By P Kharel
Navigating through events and sifting them from minor insignificant incidents is no smooth task. Delving into related barrage of information, often laced in rumours, makes the study of its significance is even more challenging. A specific context, this time, is Nepal’s.
Five and a half decades should provide a reasonable distance for cooler, sane heads and balanced and objective assessment of King Mahendra whose contributions were deliberately deleted or cast aside by politically prejudiced politicians and pens. King Mahendra did not have the men, money and means for decisively dealing with the threat of armed movement launched in 1962 and again in 1968 by the Nepali Congress, banned in 1961. Invoking Article 55 of the 1959 Constitution, he sacked the BP Koirala government and dissolved Parliament on charges of failing to maintain law and order in various parts of the country and allowing governance to fall into complete disarray.
King Mahendra’s acumen to read the emerging international scenario enabled him to play his cards astutely, decisively and confidently at a time when many Indian leaders in the corridors of power angled for. Hegemons unilaterally define the red line that suits their convenience. For example, New Delhi’s unilateral declaration that Nepal is a buffer zone for India’s strategic interests vis-à-vis Beijing, rankled the landlocked nation’s sovereign-minded people.
And, now in 2026, comes Balendra Shah as a prime minister with more or less a two-thirds majority, which was considered to be an improbability for any party to obtain. Unusual circumstances and unexpected combination between Balendra without an organised party, and Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) that wanted a nationally familiar face without any allegation of corruption whatsoever enabled the new force to win a landslide majority last spring.
Whether RSP can hold out against the traditionally entrenched political parties, whose tentacles reach bureaucrats, academics, intellectuals and business elites, is the crucial question. Traditionally powerful parties consider RSP grabbed power with the aid of the social media and tremendous backing from “foreign elements”. They believe that they should have been in power, having with a long history of struggle for the achievements of democracy. Give a credible excuse, and the entire non-RSP national constituents will flood the streets with protest rallies breathing fire and fury to go on the rampage reminiscent of last September’s terrifying events.
NGOs and foreign aid agencies together with intelligence agencies of Nepal’s major aid partners fish in troubled waters. The need is to strip away the political rhetoric or romanticism gone overboard, and look into the detail that the devil might be in.
Subarna Shumsher in 1961 announced armed insurrection against the panchayat but the effort ended when Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru advised the banned party against it after the Indo-China border war took place. On his conditional release from detention in 1968, BP, too, called for armed insurrection. New Delhi did not stop the Nepali Congress from engaging in such activity from Indian soil. But the 1962 Sino-Indian border war compelled the Indian government to advise against the armed rebellion.
COURSE CORRECTION: On New Year’s Day 2083 BS (mid-April), the Balendra Shah government sifted RPP’s demand that the East West highway’s original name “Mahendra Highway be restored and announced it as such. It may be a modest but nevertheless a meaningfully revealing course correction to reset things right, also leading to a new impetus to speculation in the grapevines.
Prithvi Narayan was hated by Christian missionaries carrying on the lookout for religion conversion; Mahendra was reviled by the Indian establishment for keeping at bay New Delhi’s overtures to make Nepal a protectorate and for asserting Nepal’s independent and cultural identity. Check on free circulation of Indian currency in Nepal, road connectivity, balanced ties with its both neighbours were accorded top-most priority. Indigenous textbooks, settlement of various ethnic communities and professional groups in the Tarai along the border with India, and brushing off New Delhi’s caution to accept Beijing’s offer to construct the Arniko highway linking Nepal and the Chinese autonomous region of Tibet were events that served as running irritants against India. King Birendra was maligned for daring to propose in 1975 that the world community accept Nepal as a Zone of Peace.
Nepal during the panchayat decades from 1961 to early 1990 seemed to be have made an assessment of China in a manner that was endorsed decades later by Henry Kissinger. The former secretary of state of the United States wrote in 2011: China does not proslytise; it does not claim that its contemporary institutions are relevant outside China.
GROUND REALITY: At an India Today magazine’s international programme a decade ago, topnotch business intellectual and hotelier with wide contacts within and outside Nepal, the late Prabhakar S. Rana had a meeting with Kissinger at the latter’s hotel suite in New Delhi. Rana asked for the globally noted geo-political strategist’s assessment of Nepal’s foreign policy. He recalled to this scribe and the People’s Review editor and Nepal’s most effective pen on world affairs, Mana Ranjan Josse, what Kissinger said: “When pursuing ties with neighbours China and India, only King Mahendra and you Ranas have been the most astute and successful.”
At the time of Nepal’s Gen Z outrage in September, Prime Minister KP Oli had about a year to handing over the reins of power to Nepali Congress leader Sher Bahadur Deuba, who had already donned the premiership five times. The duo thought that everything was honky dory. As eventual events showed the idiocy of the Deuba-Oli blissful ignorance that cost them their political career and reduced them ignominy—something worse than political wilderness.
Balen has done well to put foreign ambassadors and INGO bosses in their due places to fit their feet in the right boot-size. Access to him is not easy, as should be the case. He does not cut ribbons at inaugural functions or meet people unnecessarily. He and his trustees work quietly at a few residences of close colleagues and proven trustees. This is the start. Let more things unfold for a clearer picture.
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