His Majesty King BIRENDRA BIR BIKRAM SHAH DEV of Nepal, who has been killed aged 55, was the world's only Hindu king and was conside...
His Majesty King BIRENDRA BIR BIKRAM SHAH DEV of Nepal, who has been killed aged 55, was the
world's only Hindu king and was considered by his followers to be an
incarnation of the god Vishnu.
Although King Birendra
had been educated within the constraints of western constitutional monarchy,
after his accession to the throne in 1972 he ruled his country as an absolute
monarch, albeit a benign one. But in 1990, following a series of strikes and
pro-democracy riots, he was forced to agree a new democratic constitution
framed along British lines.
The King was never so
popular with his subjects as when most of his powers had been taken away from
him. A well-meaning, serious and rather shy man, he proved himself
temperamentally well suited to the role of constitutional monarch.
The first 10 years of
democracy in Nepal were marred by political instability; yet King Birendra
steadfastly refused to go beyond the rights given him under the 1990
constitution to "be informed", to "encourage" and to
"warn". Thus the King found
himself commanding a respect and genuine affection from his people which he had
never enjoyed as an autocrat. By 2000, many of those who in 1990 had gleefully
thrown out photographs of the portly and bespectacled monarch (a
near-compulsory fixture in Nepalese shops and homes during his earlier years)
had pinned them up again of their own accord.
Prince Birendra Bir
Bikram Shah Dev was born at the Narayanhiti Royal Palace, Kathmandu, on
December 28 1945, the first son of six children of the then Crown Prince
Mahendra and his wife, Princess Indra.
Although the Shah
dynasty had been kings of Nepal since 1767, for more than a century, until
1950, their role had been largely ceremonial. Real authority during this period
had been vested in the Rana shogunate of royal vizirs who had seized power in
1846, establishing a line of hereditary prime ministers. As the Ranas had grown
corrupt and unpopular, the monarchy had became an object of veneration and in
later years a rallying point for democratic opposition to Rana rule. In
February 1951, Birendra's grandfather, King Tribhuvana, led a national
insurrection against the Ranas and was restored as the country's rightful
ruler.
Once in power, however,
King Tribhuvana proved a reluctant democrat. A succession of short-lived
governments ruling under an interim constitution attempted to persuade the King
to call a constituent assembly that would frame a permanent constitution, but
he continued to prevaricate. When King Tribhuvana died in 1955, his son
Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev carried on as before.
Eventually, after
large-scale civil disobedience, King Mahendra announced that elections for a
representative assembly would take place in February 1959. Eighteen months
after the new government had been formed, disagreements between the Prime
Minister and the King led to a royal coup.
A year later the King
promulgated a new constitution outlawing political parties and replacing the
directly elected legislature with a network of local councils or
"panchayats", culminating in an indirectly elected national Panchayat
- in reality nothing more than a puppet body entirely dependent on the King.
Mahendra continued to
rule Nepal as a despot, although without conspicuous abuse of power. He saw
himself, however, as a modern monarch and sent his son, Crown Prince Birendra,
to be educated in the western tradition. The prince began his formal education
at St Joseph's College, a Jesuit institute in Darjeeling.
From 1959 to 1964 he
attended Eton, where although he was no scholar, he adapted well and was
remembered by contemporaries (who gave him the irreverent nickname
"Nipple") as a likeable, shy and unassuming young man, who was always
embarrassed when his full name was read out at school roll call. He spent much
of his spare time in the school's art room where he developed a talent for
painting, occasionally taking time off to accompany his father on state visits.
After Eton, Prince
Birendra returned to Nepal and began to explore the country, travelling
incognito to remote regions where he lived on whatever was available in
villages or monasteries. These peregrinations were followed by a year at Tokyo
University and a course in international affairs at Harvard under Henry
Kissinger, the former American Secretary of State.
In 1970, he married
Princess Aishwarya Rajya Laxmi Devi Rana, a member of the Rana family, the
former rulers of Nepal. For their wedding, a column of gaily decorated
elephants lumbered through the narrow streets of Kathmandu, some 500 servants
bore dishes of traditional sweetmeats to the bride and almost 200 relatives
took part in ritual footwashing of the betrothed couple. "Come let us
marry," pledged the Prince to his bride, "let our children live long
lives. Let us live a life - a hundred years - full of love, strength and
sentiment."
The marriage, however,
was not a popular one. While Birendra was shy and retiring, Queen Aishwarya was
outspoken, forceful and somewhat brash. She was therefore disapproved of in the
male-dominated society of Nepal.
On his father's death in
1972, King Birendra consulted his court astrologers who advised him to delay
his coronation for three years - the most auspicious moment for his crowning
being at 8.37 am precisely on February 4 1975. Soon after dawn on that day,
King Birendra was driven to the temple of his ancestral palace, the Hanuman
Dhoka ("gate of the monkey god"). There he was smeared with mud taken
from various symbolic places - the bottom of a lake, the tusk of an elephant, a
mountain, the confluence of two rivers and the doorstep of a prostitute's
house. Then, with Queen Aishwarya beside him, he was cleansed with butter,
milk, yoghurt and honey as priests chanted praises and salutations.
The coronation ceremony
was attended by statesmen and political leaders from 60 nations, with the
Prince of Wales representing the British Royal Family. The King's personal
guests included his former housemaster at Eton, Peter Lawrence, three other
masters and 15 old boys. At the ordained time, the chief priest placed on the
King's head the emerald green crown, encrusted with jewels and adorned with
feathers from a bird of paradise.
