The former king merely suggested that democracy without monarchy and vice-versa were irrelevant in Nepal’s context. Yet critics jumped on the former monarch as if he had affirmed that the crown was somehow indispensable to the country.
The distinction becomes essential here. Irrelevance contains the possibility/probability of action from the current rulers that would eventually prove the ex-king’s assertion wrong. Indispensability has a finality and conclusiveness that would have perhaps merited the intensity of the outcry.
Substantively, though, nothing has really changed. Even if a majority of Nepalis agreed with the ex-king and wanted a restoration of the monarchy, how would that be attained? The favorite pathway – a national referendum as stipulated in the Constitution – would be perilous to both the crown and the country.
Enticing as it might be, you cannot subject the crown to a popular test for the same reason you cannot bestow hereditary succession upon the presidency. Each system has its intrinsic worth because of its innate characteristics.
Even if king Gyanendra were to accede to a referendum now, the majority/minority battle lines will have been drawn firmly. The Panchayat system overcame that challenge by being overthrown. Otherwise, the chaos of periodic referenda would have consumed our political attention. The same would hold true on the issue of the crown.
King Gyanendra suggested popular uprising as another route. True, we have seen a surge of street protests in favor of the monarchy. But the organizers are neither organized nor coherent enough to mount an effective movement. Moreover, a national uprising is predicated more on the people’s opposition to something. We would be hard-pressed politically and philosophically to rise against a constitutionally enshrined democratic order. The perverse manner in which that order was produced and the far more pernicious ways in which it is being practiced just might not be enough to sway the populace.
What sounds like the most prudent way – the restoration of the 1990 Constitution – may be achieved politically, say, through any mechanism that affirms the faultiness of its supersedure. Bypassing the king-parties agreement everyone now believes was signed, today’s dispensation also goes beyond the much-maligned 12-Point Understanding reach in New Delhi. Moreover, the succession of compromises to defuse periodic crises only to keep alive the contrived notion of a new Nepal poisoned the new Constitution from the outset.
The country, at the same time, has moved past the 1990 Basic Law. Secularism has seen an inspissation of religious identity and its assertion. Denigrated as it might have been, federalism has not undermined the people’s basic quest for genuine devolution of authority. Such issues would have to be addressed through amendments requiring the participation of forces outside that compromise.
Then comes geopolitics. If the 1990 Constitution could not stand the pushes and pulls gripping our external environment, what makes us think its restoration would address the concerns of those same foreign actors amid the incredible shift in their power equations?
If we’ve been thinking that king Gyanendra has been pretending for far too long that the monarchy has never gone away, maybe it’s time for us to take another close hard look.
