From the WSJ Opinion Archives
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
Regicide Reappears
Nepalese prince guns down his whole family and himself. Why?
To call a person "dippy," in British slang, is to characterize him as crazy, loopy, a bit off-balance. How unwittingly prescient, therefore, that the schoolboys at Eton should have chosen that word, a rather obvious diminutive, as their nickname for Dipendra, the late crown prince of Nepal, when the latter was a student there over a decade ago.
Dipendra, according to reports yesterday in the Daily Telegraph of London, was also regarded at Eton as "a damn good shot." They must now wish, there, that he'd spent less time on the rifle range and more in the music conservatory. For on Friday night, Dipendra ensured a place for himself in history when he joined the ranks of those who commit regicide. In modern times, this makes him something akin to a unicorn, the stuff of fable.
The crown prince slew his father, Birendra, and his mother, Aishwarya--the king and queen of Nepal--as the family was at dinner. Using an automatic weapon, he also cut down his brother and sister, as well as six other relatives by blood or marriage. The massacre over, accounts say, he shot himself in the head--and all because his mother wouldn't let him marry the woman of his choice.
Nepal is in a state of fear and consternation, having lost, in one night, its king, his son, and its socio-political bearings. Governed as a near-absolute monarchy until 1990--when a popular revolt led to the institution of a constitutional monarchy, not unlike Britain's--the country is in an uncomprehending daze. This incomprehension is compounded by the fact that the motives behind Dipendra's act appear to have no echoes in history, or at least none that might be referred to readily.
The killing of kings is neither rare nor common in history. Yet a thread might be said to run through all examples. Regicide is committed for strategic or political reasons. The execution of Charles I by Oliver Cromwell followed the defeat of the Cavaliers and the imposition of a brief, and ugly, new order. The feckless Czar Peter III may have been disposed of by Catherine the Great, his wife, who reckoned, and rightly, that she would make a better ruler of Russia. Louis XVI made way for the French Revolution, and Czar Nicholas II for a Communist one. More recently, the murder of King Faisal II of Iraq paved the path to power for Saddam Hussein.
The killing of King Birendra, by contrast, appears to have been an irrational act--inviting one, in fact, to see it as a case of a crown prince "going postal." Dipendra, by all accounts, was a stable fellow who had shown an interest in, and aptitude for, kingship. Why would he take leave of his logic and destroy an institution he stood to inherit over his right to marry a woman of his choice? If he loved her so much, why didn't he choose the path of simple rebellion, like all headstrong sons? After all, he could have married his sweetheart and presented his parents with a fait accompli, or even have threatened to renounce his right to the throne. Why regicide?
In a land where the royal spokesman cannot even bring himself to pronounce the word "dead" in the same sentence as "King Birendra"--preferring, instead, to use an ornate Sanskrit word, swargarohan, or "ascent to heaven"--news of the regicide has come mainly from the foreign press and radio. Two-thirds of Nepalese are illiterate, and such official opaqueness has only added to, and not dispelled, the sense of national calamity. It is also often the case that the unlettered, perhaps to compensate for their lack of formal learning, are the most reluctant to believe that something can be simply, utterly senseless.
Dipendra's act--which arrests our attention because of its abhorrent excess--has repelled the people of Nepal, the very people who would one day have been his subjects. It repels them to such an extent that they seem to be turning their backs on it. They search for other answers, elsewhere, in places more ghoulish than the dining room of their royal palace. Like all people in shock, they will be slow to turn around once more and look into the light.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Tuesdays.
