legitimacy has been an important element in the national identity of Nepal, now the only surviving Hindu kingdom in the world. The central sanctification process, with Vedic4 and tantric roots, was brought to the capital by Prithvinarayan Shah. It consists of a coronation ceremony, raja abhisheka, which confers on the king divine status as an incarnation of Vishnu. The king’s legitimacy is further enhanced by his ancestry, traced to the famed Rajput warriors5 that fled Muslim invaders in fourteenth-century India. The Indra Jatra, a royal festival of the indigenous Newar population of the Kathmandu Valley, was appropriated by the Shah dynasty as a symbol of their conquest of the Malla kingdoms. It occurs annually towards the end of the monsoon season in order to affirm the king’s sanctified role of joining heaven and earth, symbolized by erecting a ceremonial pole at the medieval Malla palace, Hanuman Dhoka. Another important feature is the blessing of the king by the “living goddess” Kumari.6 Prithivinarayan Shah used the latter to gain instant legitimacy, when he sealed his conquest of Kathmandu during the Indra Jatra festival and placed himself before the Kumari to receive immediate sanctification as the ruler of Nepal.

Even during the period of de facto rule by the powerful Rana family, which lasted over one-hundred years, the monarchy was maintained as a symbol of both unity and continuity, though divested of any real power. Control of Nepal was transferred from the Shah dynasty to ministers in the Rana family between 1846 and 1950, after Jung Bahadur Rana wiped out most of the key ministers and power brokers of Nepal in the Kot Massacre of 1846. King Rajendra fled to India but was later prevented from reentering; his son, Surendra Bikram Shah, was enthroned instead. Thereafter, the position of Prime Minister became the hereditary prerogative of the Ranas, who married into the royal family to enhance their prestige. The sanctity of the Shah dynasty was nevertheless emphasized in an effort to keep the royal family isolated as “virtual state prisoners,” while the Rana ministers had complete authority over the laws and administration of Nepal, symbolized in their possession of the royal seal, Lal Mohur.7

Rivalries within the various branches of the Rana family prevented Jung Bahadur from placing himself on the throne even though he tried in vain to secure British approval for such a scheme. To the British in India, the monarchy represented a stabilizing influence in Nepal despite the many intrigues in and outside of the palace. After Jung Bahadur provided crucial military assistance to the British in the Indian “mutiny” of 1857, Queen Victoria rewarded him with a British title and the return of territory in the Terai lost in the Anglo-Nepali war of 1814-1816. Jung Bahadur’s explicitly pro-British policy was followed by the Rana family until the end of British colonial rule in India in 1947.

HINDUIZATION

Cultural unity, under the banner of Hinduism, was consolidated during the Rana period. This was necessary in order to stabilize rule over the territorial conquests of the early Gorkha state. The Gorkhas, along with other Indo-Aryan hill people, were predominantly high-caste Hindus.8 One mechanism for their consolidation of power was the important legal code, the Muluki Ain of 1854, through which the multiplicity of Nepal’s ethnic and religious groups were arranged within a caste hierarchy vis-à-vis the dominant Hindu elite.

Although many of these diverse ethnic groups, together over half of Nepal’s population, had either a Buddhist or animist heritage,9 they were forcibly assimilated into a Hindu caste hierarchy via the Muluki Ain. The overarching stratification entailed in this legal code impacted a wide spectrum of policies and privileges. Not only did the code delineate penalties for crimes according to caste, but it also governed laws over land tenure and trading privileges, which were economically significant. The Muluki Ain incorporated hill tribes, like the Gurung and Magar, into the middle ranks of the caste hierarchy, encouraging them to acculturate and work within the system.10 However, ethnicities considered impure by Hindu standards were relegated to the lower tiers of the caste hierarchy.11

The result was a gradual adoption by a number of Tibeto-Burmese groups of Hindu norms and religious practices, including ritual, festivals, dress, diet, and settled agriculture. This process, dubbed Hinduization, arose in a large part due to the political and economic advantages of assimilation.12 Anthropologist Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka explains this process as follows: “Within the framework of the emerging Hindu polity, ethnic populations, notably ethnic elites, responded with the adoption of specific cultural symbols of those in power.”13 The king remained at the apex of society, surrounded by an elite structure based on heredity and caste status. More marginal groups, in the lower echelons of the caste structure, often became subordinate to high-caste groups, who were encouraged to settle throughout the terrain by birta land grants. These land grants enabled the central government to extend its influence throughout the hill areas and create a network of loyal allies. The stranglehold with which the Ranas and other elites came to dominate Nepal created a resistance movement, just as democratic consciousness was awakening in the country’s southern neighbor, India.

