NEPAL: Enough of That

Sandwiched between India and Tibet and ringed about by the towering Himalayas, Nepal long was as remote as a country could get. Underneath its hibiscus and gardenia blossoms, its whitewashed stupas and tinkling bells, its 8,500,000 people were among the most backward in Southeast Asia, beset by malaria, illiteracy and preyed upon by landlords and moneylenders. In 1951 a revolution backed by India toppled the ruling Rana family, who for a hundred years had kept successive Kings virtual prisoners, and King Tribhuvan was restored to power. When the ailing Tribhuvan died in 1955, rule passed to his young (34) son, King Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Deva.

Though his education was exclusively at the hands of palace tutors, King Mahendra had acquired modern ideas and set about introducing them to Nepal. He directed the drafting of a new constitution himself and, with the aid of $30 million in U.S. aid, built schools, roads and a radiotelephone network. In 1959, with Mahendra’s consent and blessing, Nepal conducted its first election. The Nepali Congress Party, led by India-trained, vaguely socialist B. P. Koirala, won 74 out of 109 seats.

A rigorous anti-Communist with progressive policies, Koirala began pushing through land and tax reforms, soon had gathered the reins of government to himself. King Mahendra, who as monarch is regarded by Nepal’s pious Hindus as a reincarnation of the god Vishnu, was left little beyond his religious duties.

Apparently King Mahendra decided Koirala had gone too far. Returning from a world tour, the King discovered that the Prime Minister had pushed through legislation subjecting landlords for the first time to property tax and expropriating large estates, last week invoked an escape clause he himself had providently written into the constitution, summarily dissolved Parliament. Prime Minister Koirala, in the act of addressing a youth rally, was hauled off and locked up in the army officers’ club. So were all the other Cabinet members whom the army could find. As loyal Gurkha troops patrolled the narrow streets of Mahendra’s capital Katmandu, Mahendra explained that he was assuming full regal powers because the elected government was “failing to maintain law and order, harboring undesirable activity and killing the people’s democratic aspirations.”