No rest for Nepal’s royal ghosts

KATHMANDU - More than eight years after its royal family perished in a shocking massacre in the tightly guarded palace and 14 months after the kingdom of Nepal gave the coup de grace to its once-revered institution of monarchy, the royal ghosts have been resurrected with the new government announcing it would rebuild the massacre site.

Nepal’s new Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal, who inspected the palace that is now a national museum, has said that the building in which King Birendra was killed in 2001 along with nine other family members, would be rebuilt and a new investigation started into the tragedy.

“The Tribhuvan Sadan will be re-built,” Nepal said Wednesday, a day regarded as inauspicious due to the full solar eclipse.

Named after deposed King Gyanendra’s grandfather Tribhuvan, the Tribhuvan Sadan was a cluster of rooms on the grounds of the Narayanhity, the sprawling mansion in the heart of the capital where Nepal’s king and queen lived.

In 2001, Tribhuvan Sadan was occupied by the crown prince, Dipendra, who is regarded as the perpetrator of the massacre after a bitter quarrel with his parents over his marriage.

With the headstrong prince hell-bent on marrying a woman his parents disapproved of, they had warned him he would be disinherited. The threat reportedly led to the carnage.

After the killings, Birendra’s younger brother Gyanendra ascended the throne.

He was reportedly asked by the Queen Mother, Ratna, to demolish Tribhuvan Sadan, calling it accursed.

Accordingly, the mansion was razed down and today, the rubble is part of the exhibits at the museum, with labels marking the places where the slain bodies were found and the holes made by straying bullets.

The prime minister’s announcement comes as a surprise as the government had made no mention of rebuilding the demolished mansion or instituting a fresh investigation into the national tragedy in its annual policies and budget tabled in parliament earlier this month.

The republic’s first Maoist government that preceded the current coalition had also promised a high-level investigation into the massacre.

However, despite the announcement in February, the Maoist government did not live up to its pledge and fell two months later.

The current prime minister’s announcement was dismissed as a political stunt by royalists.

“It’s just a political gimmick,” said Kamal Thapa, former minister in the royal government and chief of Rastriya Prajatantra Party (Nepal), the only party in Nepal’s 601-member parliament to advocate monarchy.

“We would have no objection if they were serious. But they have been making such announcements for years.”

Thapa said Nepal and his Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist have also been making empty noises about investigating the death of its charismatic general secretary Madan Bhandari.

Bhandari and an aide were killed in 1993, apparently in a car smash.

But just as with the Narayanhity massacre, there have been publicly voiced suspicions that Bhandari’s death could have been engineered as part of Nepal’s murky political jousting for power.

The conspiracy theory gained ground after Bhandari’s driver and the only eyewitness of the accident was killed in Kathmandu nearly a decade later.