THE EXPERIMENT

A democratic revolution against the Ranas gained momentum after the sudden flight of King Tribhuvan to India in 1950. The Nepali Congress, a newly merged political party of various dissident groups in exile, took the king’s bold move as a cue to begin violent agitation for democracy across India’s border in the southern part of Nepal called the Terai. Meanwhile, Gyanendra, then only four years old, was temporarily enthroned in place of his grandfather.14 The Rana regime tried in vain to gain international recognition for the infant king. However, the government in Delhi sympathized with Nepal’s democracy movement. Indeed, many Nepali dissidents had participated in India’s struggle for independence and afterward remained in exile there to organize their own movement. The top priority for India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was a peaceful transfer of power to incipient democratic forces. Beijing had already made clear its intentions toward Tibet, and Nepal provided a crucial buffer state whose border India had pledged to defend. A restraining hand was placed on the Nepali Congress party, who had launched their struggle with Indian cooperation, just short of toppling the Rana regime, and the “Delhi compromise” was born. It consisted of a tripartite agreement between King Tribhuvan, the Rana Prime Minister, and the Nepali Congress to restore the monarchy to power and install an interim government to oversee elections to a constituent assembly.

King Tribhuvan’s triumphant return to Nepal inaugurated the first experiment in democracy on February 18, 1951. Thereafter this date is celebrated as Democracy Day. The experiment began with an interim government made up of a coalition of ministers from the Nepali Congress party and the Rana family, based on the stipulations of the Delhi compromise. The Interim Government of Nepal Act soon followed in March of 1951. It vested executive powers in the king and a council of ministers, who could be appointed or dismissed at his will. The king retained veto powers but left the direct governing to the coalition of ministers. However, the coalition, comprised of antagonistic interests, lasted less than a year, and successive cabinets likewise fell prey to internal strife. These interim governments were hampered by the lack of a mandate from the people, no defined term of office, and little authority to act without the king’s consent. Meanwhile, the monarchy took a more active role, and power gradually became concentrated in the palace. Elections for a constituent assembly were ultimately postponed until 1959. Whether one attributes the gradual centralization of power in the monarchy to the failure of interim governments or to the agency of the palace, it is clear that by 1954 the monarchy had effectively regained absolute powers.15

Meanwhile, India’s role as the midwife of Nepal’s democracy had become a source of resentment. During the early 1950s, Indian influence had steadily increased. Indian officials served in an advisory capacity, assisted with top administrative roles, and provided military assistance after a 1952 coup attempt. India’s military mission stayed on eight years in order to help modernize Nepal’s army, which was perceived as a threat to Nepal’s sovereignty not to mention a great insult to its national pride in its Gorkha soldiers. While both the political parties and the monarchy owed their initial success to India, the nationalist task required Nepal to distinguish itself from India and carve out a uniquely Nepali identity.

NEPALISM

When Tribhuvan’s son, Mahendra, ascended the throne in 1955, among his prime objectives were the diversification of Nepal’s foreign relations beyond its dependence on India and the strengthening of its national identity. His strategy in foreign policy was reminiscent of Prithvinarayan Shah’s advice in his political treatise, Dibya Upadesh. Characterizing Nepal as “a gourd between two rocks,” the country’s founder counseled his successors to remain friendly to both Nepal’s powerful and sizeable neighbors.16 Indeed, Mahendra’s foreign policy shifted from “special relations” with India to a policy of “equal friendship” with all nations.17 In his first years as king, Mahendra appointed prime ministers who were alternately pro-China and pro-India in order to play these emerging powers against each other. Moreover, political diversification also opened doors to aid from a wider selection of countries. The United States was particularly eager to provide aid as part of its Cold War strategy. Two crucial moves in terms of international recognition for Nepal’s sovereignty were its joining of the United Nations in 1955 and the exchange of embassies with the United States, China and the Soviet Union in the years that followed. All this was accomplished by Mahendra before the elections finally took place in 1959.

