The King of Nepal, Gyandra, dismissed the government of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba on Tuesday, declaring a state of emergency. In a military style take-over, following the dismissal of the government, dozens of politicians were arrested while many others went underground to avoid imprisonment. For a time, the country's telephone, Internet, and air links with the outside world remained cut.
The King told his people in a radio address that he had taken action because the government had "failed to make necessary arrangements to hold election by April and to promote democracy, the security of the people and life and property." This would strike as a familiar excuse to many in this country.
So would be the King's decision that he himself is to head the new government which will "restore peace and effective democracy in this country within the next three years."
If, indeed, the monarch's move had been necessitated by the Prime Minister's failure to make necessary arrangements for the election "to promote democracy" the logical thing for him to do was to announce an election schedule rather than to assume all powers and hold the democratic process in abeyance for another three years, which, if our own checkered history is any guide, may extend into the realm of the indefinite.
Nepal became a constitutional monarchy in 1991 under King Gyandra's more popular brother King Birendra, who along with his family was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 2001. The present King is known to have little respect for democracy and politicians. In circumstances quite similar to ours, Nepalese politicians have not helped the country's nascent democratic process much by continuing to squabble among themselves.
Which has allowed the King to go beyond the agreed parameters of his constitutional powers to intervene in the political process. This is the second time that he has fired Deuba as Prime Minister and declared emergency. Only about a year after ascending to the Nepalese throne, he had sacked Deuba's elected government, triggering mass protests and demands for the restoration of democracy.
He reinstated the Prime Minister last year, but not parliament. Just as the elections were round the corner he has fired the Prime Minister yet again, taking over complete control to become an absolute monarch.
Notably, soon after Gyandra succeeded to the throne of the small Himalayan kingdom, he had declared a state of emergency, which lasted about a year and resulted in grave human rights violations. The present development is expected to ignite fresh protests and violence.
It will also give a fillip to the anti-monarchy Maoist insurgency that has been raging in the country for quite some time. There is a growing fear that the government will use its emergency powers to deprive people of their basic rights and to resort to a violent crackdown on its opponents.
International human rights organisations, including the Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Commission of Jurists, have already expressed the concern that the fresh declaration of emergency will put the Nepalese people at even greater risk of gross human rights abuses.
Nepal is a poor country with hardy any natural resources, such as oil wealth, to attract the democratic impulse of the world's superpower whose President has taken upon himself to spread "freedom and democracy" to the "darkest corners" of the world. It remains to be seen how he plans to lighten Nepal's corner of the world with freedom and democracy. So far Washington has called the King's extreme action as merely a "step back from democracy." Understandably for it, its more pressing worry, as expressed by the State Department spokesman, is that the action will undermine the Nepalese campaign to overcome the Maoist insurgency.