Winds of change blow king away in Nepal

Kathmandu: King Gyanendra, members of whose Shah dynasty have been worshipped as real-life Hindu deities for much of their 240-year rule, is no longer popular with his 28 million subjects, and today Shakiya does not stock so much as a tea towel with his majesty's face on it.

"It's true, artists have not been making statues of the current king," admitted Shakiya, whose only remaining royal merchandise is an elderly pair of statues of the king's late predecessor, Birendra. "Some of the stationery shops might sell a few postcards of him, but I'm not sure."

As of this week, however, such postcards may acquire a new value as collectors' items, when Nepal's newly elected government meets on Wednesday to begin formal proceedings to abolish the monarchy.

King Gyanendra, 60, faces being kicked out of his red-walled palace in central Kathmandu and reduced to the state of a commoner - a dramatic fall from grace for a man whose family once ruled by divine right.

To add insult to injury, a government committee is investigating how to divide up large shares of the royal estate, which includes palaces, hotels, and fleets of Mercedes vehicles, among his subjects.

Yet the transformation of the world's last Hindu monarchy into a secular republic is the casualty of a political movement that, elsewhere at least, has itself become a dying creed.

Leading the calls for the king's demise is the country's growing Maoist movement, no longer in fashion in neighbouring China, but thriving in modern Nepal thanks to discontent at the grinding poverty that two centuries of monarchy largely failed to address.

Brutal insurgency

A former guerrilla movement which fought a brutal insurgency costing 15,000 lives in the past decade, the Maoists have used both bullet and ballot to make their way into power, winning more than a third of the seats in last month's elections to become the dominant political bloc in the national assembly.

The movement's leader, a moustachioed former teacher who goes under the nom de guerre of Prachanda, or the Fierce One, claims to be a modern Maoist, saying he believes in multi-party democracy and even "bourgeois capitalism".

But his group draws the line at Nepal's royal family, whose wealth has come to symbolise the Himalayan nation's inequality and backwardness. The only question now is whether the king stays on as an ordinary citizen, heads abroad for comfortable exile or, as some hardline Maoists would like, goes somewhere more uncomfortable.

"The king is a criminal who should go to jail," said Chandra Bahadur Thapa, 32, a former Maoist insurgent who runs the Kathmandu branch of the movement's Young Communist League.