When his captors threatened to throw Dhruv Karki into the flashing white swirls of the river Seti, the student activist thought his life was over. Blindfolded and having been beaten with a rifle butt over the past four hours in an army camp in western Nepal, Dhruv was mentally and physically exhausted.
His tormentors demanded to know the whereabouts of Maoists in the university campus, accusing him of lying when he said he did not know.
Eventually, Dhruv was marched down some stairs and thrown into a room half-filled with dust.
There he found 60 other protesters who had dared challenge the king of Nepal’s state of emergency.
It is four days since Gyanendra used sweeping dictatorial powers to close down newspapers and censor broadcasts in the mountain state. The new royalist government has also cut telephone lines and shut down internet links, cutting off the Himalayan kingdom from the outside world.
Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, the freedom to assemble peacefully and the right to privacy have all been suspended.
On Friday, paramilitary forces rounded up political leaders in the country’s capital, Kathmandu, in what appears a concerted effort to silence critics of the coup d’état.
The crackdown against former members of the government and opposition groups confirms what many observers fear: a quick and brutal snuffing out of dissent.
Sitting in his family’s house, Dhruv (27) said that after Gyanendra announced that he had sacked the government and introduced martial law, hundreds of students gathered outside Prithwi Narayan campus in the picturesque tourist town of Pokhara and shouted anti-royal slogans and ”long live democracy”.
In a matter of minutes, stones were hurled and a motorbike set alight along with pictures of the royal family.
The army responded with overwhelming force, spraying the air with tear gas and bullets. At least one student was taken to hospital after being shot. Soldiers rounded up suspected student leaders within hours of taking control of the university’s grounds.
”We were not given food or water or even allowed to go to the toilet,” Dhruv recalled. ”It must have been night but I did not sleep. They said that if we made noise we would be beaten more.”
Poked repeatedly with the barrel of a gun, Dhruv’s right eye remains bruised and half-opened. He was released from the army’s barracks a day after he was incarcerated and told to walk home.
”The soldiers told me that if I am taken again they would not spare me. But I will not give up because we want democracy.”
The attempted justification for the return of absolute monarchy is that the country was sliding into chaos because ceaseless in-fighting between political parties had allowed an eight-year-old Maoist insurgency to spread to virtually every corner of the country.
In squaring up to the rebels, the king has also invited a devastating response. The Maoist call for a three-day general strike has been ignored in Kathmandu, where the government holds power.
But in Pokhara, where the writ of the government barely runs, almost all schools, shops and offices have closed down. The only vehicles on the road are army trucks and taxis with their numbers blacked out for fear of Maoist reprisals.
Once part of Nepal’s political mainstream, the Maoists took their movement underground in 1996 and launched what they call a ”people’s war” against the state. The conflict between government troops and the left-wing guerrillas, who want to set up a communist republic in place of Nepal’s Hindu monarchy, has claimed more than 11 000 lives.
One such death happened three months ago on a bright, clear morning in Pokhara. On his way to work, Indra Bahadur Acharaya, a political lecturer, was shot in the back of the head three times by a passenger on a motorbike. A Maoist spokesperson claimed responsibility for the murder but said Acharaya (51) had been mistaken for someone else.
His son, Narendra, who witnessed the shooting, said the king cannot defeat the Maoists on his own.
”Since we do not have peace, a lot of innocent lives are wasted,” he said. ”The king needs political parties to be there. He cannot bring peace and prosperity on his own.”
Seen as ”clever and intellectual”, Gyanendra has never hidden his disdain for political parties and has assumed an increasingly autocratic role since he dissolved Nepal’s Parliament in 2002.
Although the king’s most recent grab for power had long been the talk of Kathmandu, many were surprised by the swiftness and scope of the monarch’s actions.
The British ambassador to Nepal, Keith Bloomfield, said he had asked the king only a week ago whether he was going to take power.
”We were aware that this was in the back of his mind and asked him. The king said, ‘No, no there has been a misunderstanding.’ I made it clear that such a move would not be viewed favourably. He appears to have discounted that.”
Analysts said the monarch appeared to be trying to return to the days when his family ran the country as feudal autocrats and living Hindu gods, before democracy’s arrival in 1990. The threat is that Nepal will simply end up with a monarchy propped up by an army.
The civil war has already seen defence spending in the country spiral. To defeat the Maoists, Britain, the United States and India have all armed the security forces. In 2002, Britain provided the Nepalese government with two Russian-built Mi-17 support helicopters and equipment for bomb disposal, logistics, communications and military intelligence.
At £150-million, the country’s defence budget is as large as Nepal spends on social services, remarkable in a country where adult literacy is less than 50%.
”The king does not understand that political parties are necessarily messy institutions,” said Kanak Mani Dixit, publisher of Himal magazine. ”Instead we may now get an expensive and coercive army which will stymie the development of the people.
”It will be a mistake to think we can win the war this way. Nepal is a combination of Afghanistan’s ravines and Vietnam’s foliage and you cannot defeat a guerrilla army in such conditions.” — Guardian Unlimited Â