End of an era as another Himalayan kingdom tumbles

By Simon Denyer

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - For centuries they enjoyed absolute power in their mountain fastnesses, revered by their subjects as incarnations of gods or Buddha, but one by one the monarchies of the Himalayas are falling.

Pressure has come from China to the north and India to the south, and pressure has come from below, from subjects impatient to replace feudalism with democracy, as these once-forbidden kingdoms gradually opened to the outside world.

Sikkim's Buddhist monarchs, the Chogyals, retreated into history when India annexed their territory in 1975, ostensibly to support a mainly Hindu, ethnic Nepali pro-democracy movement.

Tibet's "priest-king", the Dalai Lama, was forced into exile when China invaded his land in the 1950s, ostensibly to end feudalism. Even the centuries-old Afghan monarchy was ousted in a coup in 1973.

On Wednesday, Nepal's 239-year-old Shah dynasty was the latest to bow out, a Hindu monarchy outmanoeuvred by a decade-long Maoist insurgency and displaced by a mass pro-democracy movement.

In the Himalayas, only in Bhutan does a monarchy still play a significant role, and even there it voluntarily surrendered power this year to a new democratically elected parliament, standing aside shrewdly perhaps, before the winds of change blew it aside.

"All the Himalayan states sit in a strategic location, between large and powerful countries," said Yubaraj Ghimere, a magazine editor and political analyst in Kathmandu. "At the same there has been increasing education and political awareness in the region since the 1940s."

Those factors have destablised the monarchies in the mountains, Ghimere said. Forced to open up to the modern world, few have managed to keep their balance.