Saturday, 06.07.08

Death of a Monarchy

PRAKASH MATHEMA/AFP/Getty Images

Nepal officially abolished its monarchy on May 28.

For the first time since the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, a royal dynasty has been toppled. A newly sworn-in parliament ended Nepal's 239-year Hindu monarchy and declared a secular republic in its place. King Gyanendra, grim and gloomy and out-of-touch, was given 15 days to vacate his pink palace in the center of Kathmandu.

The final chapters of Nepal's monarchy were disastrous. In 2001, a mentally unstable Crown Prince, distraught at not being allowed to marry his beloved, killed nine members of the royal dynasty before committing suicide. King Gyanendra ascended to the throne in the wake of this Shakespearean tragedy, and as a Maoist revolt in the countryside gathered force, he abolished democratic freedoms in 2005 and ruled by decree for a year, until protests forced him to reinstate the parliament.

The media portrayed last month's act of parliament as a happy ending to Nepal's tale of woe. But it is not nearly that simple. The monarchy, as bad as it had become, was the glue that held together Nepal's dozen ethnic groups, with their 48 languages and dialects. Absent that glue, the dominant force in the country is now the Maoist guerrillas, who control parliament. The Maoists have been guilty of unspeakable "mutilation atrocities" -- including, in a small number of cases, breaking most of the victim's bones, followed by gouging the eyes, cutting the tongue, and sawing him in half. Much of the movement consists of unsocialized youths from the lowest castes, brainwashed by elderly ideologues. In this it bears an eerie resemblance to the Colombian narco-terrorists. Nepal is now officially a democracy, but it is unclear whether it will become a civil society.

The Indians must be nervous. The Maoists, a product of rural underdevelopment in the midst of globalization, are an offshoot of the leftist Naxalite terrorist movement that has plagued an increasingly prosperous India, especially in the central and northeastern parts of the country. The Naxalites represent the gravest security threat to Indian law and order, even more than any threats from Islamic terror. The Maoist victory in Nepal represents an important morale boost to the Naxalites. China is not threatened, because its border with Nepal is mountainous and sparsely populated. But the bulk of the Nepalese population, along with its turmoil, lives alongside India's hard-to-patrol Nepalese border.

The arrival of democracy in Nepal may represent further turmoil in an ethnically riven and back-breakingly poor state whose domestic woes may disrupt the emergent Indian global dynamo. Much good news is coming out of Asia, but Nepal, Bangladesh, Burma, and some states of northeastern India remain turbulent and retrograde. This latest development is neither happy, nor the end.

— Robert D. Kaplan

Filed Under: India, monarchy, Nepal, South Asia

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