The first democratically elected government came and went in less than two years. Its abrupt termination had more to do with royal ambitions than the failure of democratic institutions per se. Mahendra retained broad emergency powers in the constitution promulgated by the palace in 1959, just before the elections. The constitution had otherwise provided for a parliamentary system with a bicameral legislature, based on the British and Indian models. The Nepali Congress party won the elections with a clear majority and no significant opposition party gained enough seats in the parliament to challenge its authority. This result left the king with no leverage to counteract the socialist leanings of the new government. No doubt the pro-India bent of the Nepali Congress party caused him some concern. Given India’s later annexation of the neighboring Buddhist kingdom of Sikkim in 1974, Mahendra’s fears cannot be discounted. However, Prime Minister B.P. Koirala’s close ties with Delhi were unduly stressed in light of his careful handling of border issues with China, including the controversy over territorial possession of Mt. Everest. A more realistic concern was the opposition mounting from conservative circles. The socialist leanings of the Koirala government were immediately expressed in the Birta Abolition Act of 1959, which curtailed privileges of land-owning classes.

In the heated arena of foreign and domestic policy issues of the day, Mahendra proclaimed a state of emergency and orchestrated the arrests of Nepali Congress party members, including the prime minister, who remained in prison until 1968. The Nepali Congress responded with a guerilla uprising the next year. However, India’s defeat in the Sino-India border dispute of 1962 forced Nehru to urge an end to the armed rebellion which had launched itself from the Indian border.

Asserting national identity became a way for the monarchy to justify its existence in lieu of parliamentary democracy and also as a means of carving out a distinct niche for Nepal in the region. This policy was dubbed “Nepalism” by one minister.18 In the Constitution of 1962, Nepal was officially declared a Hindu state. This statement reinforced the traditional role of the monarchy as the apex of Hindu society. The precedent had been set long ago when Prithvinirayan Shah declared Nepal asal hindustan, the true Hindustan. The new system, called the Panchayat Raj, was conceived by the king as a uniquely Nepali form of government. It involved three tiers of government – local, district, and national – designed ostensibly to decentralized policy decisions. Local governments were directly elected, and these representatives elected the district seats, who in turn elected the national government or Rastriya Panchayat. This indirect process served to reinforce conservative policies and the position of traditional elites. It gave the Panchayat system the semblance of democracy, but the king held both veto power and the ability to formulate laws.

The Panchayat Raj was touted as “guided democracy” without the factionalism – or the freedom – of party politics. It was hollow rhetoric. The Rastriya Panchayat acted more as a rubber stamp to palace policies than an active legislative body. Mahendra sought to sweep his rule under the cloak of democracy in order to legitimize it both at home and abroad. Moreover, according to anthropologist Richard Burghart, Mahendra articulated his political system in such a way as to legitimize “the continuing political autonomy of his kingdom and the perpetuation of his preeminent role in a ‘uniquely Nepalese’ form of government.”19 The new system had some progressive features. For example, a new legal code soon replaced the Muluki Ain of 1854. Caste, though not outlawed, was replaced by the concept of equality of all citizens before the law. However, political parties remained banned for the duration of Mahendra’s rule, and the press was censored. Meanwhile, according to Louise Brown, “Mahendra wooed the army while simultaneously emasculating it as a political force.”20

Language policy likewise became a focal point for the reinforcement of a unique national identity. Nepali was affirmed as the state language in the new constitution and became the only official medium for education, government radio and public signboards. Hindi and Newari, the indigenous language of the Kathmandu Valley, were discontinued in official capacities. The aim of this policy has been summarized by political scientist Selma Sonntag: “Nation-building meant distancing Nepal politically (through the panchayat system) and culturally (through the Nepali language) from India and its Hindi-speaking masses of the Gangetic plain.”21 The promotion of Nepali as a national language can be seen both as a means of national unification and as a modern tool of domination by the existing elite. Just as with the process of Hinduization, the result was a tendency toward assimilation. Often the youth relinquished their mother tongue in favor of Nepali, learned in school, which offered more economic prospects. Once again, national unity relied on the assertion of a “hegemonic culture” over ethnic and linguistic multiplicity with a detrimental impact on the cultural integrity of ethnic groups.22 This is captured by the Panchayat slogan: ek bhasa, ek bhes, ek des or “one language, one dress, one country.”23