During the subsequent
durbar, the King announced that he had ordered his government to make primary
education available and free for every child, but disappointed those Nepalis
who hoped that he would promise progress towards democracy. The King was said
to have been dissuaded from such a move by his palace advisers and Queen
Aishwarya, although at the time he himself saw democracy as an unwelcome
adjunct to his ambition to develop his country. "The people ask us for
hygienic drinking water, roads, schools and hospitals, not for democracy,"
he once remarked. He saw himself as a divinely appointed technocrat.
King Birendra's early
ambitions included the introduction of a New Education System Plan to address
the country's 85 per cent illiteracy rate, and the establishment of a National
Development Service which required all post-graduate students to work for 10
months in the villages as a prerequisite for their degrees. He also divided the
country into five development regions, and "development" became the
ideology of the state.
Yet despite his
ambitions, he failed to make much of an impact on poverty and illiteracy.
Politics had never been his strong suit; he enjoyed the pomp and ceremony of
power but tended to leave the business of government to others. Resentment was
fuelled by allegations that courtiers and members of the royal family had made
fortunes out of corruption.
Queen Aishwarya became
the target of some of the most virulent attacks and came to be regarded by
Nepalis as a Lady Macbeth figure. She was once rumoured to have attempted a
palace coup by hurling a teapot at the King, and it had been recently suggested
that her envy of the Crown Prince's intended bride had led to a family rift.
Many of the stories about her were conjectural; nevertheless she was believed
to have amassed a sizeable fortune in a numbered Swiss bank account. Many
Nepalese assumed that most foreign aid was siphoned off into royal accounts.
Worse, in the eyes of
the Nepali intelligensia, was King Birendra's insistence on retaining the
corrupt panchayat system and his refusal to rescind the ban on political
parties. There were outbreaks of violence from an insurgent anti-monarchist
movement which in 1973 hijacked a Nepalese airliner and a few weeks later
burned down the Singha Durbar Palace, the Government's seat at Kathmandu. In
June 1985, explosions rocked the capital and killed seven people. But a
referendum held in 1980 confirmed that most subjects were content with the
panchayat system and for a time the rest of the world accepted Nepal as a
reasonably free society, ignoring some evidence of human rights abuses.
King Birendra's strength
throughout his first 18 years in power lay in the loyalty of the country's
conservative peasant majority, who remained unmoved by arguments about liberal
democracy which had exercised the tiny Nepalese intelligensia.
But in 1989 this support
was put in doubt when, following the breakdown of trade negotiations, India
closed the border with Nepal. This delayed or halted the bulk of Nepal's
foreign trade, including crucial shipments of oil, and threatened the tourist
trade, a major source of foreign exchange which had been carefully cultivated
by King Birendra.
The result was a
catastrophic decline in agricultural production, lay-offs in factories, and a
trebling in the price of basic commodities, bringing acute economic hardship to
both countryside and towns and uniting peasants and professional classes in
opposition to the Government.
For three decades, the
outlawed Congress and Communist parties had been the focus of dissent, but
rivalries and distrust had hindered their attempts to put forward a coherent
alternative to Birendra's Government. In 1990, however, they came together to
form the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, launching a campaign that
combined civil disobedience with industrial action.
In February 1990, the
movement organised strikes among doctors, pilots, lawyers and students. The
unrest reached its peak in April when 50,000 protesters marched towards the
royal palace, throwing bricks and stones. At first King Birendra's Government
took a hard line with the protesters: soldiers fired killing 50 people and a
curfew was imposed. But the brutality of the army fanned discontent and the
King was faced with declaring a state of emergency or giving in.
On April 11, the curfew
was lifted and nine members of the Government, including the Prime Minister,
were sacked, to be replaced by an administration led by Krishna Prashad
Bhattarai, a former dissident.
At first Birendra and
his advisers resisted any constitutional changes which lessened his authority,
but under the threat of more protests he was obliged to relent and subsequently
proclaimed that the people should rally round the new Government. He announced
the abolition of the panchayat system and invited Bhattarai to draft a new
constitution allowing free elections. As 28 years of autocracy were brought to
an end, thousands of jubilant Nepalis poured on to the streets of Kathmandu.
In November 1990 the
King formally relinquished power to his subjects with the proclamation of a new
constitution restoring multi-party democracy to his Himalayan kingdom. Nepal's
first democratic elections in 32 years were held in March 1991.
The first years of
democracy were bedevilled by factionalism and corruption. Between 1991 and
2000, Nepal had a total of seven prime ministers as coalition after coalition
fell apart. From 1995, a shadowy group of self-styled Maoist guerrillas with
links to Peru's Sendero Luminoso ("Shining Path") launched a campaign
of brutal murders and attacks on government installations from the country's
far western jungles, in an attempt to overthrow the monarchy and the democratic
government. This so-called "People's War", and attempts by police
paramilitaries to combat it, plunged much of the country into an unprecedented
spiral of violence.
Throughout this period,
King Birendra was almost alone in sticking to the spirit and letter of the 1990
constitution, confining himself to ceremonial functions. The humiliating events
of 1990 seemed to have left him fearful of being accused of having political
interests and for much of the time he remained behind the gates of the
Narayanhiti Palace. In 1998 he suffered a mild heart attack and after that
continued to suffer the effects of heart disease.
King Birendra and Queen
Aishwarya, their son Prince Nirajan, their daughter Princess Shruti, two of the
king's sisters, his brother-in-law and a cousin were all killed by gunfire at
the Narayanhiti royal palace in an incident which has left his eldest son and
successor, Crown Prince Dipendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, critically injured. The
King's brother, Prince Gyanendra, is acting Prince Regent.
This post was published by Sishir Chalise. 
