What was known with any confidence was this: on Friday evening the crown prince had joined his parents and other close family for dinner inside the vast royal compound in central Katmandu. Large Friday dinners, often over banquets of rice, lentils, wild boar and Nepalese curry, were a royal tradition. On this evening, the family had planned to discuss the crown prince’s long-delayed wedding plans. Marriages are generally arranged in Nepal (in consultation with astrologers), and an argument apparently erupted between the queen and the crown prince over prospective brides. The crown prince bolted from the room, and returned a short time later dressed in military fatigues and armed with an automatic rifle. According to one account, he shot the king first; when the queen and Prince Nirajan followed Dipendra into the next room, he shot them, too. Then Dipendra re-entered the main room and shot several other relatives, including his sister. When the gunfire ended, at least seven people were dead and two others were critically wounded–nearly all of the adults in the Nepalese royal family. The crown prince himself was in a coma, apparently from a self-inflicted wound.
Why did he do it? It’s clear that Dipendra, like so many other young royals around the globe, was trapped between the strict demands of tradition and his own modern yearnings. Although the monarchy had not wielded much power in Nepal since democratic elections in 1990, it still served as a source of stability in an extremely poor country suffering from a spreading Maoist insurgency. Yet the king himself was unhealthy–he underwent heart surgery in 1998–and pressure was mounting on the 29-year-old to settle down. A day before the massacre, in fact, the Nepali Times, a weekly newspaper, published a flattering article about the crown prince that said: “It’s high time His Royal Highness got married… Everybody is worrying about when this will happen.”
The king and queen favored a woman named Supria Shah, a childhood sweetheart of Dipendra’s who was of pure Nepalese descent. But Dipendra was in love with another woman named Deviyani Rana, who is in her late 20s. She has strong ties to Indian royalty and an Indian mother. The crown prince had been dating her for several years. “She’s a very nice person, mature and strong,” says a friend of Deviyani. “But the palace wanted someone very docile.” The palace may have also been wary of Deviyani’s connections to India, Nepal’s powerful neighbor. According to one account, Dipendra had told his mother during an earlier feud that he’d already gotten married to Deviyani, to which the queen retorted: “Then you can just unmarry her.”
In a bizarre twist after the murder, the 11-member Royal Privy Council named Dipendra the new king, even though he was brain-dead. Still, the man who seemed certain to take the throne is the late king’s brother and current regent, Prince Gyanendra. Decades ago, Gyanendra served as a child-king for a few days, and some astrologers predicted that Gyanendra would become king again. Gyanendra’s son Paras was reportedly in the palace at the time of the killings, and survived.
Paras, likely to be the new crown prince, is a controversial figure who has been accused several times of running down pedestrians in drunken-driving incidents. Most recently, on Aug. 7 last year, his Pajero slammed into and killed popular musician Praveen Gurung. Eventually prosecutors agreed to investigate after an Army recruit confessed to the hit and run, but so far nothing has come of the probe. Still, the incident embarrassed the royals, and sparked protests by leftist students. “People will have a hard time accepting Paras as crown prince,” says one Katmandu resident. Whatever happens, Nepal’s monarchy has been damaged.
