Mountain Kingdom (cont.) | Outside Online

Outside Magazine September 2001

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Mountain Kingdom (cont.)


	Illustrated Map of Nepal.

They definitely need some new astrologers at the royal court in Kathmandu. It was the seers of the spheres, casting their ancient divinations and decoding the celestial motions, who laid the trap. They calculated that the heavens were not in alignment for a royal wedding. The crown prince had picked the wrong bride. The auspicious date and the harmonious mate were still years in the future. The queen listened to them too closely—or, some say, they listened to her too closely—and rejected her son's plan to marry his girlfriend.

Intrigue is the Nepalese national pastime, factionalism the country's historic curse. Crown Prince Dipendra's bride-to-be, Devyani, and Queen Aiswarya were both members of the most powerful political clan in Nepal, the Ranas, who ruled the country from 1846 to 1951 in an inherited dictatorship that allowed the royal Shah Dev family to retain the crown. But the Ranas long ago split into rival branches, and Aiswarya could not stomach her son's choosing from the wrong side of the family tree.



	A Maoist militiaman raises his flintlock to salute approaching comrades.

On June 1, 29-year-old Dipendra—popular heir to the throne of the world's only Hindu kingdom, inheritor of the Lost Horizon—did something that was, the astrologers admitted later, not foreseen in his charts. He reportedly drank some scotch, smoked some hashish, and then committed regicide, patricide, matricide, fratricide, sororicide, and finally suicide. Shortly after being ejected from a family dinner for drunkenness, Dipendra returned with a submachine gun, an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol, and killed everyone he could, beginning with his father, continuing through most of the royal household, and ending with himself. When it was over, ten people were dead.

Like Hamlet, the crown prince seems to have been driven to violence by the inbred madness of a rotten kingdom. Like Ophelia, the star-crossed young royal killed himself at a pond in the palace garden. But you don't have to look to Shakespeare for analogies: Nepal's own history is littered with examples of blood on the crown, including a spectacular 1846 massacre, instigated by the queen, that cut down more than 30 members of the elite.

Still, the murdered king had seemed the very model of a modern minor monarch. Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, a descendent of the original Gurkha prince who conquered and united Nepal in the 1760s, had been educated at Eton and Harvard, and became absolute monarch at age 26 upon the death of his father, King Mahendra, in 1972. Unlike his father, who had dissolved Nepal's first constitutional government in 1960, imprisoned most of the dominant Nepali Congress Party leadership, and banned all political activity, Birendra was a relatively liberal ruler, the glue that held together this country of 23 million people—a patchwork of 60 languages and a score of ethnic groups—as it opened to the outside world.

The political system, however, remained tightly restricted until 1990, when street demonstrations forced Birendra's royal hand. He cemented his popularity by assenting to democracy—albeit a system where weak prime ministers are squeezed between an unaccountable monarchy and a parliament of cynical, corrupt coalitions. Democracy has now given birth to 92 registered parties, among them 15 "legitimate" communist parties that have often overlapped in coalitions, and even names. The Kathmandu phone book currently lists the Nepal Communist Party (United Marxist Leninist)—the main opposition in parliament—as well as the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist Leninist), the Nepal Communist Party (Democratic), the Nepal Communist Party (Masal), and its rival-by-one-letter the Nepal Communist Party (Mashal). All of them despise the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) for abandoning the electoral process in 1995 to go underground.

Despite the patina of modernity in Kathmandu, the country still suffers the aftereffects of isolation. High-caste Hindu Brahmans and Chetris of Indian descent, called Aryans, control the government, the economy, and much of the best farmland, while low-caste farmers and untouchables are marginalized. Almost half the country's people, including the Sherpas, are "tribals," mountaineers of Tibeto-Burmese descent, usually Buddhist or animist in their beliefs. There are long memories here, and hill people resent that Hindus arrived centuries ago as refugees, only to impose their culture, alphabet, rulers, and religion.

"It is a country made of groups that have long histories of suspicion toward each other," says Joe Elder, director of the Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "The farther you go out from the Kathmandu Valley, the more people insist that they are Gurung, or Tamang, or Magar, not Nepalese."

Modern geopolitics plays out along parallel lines. Never conquered by the British, Nepal swelters in the economic and political shadow of India, the regional superpower. Since the enemy of my enemy is my friend, Nepal has reluctantly turned to China. The realpolitik issue for China is Tibet. As long as Nepal clamps down on its tens of thousands of restive Tibetan exiles, Beijing supports Kathmandu, not the Maoists.

Squeezed between giants and pricked by overpopulation, deforestation, and corruption, many resentful Nepalis are vulnerable to conspiracy theories. ("In my experience, there's at least one conspiracy theory for every person in Nepal," Elder notes.) Ideologues who promise a war on "class enemies" and the satisfaction of ancient grievances find willing listeners. The Maoists' elusive leader, Comrade Prachanda (Nepali for "fierce"), constantly denounces the country's Hindu Brahman leaders, despite being a Hindu Brahman leader himself, and has whipped up nationalist paranoia with predictions of an imminent Indian invasion. Most of the time, however, Prachanda leaves the talking to the guerrillas' media-savvy second-in-command, Baburam Bhattarai, an Indian-educated architect fond of gassy vows to "hoist the hammer-and-sickle red flag atop Mount Everest."

The explosion of all these tensions came not with the royal massacre, which left the nation in stunned silence, but three days later, when—as in Hamlet—the dead king's brother, 55-year-old Gyanendra, assumed the throne in a ceremony whose very haste prompted suspicion. Many Nepalis did not believe—would not believe—the official verdict that the massacre was the act of a single, drug-addled prince. It was a double cross by factions of the Rana family;



	Rolpa girl with communist all-stars calender.

it was a coup plot by India and the CIA; it was Gyanendra, who, conveniently absent, used his despised son Paras to orchestrate the killings. Comrade Prachanda, rumored to be hiding in India or London, issued a statement calling the carnage and its aftermath "a serious political conspiracy." On June 4, thousands of demonstrators, fronted by communist students, took to the streets. Fourteen curfew violators were shot and wounded by police. Two editors and the publisher of Kantipur, a Kathmandu daily, were arrested after publishing an anti-royal article by Baburam Bhattarai. The Maoists launched a string of symbolic bomb attacks, dynamiting the house of the unpopular prime minister, Girija Prasad Koirala, and the chief justice of the supreme court, who led the dubious investigation into the massacre.When King Birendra, his skin painted pink with tikka paste, was cremated on a funeral pyre, the old Nepal went up in flames with him.

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