King Birendra of Nepal

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.

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