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Nepalese king's China card
fails
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI - Himalayan geopolitics were at
play again as thousands of Nepalis braved arrest
on Sunday, International Labor Day, and openly
marched through Nepal's capital, Kathmandu,
demanding the restoration of democracy after King
Gyanendra lifted a state of emergency imposed
three months earlier.
For one, analysts
here doubt that Gyanendra, on his own accord, made
the announcement on Saturday that the February 1
state of emergency had been done away with. It is
still not immediately clear what impact the
announcement will have, since the king appears to
retain the extraordinary powers he took on three
months ago.
About 2,000 people
participated in one rally through the streets of
Katmandu and 8,000 took part in another. The
protests were watched by people from homes and
rooftops. The protesters carried red flags and
chanted: "We want democracy, down with autocracy."
Gyanendra is a cornered monarch, said S D
Muni, India's foremost Nepal analyst and professor
of international relations at Jawaharlal Nehru
University. Muni told Inter Press Service in an
interview it was pressure from New Delhi that
forced the king to relax his grip on the nation,
after his attempt to play the China card failed.
"The king tried to use the China trump
card but did not succeed, because Beijing felt
that helping him at this stage would alienate the
international community," the professor pointed
out.
Gyanendra's announcement came hours
after he returned to Kathmandu, which he left the
week before to attend the April 23-24
Asian-African summit in Indonesia. On the return
leg of his 10-day sojourn, the monarch stopped in
Singapore and, more significantly, Beijing.
In Indonesia, the king made his first
contact with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
since the "royal coup" in February and was told in
no uncertain terms by the leader of the country
with the greatest clout in Nepal there had to be
quick restoration of civil liberties.
Gyanendra sowed confusion by selectively
telling television reporters in Jakarta that India
had agreed to restore military aid to Nepal and it
was only on his return to Kathmandu that the king
finally admitted he "took the views of Mr Singh
seriously".
Any hope that Gyanendra would
gain Beijing's ear was doomed from the beginning
given India's growing clout in global affairs and
its overwhelming influence over Nepal, the world's
only surviving Hindu kingdom.
April saw
Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao making a tour of
South Asian countries, devoting four days to
India, but studiously avoiding Kathmandu.
On April 25, as Gyanendra headed for
Beijing, India's former ambassador to China, C V
Ranganathan, told IPS that any attempt by the
Nepalese monarch to play India off against China
was bound to fail.
"For some years now
China has, as a matter of policy, refrained from
competing with India in the neighborhood no matter
what some think-tanks say. At this point, it is
important that the king has been told [by Manmohan
Singh] what is expected of him," Ranganathan said.
Reacting cautiously to the lifting of
emergency in Nepal, India's External Affairs
Minister Natwar Singh, who was present during the
Jakarta meeting between the king and the Indian
premier, said he viewed the relaxation only as a
"first step" toward the restoration of multi-party
democracy.
"We, Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh and myself, had conveyed to King Gyanendra
that political processes should be restored,
political prisoners should be released and Indian
[television] channels should be allowed to be
aired, and that these processes should culminate
in multi- party elections," Natwar Singh told
reporters on Saturday, revealing what had actually
transpired in Jakarta.
Muni, for one, was
skeptical about the real intentions of the king,
who, ever since his 2002 coronation - following a
gory palace massacre in which his brother King
Birendra Bir Bikram Shah, Queen Aishwarya and
their heir, Crown Prince Dipendra perished -
seemed bent on taking the kingdom back to absolute
monarchy.
"The lifting of emergency is an
eyewash and apart from lip service, the king has
no real respect for India's views on restoration
of multi-party democracy," said Muni. The king was
at a crossroads, Muni added, and if he were to
restore real democracy, the monarchy could lose
all its powers.
Coupled with a nine-year
Maoist insurgency to replace Nepal's
constitutional monarchy with a king-less communist
republic, political parties have also been calling
for constituent assembly elections to redraft the
country's constitution.
"We want the
promulgation of a constituent assembly, and
through the constituent assembly we will decide
whether to have the king or not to have the king,"
Ramesh Rizal, a central committee member of the
centrist Nepali Congress (Democratic), told IPS in
March.
Nonetheless, Gyanendra's assurances to Manmohan Singh in Jakarta
to restore Nepal's political process did not prevent
the arrest of former prime minister Sher Bahadur
Deuba and his colleague Prakash Man Singh
by the Royal Commission for Corruption
Control, prompting India to recall its ambassador
in Kathmandu.
Krishna Prasad Sitoula,
a Nepali Congress leader exiled in India, pointed
out that the king retained control over political
leaders through the corruption control commission,
which he said would continue to operate even with
the emergency lifted. Rajan Bhattarai of the
Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-
Leninist), also in self-exile in India, was not
taken in by the king's move on Saturday and
appealed to the international community "to find
the hard truth behind the surface".
"The
king will continue to do what he has been doing
earlier under the emergency proclamation,"
Bhattarai said. He also stressed that nothing had
changed on the ground after the emergency was
lifted.
On Sunday, Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh welcomed the lifting of the state
of emergency but disappointed anti-monarchy
politicians by reiterating that India's consistent
policy was to support constitutional monarchy as
well as multi-party democracy as the "twin
pillars" of Nepal's polity.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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