It would be naïve to think that King Gyanendra would, and should, remain totally aloof from and indifferent to the goings-on in the country.

BY P. KHAREL

After many moons of mauling and maligning them, the Maoists are making a beeline to meet ‘royalist-nationalists’. Ministers in King Gyanendra’s cabinet, Prakash Koirala and Ramesh Nath Pandey, are not the only ones the CPN (Maoist) leaders have met. In summer, Krishna Bahadur Mahara first met with Prakash Koirala. The media got wind of it only when the two had another meeting late in autumn. Early this winter, Maoist supremo Pushpa Kamal Dahal, a.k.a. Prachanda, announced that there are some people around the king who “love this country very much". In other words, he was receptive to meeting people with proximity to the palace.

Ironically, Prachanda broke his beaten path at a function organised by the Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) whose executive committee has been championing a republican agenda set by a number of mainstream political parties. Lest people wonder whether Prachanda was “misquoted”, a phalanx of Maoist leaders like Dr. Baburam Bhattarai, Ram Bahadur Thapa and C.P. Gajurel went on to defend and justify their leader’s stand. Nepali Congress and CPN (UML) in particular had never imagined Prachanda making such public overture towards the royalist-nationalists.

And to think that Maoists’ Young Communist League (YCL) not long ago had raided and defaced the residences of some of the king-led cabinet members. Keshar Bahadur Bista was perhaps the only one who managed to stave off the raids by deputing about a hundred of his supporters to face the YCL. Seeing Bista’s residence well-equipped, YCL decided to burn a motor tyre or two some 100 metres away from its original target. Before dispersing, it made a sour note to the amused crowd: “This fellow seems to be a Mahamandalay [anti-people]; next time we will come better prepared.”

DISCORDANT NOTES

With the interim-parliament having passed the republican agenda for the proposed constituent assembly to formally adopt, the seven-party alliance (SPA) partners are busy congratulating themselves in advance over the republicanisation of Nepal. The public, however, is confused, what with discordant notes from senior members of SPA partners. Shortly after being sworn in as minister without portfolio, Sujata Koirala defended monarchy as the symbol and identity of Nepal. Scores of Nepali Congress MPs are also known to hold similar view. With the passage of time, leaders are evaluated more by their performance than by their rhetoric. Many among yesterday’s heroes are now seen as power-hungry as anyone in the past. The unfolding screenplay is all-too-familiar, only the treatment varies; and failed scripts exhaust people’s patience.

At first, SPA leaders saw the king as being suspended between frustration and resignation. Then they saw him engaged in a “conspiracy to derail the gains of loktantra [people’s democracy]”. SPA is intrigued by the deafening spell of royal silence and unnerved by his recent meetings with various individuals. Nothing has really spurred the king’s reaction in public. Based on bits of information collected from various individuals —politicians, academics and lawyers — or encounters that some people have had in the course of social functions and wedding receptions, this columnist ventures to assess the situation.

It would be naïve to think that King Gyanendra would, and should, remain totally aloof from and indifferent to the goings-on in the country. Many Nepal Congress leaders, leftists and journalists who are hobnobbing with royalists and hunting with FNJ’s republican agenda-setters have met with the king. Former senior bureaucrats, human rights activists and politicians carrying the royalist-tag pinned by their SPA opponents have also had such meetings.

UNANIMOUS VERDICT

Their unanimous verdict is that the king maintains a confident, dignified composure from the very beginning. He is not happy with SPA having taken politics to a “personal level” but does not give more than a passing reference to it when visitors persist with the issue. He takes initiatives in meeting and even phoning people, maintains regular contacts with his close confidants and assures those who meet him that the people are the best judges for evaluating things that happened and are happening. He is confident of the Nepalese people retaining monarchy, listens to people attentively and asks more questions than giving elaborate answers.

The king’s counter-questions give them the impression of a mind that is “well-informed, well-briefed and well-prepared”. He is against tampering with the procedures and practices in the Nepal Army. He had advised Prime Minister Koirala soon after swearing him in as the new cabinet head in 2006 not to break the army’s tradition. Koirala, it seems, heeded the king in at least this regard. In any case, the Nepal Army has no legacy of staging a coup. The king is for the army to maintain this legacy even in these times of frequent media speculation of a coup. He is for addressing democratic forces and advises his loyalists to be reform-minded in approach to various issues.

The Maoists are also trying to communicate with the king directly. Some individuals perceived to belong to the king’s close circle wonder whether the Maoists are interested in enhancing the power of the state or the power of their own party. People offer the king various options but he keeps any commitment to himself. Many international media representatives have tried and failed to interview the king in the past 20 months. They are again busy making queries for an interview. The US, India and, of late, China have also maintained communication with the palace through a network of channels. There are suggestions that the 1990 constitution be revived even if it necessitates the rolling back of all that the interim legislature-parliament did.

In public, SPA partners dismiss the institution of monarchy as three months away from being confined to the pages of history. On the quiet, various factions are making overtures; whether for promoting electoral politics or at the advice of foreign governments, it is not clear. But King Gyanendra has been busy meeting and consulting people not just of late but throughout the protracted interim period. After all, as he said to Koirala in May 2006 and to many others in later months, he would never leave Nepal, come what may.

WITHOUT COMMENT

Gorkhapatra daily’s headline quoting CPN (UML) General Secretary Madhav Kumar Nepal: “The King has no role in deferring [constituent assembly] polls.”