For the past two weeks youthful protesters fought running battles
with the Royal Nepalese Army and police, demanding an end to the
autocratic rule of King Gyanendra. An 18-day general strike
virtually paralysed the small Himalayan nation and brought
Gyanendra’s kingdom to its knees. The protesters defied stringent
daytime curfews and did their best to dodge the army and
police’s ’shoot-on-sight’ policy (which claimed 14 lives) in their
desire to see the King ousted and democracy installed. So why did
many in the West either remain silent about these mass protests, or
go all ambivalent about them? Why did Western officials and thinkers
who talk endlessly about ’regime change’, ’democratisation’
and ’change advocacy’ in foreign affairs view the Nepalese protests
with disapproval, even disdain?

The protests reveal two things: first, that people still desire self-
determination, to be treated as autonomous adults rather than as big
kids who need a caring King, or anybody else for that matter, to
look after them; and second, that this is not the kind of ’people
power’ many in the West have in mind when they talk about enabling
democracy in far-off lands. Western leaders and commentators like
the idea of people power until it involves real people demanding
real power - then they come over all panicky and squeamish. They
like to ’encourage good governance’ and install ’people
participation programmes’ in various African, Eastern European and
Asian states, but they balk at the sight of thousands of people
demanding their democratic rights.

The protests have not only exposed the isolation of a clapped-out
and archaic Hindu monarch - they have also exposed the West’s empty
rhetoric on democracy and its fear and loathing of the masses.

At root these were protests for self-determination. Nepal is a
strange and unstable kingdom; it is the only Hindu state in the
world, ruled over by monarchs who fancy themselves as reincarnations
of the Hindu god Vishnu. Until 1990 it was an absolute monarchy
under the executive control of the King; then King Birendra
initiated political reforms which created a parliamentary monarchy,
with the King as head of state and a prime minister as head of
government. Things have remained deeply unstable. As one report
says: ’No Nepalese government has survived for more than two years,
either through internal collapse or parliamentary dissolution by the
monarch.’ (1) In 2001, King Birendra, his wife and several other
members of the royal family were shot dead by Birendra’s son. For
the past 10 years there have been clashes between royalist and
government forces and Maoist guerrillas demanding an end to the
monarchy. It was under the pretext of crushing the guerrillas that
King Gyanendra unilaterally declared a state of emergency in
February 2005, shutting down parliament, placing elected ministers
under house arrest, and assuming all executive powers.

The protesters have sought to overturn this backward state of
affairs. One protester declared: ’The King is like the foreign
people...he thinks we are ignorant temple-dwellers, that all we need
is food and God and to be ruled.’ Here, we can glimpse the
protesters’ demands: they reject both the idea that people should be
happy with their lot, and also old backward notions about God-
appointed monarchs knowing what’s best. ’We know that Gyanendra is
not a god, that he is just a man and that we can end him’, said
another protester (2). Many of the protesters are young and
Westernised - people in their late teens and early 20s, many of them
professionals, who talk about watching MTV and wishing to earn a
decent disposable income. These will be the children of the
Nineties, that brief period when there was something approximating
democracy in Nepal, who will not stand for a return to the arbitrary
rule of Kings. There is an admirable fury to their protests.

Western officials and policymakers view it differently. For all
their talk about supporting democracy around the world they have
spent the past two weeks trying to put a lid on the Nepalese
protests, encouraging the King and the various political parties
(most of which, to some extent, support the anti-monarchy protests)
to come to a compromise that will ’end the crisis’. The Bush
administration and the Blair government pose as the deliverers of
democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet they said little about the
pro-democracy protests in Nepal. In fact, they viewed them as deeply
problematic. US diplomats put pressure on the parties to accept the
King’s offer at the end of last week to name a new prime minister,
even though this would have left the King with the power to dissolve
parliament.

The British ambassador to Nepal, Keith George Bloomfield, also
encouraged the parties to accept this compromise; protesters branded
him as ’naive’ and told him to ’mind his own business’ (3).
(Bloomfield was also put in the awkward position of having to cancel
a planned celebration for his own Queen’s eightieth birthday at his
Nepalese Embassy because, as one report from India put it, ’Right
now, a lavish bash, with Nepali ministers and bureaucrats as guests,
would not gel with the Nepali people who are demanding the abolition
of the monarchy.’) The UK Department for International Development
has a programme in Nepal that encourages ’change advocators’
and ’pro-poor stakeholders’ to take more control. Yet since the
protests broke out, DfID officials have hidden from view; this,
clearly, is not the kind of ’change advocacy’ they have in mind.

