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By Rabi Raj Thapa

Despite all progress and the status of the world’s hegemon, why did a retired Lieutenant General of the US Army, Michael T. Flynn, comment—“the United States now confronts a threat of unprecedented character, scope, and immediacy”—in the recently released US National Security Strategy 2025? (Refer: The Gold Institute for International Strategy). What is there that Nepali leaders never think about or realize—that Nepal is also going through a much more vulnerable, precarious, and difficult transitional phase today? What makes Nepalis show neither haste nor worry about any type of existential threat looming over our beloved motherland and over our children and grandchildren?

Today, the issue of monarchy versus republic has once again surfaced vividly. The news of Durga Prasai’s daredevil-style meeting with the prime minister and home minister seems to have worked better than the efforts of the majority of rajabadi and Sanatan Hindu rastrabadi striving hard to reinstate and restore the institution of monarchy, along with the demands of the OMKAR parivars (families) and others.

Was the monarchy really so bad in Nepal? Now the question has emerged again. If we look at today’s fully democratic countries like Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, they still have monarchy with a Christian king as their head of state. Take Middle Eastern and other countries like Bahrain, Bhutan, Cambodia, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, and Thailand—they still have constitutional monarchies. As far as the change of governance style and system is concerned, Thailand changed its traditional absolute monarchy into a constitutional one in 1932. Bhutan did the same in 2008. Cambodia’s communist Khmer Rouge dictator, Pol Pot, killed one-third of its entire population within four years from 1975 to 1979. Then the people of democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) again restored and reverted back to monarchy from 1979 onwards.

Since Nepal adopted a secular republic, repudiating its age-old Hindu monarchy and Hindu rastra, it has been sliding down a political slippery slope from bad, worse, to disastrous. When Nepali republican stalwarts forcibly expelled King Gyanendra from his ancestral Narayanhiti Palace, he simply left smiling, without any fuss or fanfare. But our republican rulers had to be rescued by the Nepal Army and hidden for some time for their own safety. When the king, as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of all security apparatus, was disowned and humiliated, all the security forces remained lame ducks. Had the Nepal Army remained passive and inactive, all those leaders who were rescued would have joined the martyrs who lost their lives due to inept attitude and behavior. Yet these leaders still have no words of gratitude and appreciation expressed or shown.

Paradoxically, these leaders look busy finding faults and blaming the Nepal Army and other security forces for failing to protect vital national institutions like Singha Durbar and the Supreme Court. In this regard, it would have been prudent to start inquiry and investigation from the top down, beginning with the prime minister K. P. Oli, the home minister, and the heads of the security forces, rather than wasting time interrogating lower-ranked police officers. But those leaders at the top are as guilty as the security personnel, whose brutality has no explanation and no excuses.

Today, it has become evident to all that “Might is Right” is the only rule that works in Nepal. The republican leaders and successive governments have been too brazen on the issue of monarchy and Hindu rastra for almost two decades. But when Durga Prasai stormed the prime minister’s office forcibly and presented his demands on December 8, the question of monarchy has hit the bull’s-eye.

Now, all eyes are set on the prime minister’s response to Durga Prasai’s demands, which is supposed to come out on December 16, 2025. Hope is the best food sustaining Nepal and Nepali lives. Let’s hope that the prime minister comes with a solution that will be acceptable and agreeable to all republicans and monarchists, secularists and Sanatanis.