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COVER STORY: NEPAL
Throne Of Blood
A canny businessman becomes king but faces uncertainty
over his own future and that of his line of succession
By Swapan Dasgupta and Farzand Ahmed in Kathmandu
In traditional societies
it is difficult at the best of times to distinguish between fact and fiction
and between history and mythology. In a Nepal gripped by tension and uncertainty
and captivated by the bush telegraph, the exercise is proving impossible.
Consider this quaint but suggestive tale doing the rounds in curfew-bound
Kathmandu.
When Gyanendra, the present King of Nepal, was
born in July 1947, a court astrologer-and they are legion in Nepal-told
his father, the then Crown Prince Mahendra, to avoid looking at the newborn
because it would bring him bad luck. Consequently, the baby Gyanendra
was dispatched out of Kathmandu to live with his grandmother in a distant
palace. Three years later, when, exasperated by the high-handedness of
his Rana prime minister King Tribhuvan, with Mahendra and other notable
royals in tow, fled to India, Gyanendra was the only male royal of consequence
left in Nepal. Prime Minister Mohan Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana brought
the child to Kathmandu and had him crowned king on November 7, 1950.
The first reign of King Gyanendra lasted a little
over three months, with India ensuring King Tribhuvan's return. For the
ousted Gyanendra there was an unexpected windfall. It seems that coins
were struck in those three months with his image and they became collector's
items. The adult Gyanendra, or so the story goes, made a tidy sum collecting
and selling those coins to numismatists.
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I, KING: The coronation of Gyanendra
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For the 53-year-old Gyanendra who was crowned
king for the second time in very unusual circumstances on June 4, it has
been a tussle between irony and destiny. If it was Mohan Shamsher Jang
Bahadur Rana who ensured his first coronation, it was the shadow of that
Rana's great grand-daughter, Devyani, that hung over his second shy at
kingship (see accompanying story). It was, they say in Nepal, the Rana's
ultimate revenge.
Not that King Gyanendra can escape the opprobrium
of history's retribution. Conspiracy being a staple of the uninformed
classes, the 13th ruler of the Shah dynasty cannot escape the downside
of destiny. Why, they ask on the streets, was Gyanendra conveniently absent
from that fateful Friday dinner? Why, they ask, did the trigger happy
Dipendra not bring Gyanendra's son into his range? How did Queen Komal
escape with a single bullet wound despite being in the room? What others
would have called fate, the sloganeering classes of Nepal call inexplicable.
King Birendra's line became extinct on June 1; King Gyanendra's survived
intact. The first time, James Bond used to say, is an accident, the second
time a coincidence, but the third time is a conspiracy.
It is this uncanny knack for being in the right
place at the right time that has come to dog King Gyanendra. A man who
is by common consent both shrewd and highly intelligent, the new King's
priority is to restore faith and trust in the monarchy-the institution
that has held Nepal together for two centuries. "Any crack in this
institution will weaken both the country and democracy," says former
external affairs minister and Rashtriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) spokesman
Kamal Thapa.
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