Nepal King Lifts State Of Emergency

by Ranjit Devraj

(IPS) NEW DELHI -- Himalayan geopolitics was at play again as thousands of Nepalis braved arrest on May 1 and openly marched through Nepal's capital Kathmandu on International Labor Day, 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 Feb. 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 the one rally and 8,000 in the other through the streets of Katmandu. 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 the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Muni told IPS in an interview that 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 ploy but did not succeed because Beijing felt that helping him at this stage would alienate the international community," the professor said.

Gyanendra's announcement came hours after he returned to his capital, Kathmandu, which he left 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 Jakarta, the king made his first contact with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after the 'royal coup' and was told in no uncertain terms by the leader of the country with the greatest clout in Nepal that 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 that 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.

Early April saw Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao making a tour of South Asian countries and 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" towards 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 adding that the king was at the crossroads and that 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 kingless communist republic, political parties are also 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 Control of Corruption, prompting India to recall its ambassador in Kathmandu Shiv Shankar Mukherjee.

Krishna Prasad Sitoula, a Nepali Congress leader exiled in India pointed out that the king retained control over political leaders through his Royal Commission for Corruption Control which he said would continue to operate even while emergency is lifted. Rajan Bhattarai of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist- Leninist), also in self-exile in India, was not impressed 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 so what he has been doing earlier under the emergency proclamation," he said, stressing that nothing had changed on the ground after the emergency was lifted.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh welcomed the lifting of the Feb. 1 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.