Royal pain

King Gyanendra has deftly managed to expose the international community's hypocrisy with his royal coup

Lolita Maya Magar Kathmandu

The palace-military takeover of Nepal of February 1, 2005 may have shocked the politically "sophisticated" world, with India no less stunned by the fact that for the first time in recent history, a Nepali ruler chose to do something without big brother's consent.

Other major international players in Nepal — the US, UK, European Union (EU), aid donors and international human rights organisations — claim to be equally aghast, especially as King Gyanendra had promised them he would toe their line.

Officials from Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, Human Rights Watch, the EU, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights' (UNCHR) Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, and India's Foreign Secretary, Shyam Sharan are just a few that flew in and out of Nepal. They prepared their reports, had their obligatory consultations, cautioned the monarch, and left. Obviously, their caution was not enough to restrain a monarch bent on having his way.

Now that unforeseen events have overtaken Nepal, the global media has trained its sights on the country. Nepal is a signatory to nearly all international instruments on human rights. The king cast aside these obligations and proceeded to set in place a regime virtually overnight that blatantly violates the fundamental principles of rule of law. All evidence is on crude display, be it the gagging of the media, persecution of the defenders of democracy, the creation of extra legal bodies with overriding powers to both prosecute and adjudicate (the Royal Commission on Corruption Control), the army on the streets, the mass illegal detentions and arrests, the disappearances, and the impunity. Yet, again, fighting terrorism and extremism provided the cover for an attack on democracy. But the cult of antiterrorism has been the most dignified form of global geopolitics these past few seasons. The unattractive consequences of democracy should, therefore, not be scrutinised in too much detail lest the messianic purpose of the transnational liberty industry be undermined altogether.

Those states that provided the government of Nepal with military aid to fight terrorists are not guided by inviolable codes of etiquette. Here is a core problem that Nepal presents: From the point of view of realism, all that has happened is just trifling bother, more to do with the image management of democrats doubling as arms merchants. But, in the long run, this raises problems that militate against the logic of imposing stability by supporting tyrants. A fundamental question for them is: will this monarch, who has shown the capacity to unite all Nepali political forces against him, succeed in preventing the possible descent of Nepal into absolute instability? After all, the original fear that animated the international coalition into supporting the king at the expense of democracy has been the prospect of instability. But this is not the only contradiction that the king's "gambit" has exposed.

The deeper and more damaging paradox is the moral distance between the rhetoric of democracy and the so-called realism of geopolitics and its associated strategic calculations. Gyanendra has exploited this chasm to telling effect. The palace gambled on the fact that foreign states, especially India, the US and the UK, speak the language of statecraft despite their rhetoric of democracy. They are run by calculating security specialists with histories of cutting deals in dark corridors. The king, who is now also the chairperson of the Royal Council of Nepal, is merely taking his place in the procession of global democrats freed from the burdens of the moral imperative by the necessities of the pragmatic calculus. At all costs, this discrepancy between the moral and the managerial perspectives must the suppressed.

Gyanendra knows the limitations of democratic states bent on exporting stability, just as he knows the limitations of the international human rights organisations which fly in and out with their regular reports. He also understands their unconcealed glee at getting an audience with royalty. It is an old weakness of the international jet set. Never mind his past record. He is, after all, a king and his word must count for something. Never mind also that they never try and meet the Maoists who have also violated human rights with equal impunity. And will they accept Maoist leader Prachanda's assurances and commitments with the same ease with which they accepted the king's assurances? Chances are that they will not.

He knows, for all these and so many other reasons, that they can only threaten; that their act is just not good enough to ensure that smart sanctions are imposed, or even that their own workers are protected in his kingdom, let alone arresting the flow of arms aid. Nothing was really done with the already-recorded instances of violations, atrocities and crimes against humanity in the name of fighting terror. It's hard to believe that Gyanendra doesn't know about the Yugoslavia War Crimes Tribunal, that he has not heard of Louise Arbour and her role in indicting Slobodan Milosevic and his allies, that he doesn't know that the trial for mass crimes against humanity occupied the world through January 2004. Then, the world forgot to follow it through. Gyanendra knows the duplicity of statespersons committed to global democracy.

