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The king loses credibility

Going by the assurances given by King Gyanendra at the Dhaka summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, and separately to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at their brief meeting on the summit's sidelines, democracy will return to Nepal in 2007. That is the year the monarch has said he will call parliamentary elections. He claimed that by then, the country, under his direct rule since February 1, 2005 after he sacked the Sher Bahadur Deuba government, would have the right atmosphere for free and fair elections. It has already improved so much that he had called municipal elections in February 2006. The King was apparently presenting the case to his South Asian neighbours that the coup, through which he assumed executive powers, was a necessity arising out of the deteriorating security situation caused by the Maoist insurgency. When this had been brought under control, monarchy would step aside to let democracy take over. On the face of it, it would seem to be a nice plan, except that what King Gyanendra really appears to be saying is that as a form of governance, democracy is useless, especially in a crisis when only the heavy hand of authoritarianism is capable of sorting out the mess. This is not an argument that anyone with the interests of democracy at heart will advance, and it makes it impossible to take the King seriously when he makes pious declarations of his commitment to Nepal's multiparty parliamentary democracy.

In any case, King Gyanendra has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear by the manner in which, immediately after taking over the reins of government, he set about deliberately undermining democratic institutions. On November 11, Nepal's Supreme Court turned down a petition for staying a draconian ordinance that places several restrictions on the freedom of the media, clearing the way for the government to implement it. But it speaks to the value that people attach to the hard-won freedoms of 1990, when Nepal replaced its absolute monarchy with democracy, that they are not taking any of this lying down. The court ruling has sparked widespread protests within the country, which should strengthen the hands of the alliance of seven political parties that are spearheading the movement for the restoration of democracy. The King evidently believes he can build a case for his authoritarian rule by describing Nepal's Maoist insurgency as "terrorism", as he did constantly during his speech at the SAARC summit. But there are few takers for such an equation. To the contrary, public opinion in Nepal is no more as dismissive as it once used to be of the Maoist demand for the abolition of monarchy, and this has found reflection in the positions of the country's two biggest parties, the Nepali Congress and the United Marxist-Leninist. Unless King Gyanendra acts immediately to restore his country's multi-party parliamentary democracy, Nepal's intensifying agitation against the monarch could soon turn into an agitation against the monarchy.

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