JANA ANDOLAN

Although the recently slain King Birendra will be remembered as a true collaborator with democracy, it was not an easy start. He inherited the Panchayat system from his father, Mahendra, but in 1980 submitted it to a referendum after a spontaneous outburst of anti-Panchayat agitation. Student demonstrations,24 sparked a groundswell of discontent with the Nepali government in Kathmandu and beyond. In response, Birendra sought a popular mandate for his government. Elections were held in 1980, asking the Nepali people to decide between a reformed Panchayat Raj or multiparty democracy, which resulted in a fifty-five percent victory in favor of status quo albeit in modified form. The reformed system eliminated three-tiered indirect elections in favor of direct elections at the national level, which were held in 1981 according to universal suffrage. The result was a seventy percent turnover in the membership of the Rastriya Panchayat, a testament to the widespread disapproval of the entrenched elites.

The 1981 elections did not lessen the palace’s power, but it did liberalize the political climate to the extent that political parties, though officially banned, could effectively function; they began to organize with fervor.25 The Panchayat system had done little to alleviate poverty in rural areas. Despite steady and increasing foreign aid reaching $226 million in 1990, Nepal remained one of the poorest countries in the world with a GNP per capita of only $170.26 The economic plight of the ordinary citizen was further exacerbated by an embargo imposed by India in 1989. The embargo, in response to an arms deal that Birendra brokered with China, severely limited access routes to commerce for landlocked Nepal and crippled the economy. Mounting economic tension infused political parties with the widespread popular support necessary to launch a massive democracy movement.

By 1990, popular discontent and political forces joined to produce a people’s movement, Jana Andolan. The movement represented the first coordinated effort by political parties, particularly the Nepali Congress and a United Left Front to end the Panchayat system. It began symbolically on February 18, Democracy Day, and raged for fifty days. It consisted of a sustained series of demonstrations across Nepal, including nationwide strikes that shut down the streets, disrupting every aspect of urban life: transportation, administration, and commerce. The police crackdown was oppressive, and the jails filled with thousands of people. For the first time, the growing middle class of merchants and professionals were galvanized against police violence.27 The most climactic event of the movement was a demonstration, involving more than one hundred thousand people on April 6, which ended in a confrontation with police forces when protestors charged towards the palace. The brutality that ensued, with police firing into the unarmed crowd, was the deciding factor for the king. Soon after, he ended the ban on political parties. Multi-party elections took place in less than a year.

The Constitution of 1990 defines Nepal as “a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, democratic, independent, indivisible, sovereign, Hindu, Constitutional monarchical kingdom.”28 This definition was a compromise between palace attempts to safeguard its prerogatives and demands from ethnic and regional groups. Sovereignty was vested strictly with the people of Nepal, not the monarchy. Yet the king retained the title of supreme commander-in-chief of the army, broad emergency powers and control over palace-related issues, including succession. The new constitution provided for a parliamentary system with a bicameral legislature comprised of 205 seats in the House of Representatives (Pratinidhi Sabha), elected by universal suffrage, and a 60 member National Assembly (Rastriya Sabha) in which the king could nominate ten members while the other fifty seats were to be indirectly elected by the House of Representatives and an Electoral College.29 Hinduism remained the state religion, a subject of much controversy. And although Nepali remained the state language, the multiplicity of national languages were also recognized. In 1990, Radio Nepal began broadcasting in Newari and Mathili (a Hindi dialect prevalent in the Terai) and added eight other languages by 1993. Over the following years, resources were directed toward language and textbook development for primary school education in various mother tongues.

