The kingdom’s principal iconoclasts were the leaders of its banned political parties—the centrist Nepali Congress and various Communist factions—plus a loose network of urban intellectuals, including unruly university students at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan University and dissident newspaper editors holed up in ramshackle quarters around the capital. These last had been treading a fine line with the king for years, but as their international news wires and shortwave radios crackled in the fall of 1989 with astounding news of the collapse of Eastern Europe’s Communist regimes, the impish newspaper editors grasped an opportunity. It was impossible to report on or to advocate popular, democratic dissidence in Nepal itself, but since communism was a royally decreed evil, it seemed more than acceptable to trumpet news of its demise in Europe. Day after day the
Rising Nepal
carried headlines about the democratic people’s movements in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany— mass demonstrations, peaceful calls for democratic rights, student movements inspired by the Chinese students at Tiananmen Square—and the editors gave the stories front-page prominence that seemed considerably out of proportion with their interest to isolated Nepalese. (Indian newspaper editors, in comparison, tended to bury the East Europe story, reflecting a general unease in New Delhi about the worldwide tide of popular disenchantment with leftist state structures.) The circulation of the
Rising Nepal
and other Kathmandu newspapers was not large enough to have obvious national significance, but the papers did reach many in the urban classes living in the Kathmandu valley and the towns in the southern plains, or Terai. Dissidents in the banned political parties and at the university later told me that as the news from East Europe went on, the increasingly bold headlines in the Kathmandu newspapers became a kind of private code, a signal to the democratic faithful that they could act and win, as well as an inspiration to the relatively small urban and trading classes previously reluctant to rock the royal boat.
The king, a baby-faced, generally well-liked man popularly depicted as the bungling victim of his scheming queen, his ne’er-do-well son at Eton, and his manipulative ministers, apparently did not understand the implications of this news from afar. Politics did not much interest his royal highness. Officially decreed to be the living reincarnation of a Hindu god, Birendra did his bit in public, wandering among the masses to dole out welfare schemes or cut ribbons at Western-funded infrastructure projects. But his principal passion appeared to be volleyball, which he played every day at the Kathmandu palace or at his far-flung hunting lodges. He also enjoyed swimming and had been trained as a helicopter pilot, potentially useful skills for a despot uncertain when or how he might need to make a quick getaway.
By February 1990, the remnants of the Berlin Wall were being scavenged by souvenir hunters and hundreds of students at Tribhuvan University had banded together to launch a movement for democracy modeled on the efforts of their Chinese and East European brethren. Their democracy movement was a direct violation of Nepal’s laws against organized politics, but the students said they intended to go ahead anyway with street demonstrations, and they set a date to begin. I flew up from Delhi to see how it would go.
After the sometimes brutal nihilism of Indian religious riots and Sri Lankan ideological insurgency, the Nepalese democracy movement had a refreshing air about it. Spared direct rule by British troops during the days of the empire (after a patch of rebelliousness, the reigning Ranas had put their formidable Gurkha soldiers into imperial service during the nineteenth century), the Nepalese managed generally to avoid the institutionalization of brutality in their state apparatus, so while there was repression and even torture of political dissidents in prison, there were relatively few of the routine firings on crowds or extrajudicial killings that had helped to inure democratic India and Sri Lanka to the uses of state violence. In Nepal’s embryonic political culture, shooting unarmed civilians in the streets was not yet unremarkable. Added to this was a comparatively pure opposition of eighteenth-century political ideas—constitutional democracy on the one side, absolute monarchy on the other. Of course, many urban Nepalese were aware of the muddling of these opposing ideas in the late twentieth century. The muddle included the king’s attempt to establish a “partyless democracy” of district councils, called
panchayats,
through which royal decrees and socialist welfare schemes were implemented. The muddle also included bizarre factionalism and antidemocratic tendencies among the self-proclaimed Nepalese democratic parties, particularly the Nepalese Communists, some of whom were regarded by Beijing as potential levers against the Indian-installed monarchy. But when the students from Tribhuvan University hit the streets that February and King Birendra tried to sort out how he should respond to them, these questions and problems were subsumed temporarily by a greater spirit, a mobilization of sometimes anachronistic political ideas. As an American, to watch this unfold was to be transported into a theatrical Mongolian enactment of dimly recalled elementary school textbooks.
On February 18, the day announced by the students for the start of their demonstrations for democracy, the king and his ministers decided to show their own popular power by mobilizing on the streets of Kathmandu a “spontaneous” demonstration of royalist sentiment. Thirty or forty thousand people streamed onto the cracked concrete bleachers at the National Stadium to prepare for a march. They were mainly government employees or members of civic organizations funded by the king and queen, such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Emissaries of the royals handed leaflets and souvenir postcards of their beloved highnesses to all those entering the stadium. There were pictures of the king wrapped up in orange ribbons, pictures of the king advertising the virtues of democracy, pictures of the king waving to the masses. The king himself felt it imprudent to make a personal appearance, so the next best thing was paraded around the stadium—a larger-than-life-size color photographic cutout of His Majesty in familiar waving pose. Honor guards in red uniforms and large white fur hats toted the royal image in a horse carriage bedecked in flowers and gold braid. The overall impression was of a marginal Peter Sellers movie.
Wandering around the stadium, waiting for the march and the action to begin, I approached a group of primary school teachers in the midst of the crowd. One held a sign that read on one side, “Long Live the Panchayat System of Democracy—Down with the Foreign Alliance,” a reference to the Nepali Congress’s historic links to its Indian counterpart. The reverse of the sign read, “The Panchayat System Must Be the Best for Nepal.” This seemed an odd sentence, potentially ambiguous, but more likely the consequence of South Asian grammar.
