Word: nepal
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Shah considers himself, first and foremost, a realist. He argues that advanced Western nations grant liberties which would threaten the stability of an impoverished Third World country like Nepal. With an annual income of $110 per capita and a literacy rate of 18 per cent, Nepal is undergoing development at an unprecedented, albeit glacial rate. The mountainous terrain--Nepal, home of Mounts Everest and Annapurna, is flanked entirely by the Himalayas--provides for poor communications, medical services and transportation of the agricultural goods produced by 90 per cent of the workforce. Shah denies that the mere infusion...
...Nepal is a democracy at least in name. Using the official state terminology, Shah calls it a "partiless democracy"--partiless because every political figure serves the King, a democracy because every citizen indirectly elects a local, regional and state-wide panchayat (council) representative. But in the constitution and in practice, the sole voice of authority is the King, the most revered of all national traditions, even more than the Hinduism professed by 90 per cent of the population...
...Nepal's hereditary monarchy dates back to 1559, the year of King Drabya Shah's unification of a people already almost two millenia old. In the unbroken line of kings that has followed, His Majesty Birendra Shah in 1972 assumed the throne vacated by the death of his father Mahendra Shah, and his grandfather Tribhuvan Shan before him. Like his brother-in-law, King Birendra also attended Harvard, spending 1967-8 as a Quincy House student "taking a crash course in affairs of state," according to Shah...
...most potent challenge to the King's autocracy has been waged by students, who in constituting much of the educated, urban elite have mounted a campaign of public demonstrations similar to that in Iran. A few years ago students stormed the offices of the government-run paper The Rising Nepal; when its editors abolished their foreign news section shortly afterwards, they blamed the students for destroying the press that happened to print that section. During last year's ten-day demonstration of the banned Nepalese Congress Party, police killed a total of 25 protestors and arrested hundreds more...
...official speculates, that the King last May granted new provisional liberties to the people. He announced that for the period of a year, he would suspend his constitutional right to censorship pending a national referendum, (the first direct country-wide vote in two decades, and only the second in Nepal's history) to determine if the people like the existing partiless system. In the meantime, the government is doing some politicking of its own: at a recent pro-partiless rally, a panchayat minister declared that "The supreme objective of the multi-party system is to capture power whereas that...