Article Review : AUTOCRACY IN NEPAL-A CHALLENGE

The series of student demonstrations in Kathmandu and other cities in Nepal which have culminated in the police firing in Hataura and the officially ad-mitted death toll of three have to be seen in the context of the developments over the last three months, specifically since the execution on February 9, 1979, more than two years after they were sentenced to death, of two leaders of the banned Nepali Congress Party. That execution itself had set off, according to a Reuters report, wide-spread student disturbances leading to classes being suspended in most colleges in the Kathmandu valley. The discontent apparently continued to simmer; and the patently organised 'reception' accorded to the ailing Nepali Congress leader, B P Koirala, when he returned to Kathmandu on March 6, to be severely heckled and have his supporters physically assaulted at Kathmandu airport, should have added to popular discontent. Soon, Koirala himself, who had spoken in so glowing a fashion about the sweet reasonableness of King Birendra when he had met him in November last before going abroad once again for medical treatment, was ordered to confine his movements to Kathmandu valley. That was a day before Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged; and that execution in distant Rawalpindi seems to have provided just the needed impetus for the student protests which already had been so forcefully expressed over the execution of Yagya Bahadur Thapa and Shim Narayan Shreshta to be resumed with renewed vigour. The passions evoked by the hanging of Bhutto were closely related to the passions generated by the earlier executions at home; the Bhutto hanging only provided a convenient cover for the renewal of those passions. But the intensity of this opposition, .as well as its organised expression must have surprised the authorities in Kathmandu. A strike lasting for over a fortnight leading to the closure of the premier umivemity in the country, police lobbing tear-gas shells and making cane charges on students, demonstrators burning cars, attacking the police with stones and sticks, seizing of a gun from a security man, attempting to storm the Nepal Bank building in, Hataura, arrests of hundreds of students and extensive injuries to both students and policemen, the reluctant acknowledgement by the authorities that "the involvement of political elements in the student strike cannot be ruled out" -surely, all these are symptoms of scarcely permissible activity in such an ordered Panchayat democracy as that of Nepal. The demands of the striking students have been mainly for educational reforms, but in a polity like that of Nepal, even a demand for educational reforms becomes a political demand, 1t 'is perhaps premature to see in these sporadic outbursts of student unrest the beginnings of a real challenge to autocracy. But the authorities are any-way not treating the outburst lightly, though curiously, the harshest measures seem to have been directed against so loyal an opposition leader as B P Koirala himself who has now been put under house arrest under the public security act.