KATHMANDU, May 29: The world´s newest republic is one year old today -- Happy Anniversary! On this day, a year ago, the Shah dynasty that unified and ruled Nepal for over 240 years, often through bloodshed, came to a peaceful end. No monarchy in modern history has been abolished so peacefully, though the ballot.
A year after the declaration of the Republic, except for a few statues of former Shah rulers, the country neither has any trace of monarchy left nor does it seem to miss the institution. That´s a remarkable transformation, given that the Shahs´ foothold in this country lasted for over 450 years since Drabya Shah, the progenitor of the Shah Dynasty, wrested Gorkha from local tribal chiefs in 1559. [break]
The political landscape of Nepal has also gone completely republican-- the party that advocates the return of monarchy, even if in a symbolic form, has a meager 4 seats out of the 601 in the Constituent Assembly that will draft the new constitution.
The new republic is, however, not without its share of worries. The party which fought a decade-long bloody war to abolish the monarchy and was returned to the Constituent Assembly with the largest mandate, has just exited from power. And the sense of déjà vu of post-1990 politics is already overwhelming: The common citizenry fears that political instability has returned and the parties are gradually becoming self-righteous and self-serving, losing the sense of enormity of the challenge that lies ahead.
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After conquering a vast territory and brining it under the Gorkha Kingdom, the unifier of this country, Prithivi Narayan Shah, did something fundamentally different and more important than past kings in the Indian subcontinent: He refused to share his conquest with his brothers, a common practice of the time. Instead, he devised the principle of allegiance to the Dhungo, which literally means stone. But metaphorically it represented the state. "The concept of Dhungo implied that the Gorkhali state was a permanent entity that transcended the person of the ruler. In other words, allegiance to the state superseded personal loyalty to the ruler," writes historian Mahesh Chandra Regmi.
The Dhungo concept implanted in people the idea of the permanency of the state. This was perhaps so instrumental an idea that it kept the Nepali state from unraveling even during difficult times and helped it emerge into a modern state.
The equivalent of the Dhungo concept today would be, leaders implanting an idea among the common citizenry that their allegiance to the state supersedes their loyalty to the party. So long as the people see leaders as holding their party interests above those of the country, the idea of republic will remain weak.
There is also another parallel between Prithivi Narayan Shah´s day and the present. By the time he died in 1775, the whole of the eastern tarai upto Jhapa and the entire eastern hills up to the Tista River were under the Gorkha Empire- in-the-making.
He died, at the relatively young age of 53, without providing a people of vast cultural diversity within his newly acquired frontiers, a sense of belongingness to this new kingdom.
And 235 years after his death, this newborn republic is also confronted with the challenge of creating a sense of belongingness in it among its still diverse communities.
Subsequent rulers, after the death of Prithivi Narayan, maintained the territorial integrity of the kingdom and managed relative peace within its new frontiers through coercion and assimilation, something which is not only not possible now but would also be morally wrong. Whether Nepalis, with so much diversity in terms of ethnicity, language, religion and culture, will be able to negotiate a common identity and learn the art of coexistence and mutual respect will decide the future of this infant republic.
In terms of timeframe, the next one year during which we are supposed to write a new constitution and federalize our unitary state will be crucial. If we manage to pull off this transition, we will have set the foundations for a robust republic.
Before the unification campaigns of Nepal ended rather disastrously in the 1816 Sugauli Treaty with the East India Company, Nepal was well set to become a Himalayan Empire, stretching from Kashmir in the west to Tista in the east. British historian John Pemble was so impressed with this empire-in-the-making that he wrote, "In the space of half a century, the Gurkhas had unified, for the first time in history, a belt of territory which was the most beautiful, the most inaccessible and traditionally the most fragmented in Asia.
There seems no reason to suppose that had the war with the British not intervened, this empire would not have proved viable."
With the possibility of any war with either of its neighbors or a third country negligible, there is no reason to argue that the new republic will not survive and grow. As economic growth and prosperity rapidly shift toward Asia in this new century and with China and India poised to become the first and third largest economies of the world, there is also no reason to believe that Nepal will miss out on the trend and not become a viable and prosperous republic.
