What a difference two weeks makes. Last month, we bit our tongues while talking about the anti-monarchy slogans being raised on the streets. Today it has become so commonplace, we don't bat an eyelid.

Till a few weeks ago, people spoke in hushed tones of the shoe garlands on royal effigies. Last week, they cremated a corpse of 'regression' wearing a crown, and it was regarded as just another street demo.

Now that the streets are resounding with republican slogans, one has to wonder why Nepalis have to kill each other for that cause anymore. Nine thousand lives and eight years of mayhem later, it now looks like the main demand of the Maoists could just as easily have been met by street protests and setting a few government vehicles alight. The party bosses unleashed the students, but will the kids listen to Grandad Girija anymore? The tail is wagging the dog.

It is difficult to gauge just how much support the students on the streets get from onlookers on the sidewalks. But the fact that so far they are just looking on, and not joining in the arson, may indicate the slogans are just that: slogans. The Nepali people still appear to be drawing a distinction between the institution of monarchy and the intention of the monarch.

Most bystanders don't trust the political parties all that much either. They take a dim view of the bonfire of government pickups bought with public money. Ripples of the anti-regression demos on Ratna Park do not reach remote Nepal. The message is magnified by television news, but the people analyse it as being less about republicanism and more about parties trying to upgrade their bargaining position vis-?-vis the king.

It doesn't help the parties' cause that the people recognize some familiar faces leading the marches, faces that are on the CIAA's watch-list. The public is also dismayed that these past weeks prove the modus operandi of the parties hasn't changed. If they get back on the saddle, they will be back to their old tricks, including fighting each other tooth-and-nail.

Meanwhile, sitting in Nagarjun and gazing down at his capital Valley, the monarch is recalcitrant. The royal audiences have failed to do the trick. The king's use of the seven-point plan seems to have underestimated the frustration of the parliamentary leadership as well as the potential of the street agitation to spiral out of control of both the government and the parties.

Now that we are forced to think the unthinkable, we have to say that Nepal will probably survive as a republic. But why get rid of an institution that is not just a symbol of our historical evolution into a nation state, but also an institution that can be the constitutional force of last resort?

If the parties showed more measured and responsible behaviour and the palace proved through its actions that it is committed to restoring the peoples' sovereign rights, there may still be a way out of this morass.