Britain and America’s intentions in relation to Nepal become clear
when you consider that both have offered military assistance to the
regime in recent years. According to Amnesty International, in the
year prior to the King’s coup Nepal received 20,000 M16 rifles from
America and small arms from the UK. It is reported that two Islander
fighter aircraft supplied from Britain to Nepal in 2004 have been
used in attacks on Maoist guerrillas and also civilians in Maoist-
controlled territory (4). Britain and America want stability over
democracy in Nepal. Before the King overthrew parliament that meant
supplying military assistance to crush the armed opposition;
following the King’s coup, which was condemned by Washington and
London, it has meant US and UK officials leaning on the King and the
parties to strike a deal. These interventions, where Western
officials have sought to dampen the protests by pushing the
politicians into a relationship with the King, give the lie to the
Bush and Blair governments’ claims to be international warriors for
democracy. Their idea of ’democratisation’ is in fact little more
than posturing, designed to boost their own moral authority rather
than install anything like democracy around the world.

Even commentators who are critical of Bush and Blair and sympathetic
to the protesters have described the protests as a ’crisis’ which
only democracy, assisted by a better kind of international
intervention, can resolve. This gets things the wrong way around.
Instead of seeing the protests as an attempt by the Nepalese to
build a democracy, some commentators see them as a violent and
destabilising outburst which ’installing democracy’ might put an end
to. So Isabel Hilton in the Guardian criticises the interventions of
America, Europe, India and China for being ’inglorious’, and
suggests that these external powers should encourage democracy
instead, since ’only democracy can end the crisis in Nepal’ (5).
Here, democracy is discussed as a kind of appeasement for the
masses - not as something they earn and shape themselves, but as
something graciously provided to them in order to keep in check
their potentially unpredictable behaviour. More radical commentators
look to the language of the past to describe and justify events in
Nepal. Tariq Ali, unable, it seems, to see what is new and different
today, says the protests are ’refreshingly old-fashioned’ (6).

And consider the contrast between Western media coverage of these
protests and its coverage of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in
2005 or the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003. Those events were
immediately described as ’revolutions’ and celebrated in newspaper
columns and breathless TV reports. In truth, they were largely stage-
managed affairs, often orchestrated by Western intervention. They
may have involved large numbers of people taking to the streets and
attending pro-democracy pop concerts, but they would best be
described as the consequence of Western pressure to replace one
dubiously-elected political party with another. They were media
events, too, staged as much for the international press corps as to
put pressure on the incumbent regimes. The Nepalese protests, by
contrast, were massive, often vigorous, and they took place
regardless of whether or not photographers were there to capture
them. Yet they have been largely ignored by newspaper columnists, or
referred to as a ’crisis’.

It seems that many in the West are far more comfortable with
carefully planned ’revolutions’ that last a few days and which win
the support of the US State Department and the UK Foreign Office,
than they are with the fury of masses who have had as much as they
can take. It seems to me that some in the West are even more
comfortable with suicide bombings than they are with mass protests
like those in Nepal. Acts of individual and nihilistic terrorism,
such as those by Palestinians against Israel or by a handful of
disgruntled men from Leeds, seem to have been discussed more
sympathetically than the Nepalese protests have been (and to have
received as much, if not more, media coverage). There is a kind of
vicarious pity and self-indulgent empathy for suicide bombers who
apparently have no choice but to kill themselves and a few
civilians; they are seen as victims of powerful forces
understandably lashing out. Yet a more meaningful lashing out by a
mass group of people that might have real consequences - that is
viewed as something scary and suspect.

The protests exposed to ridicule King Gyanendra. He has now
announced that he will restore parliament - certainly a step in the
right direction towards democracy, though whether this concession
will satisfy people’s desire for more control and choice in their
lives remains to be seen. The protests also exposed the West’s
flimsy attachment to democracy and its fear of mass and
unpredictable actions. What really unnerved Western officials and
commentators was that they felt they could not meaningfully
influence events in Nepal; instead of sitting in some plush
committee room devising and enforcing a ’governance plan’, they were
reduced to watching the protests and wondering how they would end.
UN secretary general Kofi Annan called for the ’transfer of power in
a timely, orderly and responsible manner’ - that’s how they like
things to be done, in an orderly fashion and to a clear deadline,
probably to be followed up by annual reports on targets reached and
developments made....

Our leaders cannot handle the messy business of real people in Nepal
loudly demanding some real power over their lives. Yet this is what
struggles for democracy look like. It may not be pretty, but it can
be pretty inspiring.

Notes

(1) Nepal, Wikipedia

(2) Nepal’s young show rage in the streets, Cleveland Dealer, 23
April 2006

(3) British Queen’s birthday bash in Nepal put off, Daily India, 24
April 2006

(4) In cahoots with the King, Guardian, 11 April 2006

(5) Standing behind the despot on the wrong side of history,
Guardian, 24 April 2006

(6) This is no rah-rah revolt, Guardian, 25 April 2006