The 1990s witnessed a burgeoning of ethnic activism. Janajati or “indigenous peoples” movements worked to redress the two-hundred year domination of the Hindu elite through political mobilization and the promotion of cultural heritage for distinct ethnic groups. In one highly symbolic battle, the Nepal Janajati Mahasangh, formed in 1990 as a coalition of indigenous groups, successfully petitioned against the imposition of Sanskrit as compulsory in schools. Ethnic differentiation, not assimilation, became the dominant trend in the new democracy. In the 1991 census, the percentage of people identifying Nepali as their mother tongue shrunk for the first time. Coalitions based on ethnic allegiance were complicated by the fact that many ethnic groups include a diversity of subgroups. Some have distinct languages, like the Rai and Tharus, and others have broad geographic diffusion, like the Tamang. These factors became obstacles to the organization of broad-based lobby groups and also to the framing of a common identity.

To counter political fragmentation, the constitution explicitly bans political parties formed on the basis of regional or ethnic affiliation from participating in general elections.30 Many such parties sprung up in 1990, but only two were allowed to participate in the first elections: the Rastriya Janamukti Party and the Sadbhavana Party. They were carefully defined in broad enough terms despite ethnic and regional affiliations. The Mongol National Organization actively defies this stipulation by entering its candidates as independents. This unique party advocates a federation of Tibeto-Burmese states and the end of monarchy “which it sees as a buttress of Hindu dominance.”31 Whether ethnic activism will ultimately undermine Nepal’s cohesion and give rise to separatist movements remains to be seen.

Throughout the 1990s, King Birendra acted as a stabilizing factor. He never overstepped the bounds of his role as constitutional monarch, even during the steady stream of minority and coalition governments. By 1997, democracy had reached a low point, when three coalition governments came and went in a single year; this was due not only to a hung parliament but also by the inability among party members to transcend factionalism in the interest of political stability.32 Even the first majority government formed by the Nepali Congress party, between 1991 and 1994, ended prematurely in internecine conflict. The current government is led by the Nepali Congress, which won a majority of seats in the last elections in May 1999.

THE TEST

Throughout Nepal’s history as a unified country, the monarchy has been the single consistent factor. However, the role of the king has undergone significant transformations over time: from conqueror to symbolic figurehead and from absolute ruler to steward of democracy. It is because the monarchy has been such a critical factor to Nepal’s unity and sovereignty that the credibility of the new king, Gyanendra, is so crucial at this juncture.

The royal massacre still casts a long shadow over the palace. Gyanendra’s initial gaffe, explaining the incident as an accidental misfiring of an automatic weapon, was hardly resolved by the findings of a token commission. The commission report, which unequivocally implicated Prince Dipendra, raised more questions than it answered. For example, how could the prince, so drunk and high that he had to be helped upstairs to his bedroom by four men, later juggle multiple weapons and move skillfully between rooms several times while shooting at royal family members, all in a palace full of guards? It is a mystery that may never be solved.

Though far from winning over the Nepali people, King Gyanendra is slowly gaining approval. A key legitimating moment came at the very start of September during the third day of the royal festival, Indra Jatra. According to the Kathmandu Post, “The people heaved a sigh of relief when the Kumari offered her blessing to the King without hesitating, indicating a prosperous future.”33 The all-important coronation ceremony, which empowers the king as Vishnu incarnate, is still at least a year off for Gyanendra. In early January, the eleventh summit of SAARC (South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation) was hosted in Kathmandu without a hitch, despite the tensions between India and Pakistan over a terrorist attack in India on December 13. The summit provided the king with his first opportunity to meet leaders of neighboring Asian countries, including India’s Prime Minister Vajpayee and Pakistan’s President Musharraf. Regional terrorism was high on the agenda, and SAARC members signed a resolution against harboring terrorist groups on their soil. The visit by regional leaders to Nepal and their unanimous condemnation of terrorism have been important legitimizers for Gyanendra and his emergency. No doubt Colin Powell’s stopover in Nepal during his Asia tour in late January further enhanced Gyanendra’s stature as an accepted figurehead. Powell heralded the government’s efforts to end terrorism in Nepal but also cautioned against prolonging the state of emergency, in the interests of safeguarding democracy.

