Republic or Death! by Alex Marshall

Maoists tried to encourage this conspiracy theory, Baburam writing in a newspaper that no one should accept Gyanendra as king and suggesting they’d been negotiating peace with Birendra all along.)
    When Gyanendra received the crown, the Maoist uprising had already been going for five years but had been confined mainly to the western hills. It had begun with Baburam’s forty demands, which were issued in a very polite letter in February 1996 (Baburam was the group’s second in command behind a military leader called Prachanda). The letter pointed out that over 70 per cent of Nepal’s population was in poverty, then called for everything from the abolition of the royal family’s ‘rights and privileges’, to Nepal being declared a secular state; the confiscation of landlord’s property to free medical care. ‘If there are no [positive moves] we would like to inform you we will be forced to adopt the path of armed struggle,’ it added, politely. The ‘people’s war’ began a few days later. The next few years saw attacks on police and government offices, mixed in with periodic ceasefires. But after Gyanendra assumed the throne, the rebellion stepped up a gear. The Maoists killed forty policemen on his birthday – an unwelcome gift if ever there was one – and a few weeks later they attacked the army for the first time.
    It was about this time that Pradip first learned that the Maoists were banning the old royal anthem. ‘I was at home and I read in the newspaper they were making people sing communist songs instead and it made me feel that maybe there was something wrong with it. “Why would they ban it?” I asked myself. “Was there a problem with the king or not?”’ It was the first time he’d ever questioned the monarchy.
    Gyanendra went on to do everything wrong in his quest to stop the Maoists. He called in the army to attack them. He repeatedly dissolved parliament. In 2005, he took full power for himself, then started banning newspapers and cutting off phone lines and internet access. He also started having anyone who showed opposition arrested. At one point, he declared a curfew and ordered those who broke it to be shot. Because of all this, he soon didn’t just have the Maoists against him, but most of the rest of the population too. Baburam knew an opportunity when he saw one. The Maoists announced a ceasefire and began to work with the existing political parties to create a future without the royal family in it.
    On 3 May 2006, Nepal’s government and the Maoists jointly announced an end to the uprising. The king’s days were numbered (although he somehow scraped along with his title until May 2008). Two weeks later, the anthem was scrapped. A few weeks after that, the competition for a new one was launched and Pradip started to write his song. The rules to the contest said the new anthem should be a maximum fifty words; the description of what it should be about – ‘Nepal’s natural beauty, its special cultural identity’ and so on – ran to twenty-seven, not exactly leaving much room for creativity.
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    I can tell we’ve reached the point in Pradip’s story where things are about to go wrong when I ask him a simple question: ‘So, were you always patriotic?’ It’s the sort you’d expect the briefest of answers to: ‘Of course! Why would I have entered the contest if I wasn’t?’ But once Pradip starts answering, he seemingly can’t stop. He talks about his childhood and the day ‘I literally touched the soil and decided I’d never leave’. He talks of listening to patriotic songs on a radio an uncle bought for him. He talks about everything he did to improve the life of his village, and his work in a lawyer’s association fighting to improve people’s rights. And then he talks about attending protests against the king in Kathmandu, getting shot at with rubber bullets and having to hide in a ditch. He speaks for so long my tea gets cold and my interpreter Ram’s voice