Even as the world continues to castigate him, the institutions of market-led growth are already lining up to serve his cause of fighting terrorists. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) reportedly signed a US$ 20 million deal with the Nepali government the day after the palace coup. The instruments of market-friendly development have long made their dislike for multiparty democracy known. The king is unlikely to have forgotten the repeated assertions of Kenichi Ohashi, the Nepal Country Director in the World Bank, in the days before February 1 that "more broad-based coalition governments" lacked coherence in pushing through reforms. The king's newly-established government has no doubt assured the relevant institutions that the greater coherence and clarity will be imparted to the pursuit of the Washington Consensus.

Meanwhile, the staff of other international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is already talking appreciatively of the restoration of the Internet, e-mail and telephone. The restoration of telecommunication is the equivalent of the restoration of democracy. That should not surprise anyone, since the NGOs have always claimed that they would like to be left alone, free of "politics", to just do development. As happens in countries that have been funded back to the Stone Age, the normalisation of the abnormal is being led by the NGOs. This is the "business as usual" constituency that King Gyanendra and his generals can always rely on.

The international media has not paid adequate attention to such aspects. Instead it has scurried in and out as new headlines about new developments demand its fickle attentions. In Nepal, as elsewhere, tragic history is made in the gaps between other headline-grabbing events. Sections of the Indian media report about the "normalcy" in Kathmandu. They talk to taxi drivers and corner-shopowners, who assure foreign journalists that they are happy with the takeover.

The media follows the official Indian establishment and the likes of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in framing the Nepal crisis as a "problem in the Indian backyard" without realising that the issue was always right in the Indian living room, given the investments that India has historically made in Nepal, its monarchy and the Royal Nepalese Army over the decades. The problem is in the kitchen, where the kanchha washes the dishes; it is at the affluent gate, where the bahadur keeps watch over thieves and burglars; it is in the Indian army; it is in the brothels of the big cities of the subcontinent.

It is not only international contradictions that the royal coup has exposed. Within Nepal, Gyanendra exposed the contradictions in political and civil society in Nepal. He played on the paranoia about the red terror in Nepal. He found the weak spots of the human rights and democracy movement in Nepal, and the corruption that taints both. Many could be purchased. And they were purchased time and again by the palace, by the donors, by anyone who had something to offer. Bring out the "corruption" card and key mediapersons, earlier so raucous, become subdued and tame. The glossy-paged freedom-loving editorials glibly pronounce that for most Nepali people "…there is cautious hope that this could be a way out of long years of instability, anarchy and violence". The king capitalised on the lack of clarity about the political situation in the democratic forces. Nepali democracy has an Achilles' heel: it can accommodate corruption, it can accommodate American interference, Indian hegemony, arms deals, unaccountability, non-representativeness, hierarchy — everything, it seems.

However, Gyanendra and his generals and their obsolete advisers are worried. They are scuttling in and out of the dark corridors. They rule a kingdom that they do not own. Over a third of the kingdom is under the control of the rebel forces who have successfully blockaded the highways for many days in a row.

Moreover, not all Nepali democrats are for sale. There are many who have not been locked away, who are among the people, who are courageous, sincere and imbue realpolitik with a morality that makes it lethal. They are realigning and regrouping and, as per description, politics is making the strangest of bedfellows. The student movement worked across ideological divisions and was quick to seize the initiative.

There is also the slightly irritating fact that the great powers that run Nepal are bound by their electorates and answerable to the vociferous proponents of freedom and decency that enroll in universities and that still populate the republic of noisemakers. They buzz around making irksome noises and organising in meddlesome ways. Unfortunately for Gyanendra, there are still political parties that demand explanations from the foreign offices in their countries. There are the cumbersome inconveniences of not being able to fully black out information from Nepal.These world social fora, the disarmament coalitions, the "talking across borders", the sane voices, the questioning voices, the holding of hands. There is the hassle of those who simply refuse to buy the bogey of terror, whether it be hued in green or purple or orange or red.

The views expressed here are only that of the author’s