For now, the streets of Kathmandu are quiet, enforced by army checkpoints and nightly curfews. Maoist attacks are, for the most part, restricted to the countryside, where guerillas control a handful districts and continue to lay siege to police stations and army posts. Since the emergency, the press has been barred from sensitive areas, and some arrests of journalists have been reported. All in all, the economy has been hard hit by a forty-two percent decrease in tourism and the departure of numerous aid agencies after the bombing of a Coca-Cola plant in Kathmandu in November.

If the current scale of Maoist violence continues, the result could be a protracted civil war in which democratic institutions are suspended ad infinitum. Under the current constitution, the king has three months of emergency powers in the event of a national crisis. After that, the emergency must be ratified by a two-thirds majority in parliament. The clock is ticking. By February 22, the parliament will have to decide whether or not to continue the emergency. But the prospects for consensus seem slim. Opposition to the emergency among political leaders has mounted since December. Prime Minister Deuba is a principal advocate for continuing the emergency; however, his Nepali Congress party does not have enough seats to carry a two-thirds majority on its own. By the end of February, all eyes will be watching King Gyanendra. In order to conform with the present constitution, the king must either build consensus concerning a sustained emergency or bow to the will of the elected government. Only then will his attitude toward democracy truly be known.

ENDNOTES

1. Ajay Suri, “Tremors Rock Gyanendra’s Throne,” The Indian Express, June 5, 2001.
   
2. This term will be more familiar to readers as “Gurkha,” based on its Anglicized mispronunciation popularized by the British during the colonial era. The transliteration, “Gorkha,” is currently used by the government and press in Nepal as well as by Western scholars.
   
3. The Anglo-Nepali war of 1814-1816 occurred over a border dispute and access to trade routes in the Himalayas. Ludwig Stiller contends that such a dispute was inevitable given Nepal’s military strength at the end of its successful conquest of much of the Himalayan region and the British East India Company’s expanding trade interests from its stronghold in northern India during the early colonial era. See Ludwig Stiller 1973. The Rise of the House of Gorkha: A Study in the Unification of Nepal 1768-1816. Kathmandu: Ratna Pustak Bhandar.
   
4. The Vedas contain the most ancient Hindu rituals and consist in a body of sacred texts, originating from the second millennium BCE.
   
5. The Rajputs were a famous warrior clan who rose to power in northern India during the 9th -10th centuries.
   
6. The “living goddess” is a rotating position with Buddhist origins, which has played a key role in the Hindu royal festival, Indra Jatra, since the time of the Malla kings. The position is held by a young girl, kept in seclusion until puberty, except on ceremonial occasions. Once the girl has matured, she returns to a normal life and a new “living goddess” is selected.
   
7. Adrian Sever 1993. Nepal Under the Ranas. Sittingbourne, U.K.: Asia Publishing House, pp. 410-411.
   
8. The Indo-Aryan hill people, who form the top tier of the caste structure in Nepal, are known as Parbatiyas and consist predominantly of Brahmins and Ksatriyas. The Ksatriyas, or warrior class, can be divided into groups claiming descent from the Rajput warriors in India (see note 5 above), such as the Thakuris and Gorkhas, and those who migrated to Nepal in ancient times and intermarried with local ethnic groups, notably the Chetris (formerly Khas). The Brahmins also claim to originate in India.
   
9. The ethnic composition of Nepal’s indigenous groups is remarkably diverse, including the Newars in the Kathmandu Valley; Tibeto-Burmese tribes in the western and central hills like the Gurung, Magar and Tamang; eastern Kiranti people such as the Rai and Limbu; Tibetan peoples along the northern border, grouped as Bhotiyas; and the Tharu in the southern strip of Nepal bordering India (though more recently Hindi-speaking immigrants from India have also settled in this southern region, called the Terai). The Newars of the Kathmandu Valley are a notable exception to the discussion that follows. They have historically included both Buddhists and Hindus. Additionally, the Newars had their own caste system which was incorporated into the Mulakai Ain, such that high-caste Newars were granted a similar status to their counterparts among the Indo-Aryan hill tribes. Moreover, from the very beginning of Nepal’s unification, Newars played an important role in the government. They were necessary allies to cultivate since the administration of the country occurred in their indigenous stronghold, the Kathmandu Valley. Even during modern periods of direct monarchical rule, Newar elites have served important government posts alongside Parbatiyas.
   