I asked the man holding the sign why he had made it. He looked at the sentence stimulating my curiosity, then at me. “Because the panchayat system must be the best for Nepal,” he answered.
“Do you think that most people agree with that?”
“No, no, not at all,” he said, as if this were obvious.
After an uncomfortable pause, I asked, “Will there be trouble later?”
“Maybe there will.”
There was, but it was a modest, relatively playful riot. After a few loops around the stadium track, the carriage carrying the royal cutout departed and ran smack into bands of democracy-movement organizers and squads of truncheon-wielding riot police in the streets of downtown Kathmandu—narrow warrens where swirling Hindu temple architecture blends appealingly with Tibetan influences. The royalists decided quickly to get out of the way; many went home, while others joined the crowds of shopkeepers, office workers, and tourists that formed just west and north of the palace to watch the students break the law. This they did by standing in clusters of two or three dozen at the opposite ends of streets and alleys from the riot police. Wearing blue jeans, bandanas, and track shoes, the students chanted over and over, louder and louder, “We want DEM-o-crah-see! We want DEM-o-crah-see!” At first, I wasn’t certain what they were talking about—I thought they might be calling for the release of some jailed student leader whose name I had somehow missed. For months afterward, the pronunciation echoed in my mind, a sign of my sentimental weakness for hopeful politics.
The students picked up bricks and hurled them at the police. The police picked up bricks and hurled them back. After a while, both sides would stop for another round of chanting. During these breaks I wandered among the students to ask about their plans. As I had no translator and they had little English, our exchanges were limited to blunt declarations, which seemed about right for the mood of the riot. The students said things like, “We are going to break the law! We are going to make it free!” or “We have got the cooperation of the people—this is autocracy, complete autocracy!” or “We will fight so long as our blood is red!” I asked about the king, and a few offered that he was not such a bad man, but he was surrounded by an evil queen and a corrupt court. There was room for forgiveness, if only the king would see the light of DEM-o-crah-see spreading around the world. This day, however, the king seemed determined to snuff the light out, albeit carefully. The police refrained from using guns, at least in the politically sensitive environs of central Kathmandu, but by midafternoon they had had enough of the slogans and the bricks, and they began to charge the students vigorously, emitting guttural screams and wielding their sticks freely on heads and backs. Now adrenaline began to pump and all of us were running and shouting with heightened ability. We white people were supposed to be exempt from police beatings under the general principles of South Asian hospitality to foreigners, but it was necessary sometimes to remind individual policemen loudly of the rules.
By evening the students had pretty much dispersed to tea stalls and campus hostels, vowing to carry on another day. I found myself over by the national museum erected for the preservation of the memory of King Tribhuvan, King Birendra’s grandfather, who took back the palace from the Ranas. I went inside for a look. Mainly there were sepia photos of the king on auspicious days of his reign and samples of auspicious clothing he wore on auspicious occasions. There were a few exceptional examples of imperial pomp, such as a snap of His Majesty dressed in a military cap and a Scottish kilt, holding a growling Pekingese while astride a horse. There were photographs of the royal wedding, which took place when the king was only thirteen years old. The ceremony took two days, as Tribhuvan married two women simultaneously, the senior Queen Kanthi Raja Lakshmi Devi and the junior Queen Ishavari Raja Lakshmi Devi. From later photographs one does not gain the impression of an energetic menage à trois. But the king does seem enlivened in pictures of his revolt against the evil Ranas, aided by India’s Nehru. He stands proudly beside Nehru in one of these photos, decked out in cool jazz shades. They look like a couple of conked swing-era trombonists on leave from a Manhattan hotel.
In the weeks ahead, Tribhuvan’s grandson, the Volleyball King, made it plain that he was not anywhere near so hip to the democracy thing. His security forces shot a few students dead and the king’s ministers sent the riot police out in greater force. I made an appointment at the palace to ask what the king had in mind. One of his senior aides met me in an office just inside the tall, spiked palace gates.
“The king’s idea for twenty-five years is that every institution must keep in tune with the changing times,” my informant began. “The king is looked on as the reincarnation of god, but in the Hindu model, where the god is much more of a human figure. To be a reincarnation of god is not really divinity. He has said that he is not divine. He feels the monarchy must keep in step with changing times. He wants to find out what useful role it can play. He sees the role as expediting development and preserving peace.”
I asked about the popular impression that the king’s court, if not the king himself, was deeply corrupt.
“A great deal of the resentment is exaggerated,” my courtier friend answered. “Obviously the contractors do make money and there is corruption in the country and in the palace, but not any more than in other countries. That autocracy thing has been heavily criticized. It’s just a rationale for electioneering. The overwhelming impression one has is that the king is a good listener. There’s a very strong democratic streak in his temperament. Sometimes he’s criticized for not acting quickly enough, but in addition to being democratic and a man who listens, he is a very fair person.... He is interested in problems that other people can’t solve.”
He found one on April 6, the day an estimated two hundred thousand Nepalese in Kathmandu Valley thronged through the streets of their capital to demand multiparty democracy, abandoning their caution about the chanting, brick-throwing university students and joining them at the barricades. It was the largest popular demonstration in recorded Nepalese history. Waving the flags of banned opposition parties, the demonstrators massed before the downtown palace, pelted stones at a statue of the monarch’s father, King Mahendra, and chanted slogans. These included not only the familiar “DEM-o-crah-see!” but now also more focused ones, such as “Birendra the Thief, leave the country!”
Soldiers manning machine guns in pillboxes before the palace gates opened fire. In Kathmandu and at similar demonstrations in other cities, dozens were killed and scores wounded. Anarchy now reigned in the capital’s streets.