Republic or Death! by Alex Marshall Page A

starts to crack from talking so much. It’s as if Pradip feels he needs to prove his credentials to himself, let alone to me, which is somewhat understandable given what happened after he was named as the lyricist of the country’s new anthem.
    For almost two weeks, Pradip was one of the main news stories in Nepal. The national newspapers were filled with comments about him; it was the same on radio and television. He was famous. But it wasn’t all the overwhelmingly positive attention he might have hoped for. Much of it was instead people arguing about whether he should have won or not. There were the kind of complaints you’d expect: people who didn’t like his words, who complained he didn’t mention the ‘martyrs’ who died during the people’s war, or who, conversely, complained he’d used the word ‘blood’ and who felt the country needed to move on from the fighting. Then there were also those who complained about his ethnicity – Pradip is a Rai, a group that makes up just 2 per cent of the country’s population. One of the main reasons the Maoists had risen to popularity was by promoting minority rights, saying people could speak their own language and celebrate their own culture rather than having to follow the traditions of the dominant high-caste Brahmans. Giving Pradip the anthem was clearly just a sop to them, some said. ‘I was the victim of a dangerous ethnicist contraction,’ claimed the competition’s runner-up, despite none of the judges having known Pradip’s name, let alone his ethnicity, until he was into the final three.
    All of this was, by and large, silly – jealousy mixed with conspiracy – that was always going to die down as soon as people ran out of breath. But there was one accusation that couldn’t just be shaken off: that Pradip was a monarchist. It took journalists all of a day to discover he’d once edited a poetry collection that included a poem by Gyanendra. ‘We are very proud to have the opportunity to include a composition by His Majesty,’ Pradip had written in that book’s introduction. That one sentence – fifteen short words – was like a match to paper.
    The level of scrutiny became such that it wouldn’t have been much of a surprise if people had been found going through his bins, or breaking into his house hoping to find hand-drawn pictures of Gyanendra with hearts around them. Few people seemed to ask why a monarchist would enter a competition to create an anthem for a new, soon-to-be-republican Nepal. And fewer still pointed out the book had been published years before, when practically everyone was a monarchist. To their credit, Pradip’s publisher did. ‘If we are going to ask questions about [him] on the basis of one sentence, who among us is pure?’ they said in a letter to Nepal’s main newspaper. But a few weeks later, Pradip’s anthem was still ‘in quarantine’. He had won the competition, he was due a £4,500 prize, and he was being invited to ceremonies and getting phone calls from his future wife, but there was seemingly no guarantee his words would become the anthem. Pradip was just left anxious and confused, unable really to relax for months: the committee didn’t approve the final anthem until the following April; the government until a few months after that.
    I try to get Pradip to talk about this time, but it’s clearly hard for him to do so. It’s what he’s been trying to avoid ever since I walked into his house. He looks at the floor and speaks quietly. ‘The attention, the interviews, all of this went on for so long. It was like being stuck in a black hole. I had heart pains, headaches. Everything was hurting. Obviously it was a stressful time, but I tried to suppress my anger and fear and fury with what was happening. I was trying to be a man! Maybe I had some shortcomings and weaknesses, but I told myself I had always done the right thing. One of my uncles was so shocked he said, “If I were you I wouldn’t tolerate