10. See Nancy Levine 1987. “Caste, State, and Ethnic Boundaries in Nepal,” Journal of Asian Studies 46 (1), pp. 71-78.
    
11. For the intricate details of the caste system according to the Muluki Ain, see András Höfer’s seminal work, The Caste Hierarchy and the State in Nepal: A Study of the Muluki Ain of 1984 (Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag Wagner, 1979).
    
12. The term “Sanskritization” was first introduced by M. N. Srinivas in the landmark study, Social Change in Modern India. It denotes the adoption of high-caste behavior by low-caste Hindus and tribals as a form of social mobility. The term “Hinduization” is more in usage among contemporary anthropologists to emphasize the adoption of Hindu forms by non-Hindu groups as a type of syncretism and assimilation.
    
13. Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka 1997. “Vestiges and Visions: Cultural Change in the Process of Nation-Building in Nepal” in David Gellner, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, and John Whelpton (eds.) Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom: The Politics of Contemporary Nepal. Amsterdam: Hardwood Academic Publishers, p. 426.
    
14. When King Tribhuvan fled to India, he took the rest of the family with him but mysteriously left Gyanendra behind.
    
15. A royal proclamation on January 10, 1954 effectively gave the palace control over the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. See Bhuwan Lal Joshi and Leo Rose 1966. Democratic Innovations in Nepal: A Case Study of Political Acculturation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
    
16. Ludwig Stiller 1968. Prithwinarayan Shah in the Light of Dibya Upadesh. Kathmandu: Himalayan Book Center, p. 42.
    
17. See Leo Rose 1971. Nepal: Strategy for Survival. Berkeley: University of California Press.
    
18. Joshi and Rose 1966, p. 395.
    
19. Richard Burghart 1984. “The Formation of the Concept of Nation-State in Nepal,” Journal of Asian Studies 44 (1), p. 101-102.
    
20. Louise Brown 1996. The Challenge to Democracy in Nepal: A Political History. London: Routledge, p.39. Following in his father’s footsteps as supreme commander-in-chief of the army, Mahendra carefully weeded out overly ambitious officers and cultivated loyalties by taking a personal interest in the careers of those in the senior ranks. Moreover, he ensured that the army continued to be well-paid. See Joshi and Rose 1966, p. 390.
    
21. Selma Sonntag 1995. “Ethnolinguistic Identity and Language Policy in Nepal,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 1 (4), pp. 109-110.
    
22. See Brown 1996, pp. 75-80.
    
23. Whelpton, John 1997. “Political Identity in Nepal: State, Nation, and Community” in David Gellner, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, and John Whelpton (eds.) Nationalism and Ethnicity in a Hindu Kingdom: The Politics of Contemporary Nepal. Amsterdam: Hardwood Academic Publishers, p. 75 (note 19).
    
24. These protest were set off by shock over the execution of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, but quickly turned into anti-Panchayat demonstrations.
    
25. During the 1980s the Nepali Congress party was able to hold annual rallies in the capital with impunity. In 1985, it staged a satyagraha, or civil disobedience movement, garnering widespread support in the capital, but its leaders soon realized the need for a rural base in order to end the Panchayat system. See Brown 1996: 98-100.
    
26. Ramjee Parajulee 2000. The Democratic Transition in Nepal. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 223-224.
    
27. Ibid., p. 83.
    
28. Michael Hutt 1991. “Drafting the Nepal Constitution, 1990,” Asian Survey 31 (11), p. 1035.
    
29. Ibid., p. 1037.
    
30. This proviso is regulated by an Election Commission.
    
31. Susan Hangen 2000. “Roundtable: The Politics of Culture and Identity in Contemporary Nepal,” Himalayan Research Bulletin 20 (1), p. 7.
    
32. See Y.N. Khanal 1997. “Nepal in 1997: Political Stability Eludes,” Asian Survery 38 (2), pp. 148-154.
    
33. Kosmos Biswokama, “When the new Monarch meets the new Living Goddess...,” Kathmandu Post, September 2, 2001.

Source: Harvard Asia Quaterly