Nepalis woke up on Tuesday with a sense of being once more in charge of their own destiny.

Many didn\'t seem to be able to believe it, and thronged around the news-stands to read the morning papers that carried banner headlines of the restoration of parliament. The euphoria was palpable, but there was also a need to catch up with lives disrupted after 19 days of strikes and closures.

Long queues immediately formed outside the gas stations, public buses and electric three wheelers started running again. By noon thousands of people had started gathering at the designated crossroads on the Ring Road for victory rallies. Many were smiling despite a thunderstorm, chanting loktantra slogans. There were a few disgruntled voices who still wanted the king to go and the country turned into a republic.

Some of these were shouting slogans outside Girija Prasad Koirala\'s house in Maharajganj where the seven party leadership was meeting to unanimously elected Koirala as their candidate for prime minister. His name was jointly proposed by Madhab Kumar Nepal and Sher Bahadur Deuba and seconded by all the others. The fact that such erstwhile cut-throat political rivals were working together was taken by many as a good sign.

The only sour note came from the Maoists who announced that their crippling blockade of the highways would continue until their main demand of constituent assembly was "effectively addressed" by parliament. When the house meets on Friday, the parties will table a pledging resolution for constituent assembly elections. For the moment, analysts say, the Maoist leadership is trying to show its rank and file that it is continuing its pressure on the seven party alliance so it doesn\'t renege in its promise.

Koirala is now expected to start building up an interim administration to take over from the royal council of ministers. One UML source said a ceasefire proposal to the Maoists may be in the cards as well as the release of all political detainees.

Persuading the Maoists to reopen the highways by giving an undertaking to the Maoists on the constituent assembly could be the first order of business. The task ahead of the interim government will be to provide immediate relief to people who have been affected by the three-week shutdown.

In the medium term, Koirala\'s team will have to focus on kickstarting the government\'s service delivery mechanism which has been moribund, restoring the supply situation, and revive a near-bankrupt state exchequer.

And in the long-term, observers say, a restored democratic process must get the Maoists to renounce violence and join multiparty politics.

Power to the people
This wasn\'t so much a victory of the parties or the Maoists, it was a victory of the people
KUNDA DIXIT

WEB EXCLUSIVE | Posted on 25 April - 1.16 AM NST

Listen to King Gyanendra\'s royal address to the nation on 24 April (in Nepali) (in English)

He could have done this on Friday, he could have done it last February, he could have done it four years ago. But King Gyanendra took the country right to the brink before he backed down.

In his address to the nation just before midnight on Monday, the beleaguered monarch made his final climbdown by saying: "Sovereignty and state power rests with the people." That\'s all it took.

The sombre-faced king then went on to read from a teleprompter and proclaim that the parliament dissolved by Sher Bahadur Deuba on 22 May 2002 would reconvene on Friday at 1 PM. He even extended his "heartfelt condolences" to those who had suffered during the People\'s Movement.

It was a compromise that gave all three forces a face-saving way to back down: the parties got their parliament restored, the Maoists got the promise that parliament will deliberate on a constituent assembly and the king got to keep his throne.

He could have done more: announce an immediate ceasefire, released all political detainees or address the Maoists directly. Dealing with the Maoists has now been left up to the parties and perhaps parliament will be reconvened for only 24 hours after which it will pass provisions for a constituent assembly election and pave the way for the armed rebels to ultimately join the political mainstream. The parties will then form an interim administration to oversee those elections which will among other things decide on the future of the monarchy.

It took a week of hectic behind the scenes negotiations for the king to finally agree, and it was touch-and-go right to the end. The Indians brought in the heavy guns in the form of special envoy Karan Singh and Shyam Saran to find a formula acceptable to all parties. Things got messed up when the king went only half-way to meet the parties\' demands in his address to the nation on Friday.

This enraged protesters even more, with tens of thousands nearly marching on the palace on Saturday. The party leaders announced a mammoth demonstration all around the Ring Road on Tuesday to make a symbolic noose around the capital. That demo is now going to be a victory rally. And going by the celebrations, slogans and even fireworks in Kathmandu neighbourhoods way past midnight as we write this, it will be a rally bigger than anything we have seen so far.

Five of the seven party leaders were said to have been at the palace meeting the king just after his proclamation was broadcast.

So, it took three weeks of nationwide non-violent people power to achieve what the Maoists couldn\'t get with years of armed struggle. The biggest challenge ahead of the new rim government is to arrange a ceasefire and begin a peace process to ensure that future elections are free and fair.

Restoration of democracy will now end Nepal\'s international isolation, it will be welcomed back into the world community. It will free up foreign aid again and with peace, we may begin the task of rebuilding and rehabilitating all that has been destroyed.

As we saw in the mid-1990s, it will be messy. It would be surprising if the old NC-UML rivalries did not resurface, and there will be corruption and mismanagement. But these are problems we know how to fix with democratic institutions that guarantee accountability. It would have been far worse to be living in an absolute monarchy or a totalitarian state.

