NEW DELHI, 10 June — Conspiracy is easier suggested than done. Conspiracy is rational; stupidity is irrational. Conspiracy has a purpose larger than murder or assassination. Very few conspirators are suicidal. They are aspirants, not depressive maniacs; there can even be a psychological case to be made that conspirators are optimists, if desperate ones, justifying murder, even parricide, in their own eyes by the vision of a radically different future in which they play a crucial part. Conspirators are inherently selfish; they want something for themselves in this life, and therefore want to live even if they are aware that the risk of a mistake is death. They do not turn the gun on themselves.
A very useful lesson of history is that no conspiracy can be as bizarre as facts. The senseless mind is far more dangerous than an evil one. Journalists and commentators and politicians love a conspiracy, if for no better reason than it makes a good story, promises the reward of endless spin-doctored books, and, for politicians, the convenient opportunity to turn events to their advantage.
Since being a columnist makes me neither omnipresent nor omnipotent, I make no claim to knowledge of the real events that took place in the palace at Katmandu in which an apparently denied lover allegedly killed his parents and other relatives at a family dinner before putting either a submachine gun or an assault rifle to his own head.
But enough details have emerged, including from eyewitnesses, about that cruel, senseless, horrible, macabre dinner party to encourage what is hopefully intelligent comment. Friday night at the palace, it seems, was generally family night. King Birendra of Nepal liked to host a dinner for his relatives, and the first Friday of June was another normal evening. There was summer in the air of the Himalayan kingdom and guests were sprinkled across the garden, an adjoining billiard room and a parlor, waiting for dinner.
The crown prince, Dipendra, 29 and still unmarried, was at the bar; at about 9:00, he slipped out. He reappeared wearing an army uniform (he was ? in the armed forces, by accident of birth rather than any particular military genius); his cap was pulled over his face and he was carrying an M-16 assault rifle and an Uzi submachine gun. He walked up to his father, who was sitting, and shot him. An eyewitness remarked on the utter astonishment on the father’s face as he collapsed to his death.
Dipendra then, berserk, sprayed machine gun and rife fire through the room, careless of who he was hitting. The guests were frozen with fear. Dipendra himself was expressionless and indiscriminate as he left the room. His mother Aishwarya and brother Nirajan followed him to the garden and were shot dead there for their pains. His uncle Dhirendra tried to intervene and died as well. At some point after this Dipendra shot himself as well, his bloodlust assuaged, the palace littered with the remains of a terrible tragedy.
This is mania, not conspiracy. The Nepalese, understandably, want an explanation, all the more so because they are still devoted to the institution that the family represented, royalty. The truth is difficult for them to accept.
The first explanation that went around, and still carries momentum, is that Dipendra was not allowed by his parents to marry the woman he loved. This may be true. There are other young men across the subcontinent with similar problems. Each individual lives, and occasionally dies, by the culture of his mind space. Dipendra was a product of a value system that placed him above the law of the land. From there it was one psychological step that took beyond the law of human relationships. By law the Nepal royal family is above the law.
There will be some exceptions, and the number of those who leap to the defense of this faith will be even higher.
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, all nations born out of some freedom movement eliminated royalty from the power structure: what the leaders of the freedom movement in India began before independence Indira Gandhi completed in 1969. One of the problems of Pakistan has been its inability to eliminate the power of such vested interests from its political system.
While of course there are other reasons for Pakistan’s inability to come to democratic terms with itself, this hangover from an iniquitous past remains a major obstacle in the search for a modern political language and structure.
Bangladesh was more fortunate; partition took away most of its zemindars to India. Nepal was not part of the British empire; its royalty represented its national status and therefore continued, not without hiccups, into an era at serious discord with the logic of inherited and inevitable power.
Under pressure, the Nepal’s king ceded some ground to nationalist democrats, but they recovered ground and brutalized their own people, using prison, torture and repression to preserve their tyranny. It took another popular revolution, in the late 1980s and early 90s to make them see reason. The royal family of Nepal lost its power.
The moment they were removed from politics, the royal family began to return to the affections of the people. The family has become a symbol and reassurance of national identity. This is what makes it difficult for the Nepalese to accept that there can be a deranged maverick in the midst of a family that they need. Even to suggest this is to invite a volatile reaction.
Today the support for the monarchy has reached such proportions that the people refuse to believe eyewitness accounts of the massacre that blame the dead crown prince, and the government and the new monarch find it expedient to feed extravagant assumptions although they know the truth.
This diet of fallacy can only feed a moment or two of history. The young men who are shaving off their heads in sorrow were, 10 years ago, seething at the palace. There is deep grief for the dead of the royal family, on a scale perhaps that England witnessed for Diana, another death in mystery confounded by suspicion. But when the mist evaporates from the eyes Nepal will have only two options: it will either have to believe that the crown prince massacred his family in a horrible act of insanity; or that their new king is tainted, in the sense that Hamlet’s mother was tainted. Perhaps, Hamlet-like, doubt is the destiny of this generation. But in either option, there is no doubt about who is guilty. There is something spurious in the state of Nepal.