This wasn\'t so much a victory of the parties or the Maoists. It was a victory of the people.

The first step
The absolute monarchy is dead, long live democracy
KUNDA DIXIT

Listen to King Gyanendra\'s royal address to the nation (in Nepali) (in English)

King Gyanendra has finally admitted he made a mistake, but he hasn't said sorry for the past four years.

But coming from such an obstinate monarch who has been so determined to wrest power, it must have taken quite an effort to say what he did. It has been four wasted years, years in which Nepalis slid deeper into misery and hardship. But better late than never.

In his much-anticipated Friday evening address to a curfew-bound capital and a nation in turmoil, the king finally admitted what we have known all along: that sovereignty resides with the people.

This was a key philosophical concession, and he followed it up with an offer to the seven parties to propose a name for a prime minister. This may be just enough to rescue the country from the jaws of anarchy for now.

But because the king yielded only after his back was to the wall, the obvious question now is whether a people who have regained sovereignty will accept his offer. In the past three weeks, people Power II was already turning from a pro-democracy movement to a pro-republican one.

It will now fall upon the seven-party alliance to address the first issue of whether or not to take up the king's offer. The Indians who brokered this deal must have been convinced this was the minimum acceptable concession for them. However, the anger on the streets has overtaken the position of the leadership of some of the parties and the question is whether they can now quell it.

The seven parties now have to kill two birds with one stone: they must prove that their unity will remain intact over the choice of prime minister and they should also use this opportunity to bring the Maoists into the mainstream. They must waste no time in coming up with their candidate.

The parties have always been better at fighting for democracy than making it work, and we shouldn't be having to see the unseemly three-week squabbling for cabinet positions as we did in the past.

This is no more about who gets which portfolio, but about rescuing the country and getting on with re-establishing an inclusive democracy and restoring peace.

The 12-point pact between the rebels and parties holds the hope that the Maoists can now be persuaded to join the mainstream after renouncing violence. Recent public opinion polls show that they don't need the guns to get a sizeable chunk of the votes in future elections provided they agree to demobilization.

As for the king, he should replay some of the tapes of the street protests and gauge for himself the level of anger against him. The message is stark: he has to be satisfied with being a ceremonial monarch, otherwise there is no place for him.

OPERATION MAHARAJA: Girija Koirala of the NC meeting Indian special envoy Karan Singh, Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran and Indian Ambassador Shiv Shankar Mukherjee. Singh later had a private dinner with King Gyanendra to find a solution to the impasse.

The maharajahs of Kashmir and Nepal met in Kathmandu in the presence of Indian foreign secretary Shyam Saran on Thursday. Expectations are high that some breakthrough will emerge to defuse the continued volatile confrontation. But even by Friday morning as another 11 hour curfew set in and citizens of the capital reeled under shortages, it doesn't look like good sense is prevailing.

The reason we are right at the brink is because of the continued refusal of King Gyanendra to see the implications of his takeover on the country, on himself and on the institution monarchy. He may deserve whatever is coming to him, but the Nepali people don't. This has been a surprising uprising. No one has been more surprised by its runaway momentum than the seven political parties who launched it. In fact, they are being overtaken by spontaneous popular outrage on the streets. The people, too, have been surprised by their own power and emboldened by it.

King Gyanendra must also be raising one startled eyebrow, he thought he could ram things through with force once again. The Maoists perhaps should be the most astounded: the Nepali people have achieved in two weeks what the comrades have taken more than ten years to try to do and in the process left at least 14,000 fellow-Nepalis dead, millions in misery and the country in ruins.

We keep saying there are three centres of power in this country and have always forgotten the fourth: the people. They are a power to be reckoned with, and the other three ignore it at their own peril. The problem with people power is that it is ephemeral: manifesting itself only after a certain anger threshold is crossed, it stays for a while and then it subsides. It has to be channeled and lead while it is in a swarm mode otherwise the street energy for change is wasted.

Past people power uprisings like the Velvet and Orange Revolutions and our own 1990 movement brought about change because they were directed to a desirable outcome: stripping the powers of a dictatorship with minimum bloodshed. When the Philippine army refused orders to fire on demonstrators in 1986, strongman Ferdinand Marcos still hoped to cling on to power. He got a call from US senator Paul Laxalt, who gave him the famous line: "Mr President, it's time to cut and cut cleanly." Marcos knew it was time to go.

So there is a certain historical resonance to American Ambassador James Moriarty telling CNN that the king may have to fly out "clinging to the nose-wheel of a helicopter". From Saigon to Teheran, the Americans have seen such chopper-borne evacuation of once-favourite strongmen frequently enough.

History repeats itself, and this week it is repeating itself as a farce. Three stalwarts of the Panchayat in 1990 are in positions of power: cabinet ministers Kamal Thapa and Niranjan Thapa as well as that shadowy adviser Sharad Chandra Shah.

They never learn, do they, that the country belongs to the people and not just to the king.