Birendra of Nepal
Birendra was King of Nepal for twenty-nine years, from 1972 to the night of 1 June 2001, when his son the crown prince Dipendra, in a dispute over a marriage and full of whisky, shot him, the queen, his brother, his sister and five other members of the family at a dinner in the Narayanhiti palace and then himself, which put the king's unpopular brother Gyanendra on the throne and set the monarchy on the road to its abolition seven years later. Birendra had governed as an absolute king under the partyless panchayat system for eighteen years and had then, in April 1990, after seven weeks of demonstrations and some fifty dead, conceded a constitutional monarchy and multi-party democracy, and was by his death the one institution Nepalis trusted. He was born in 1945, educated at Eton, Tokyo and Harvard, travelled the world before his accession at twenty-six, and was crowned in 1975 at an hour fixed by astrologers with the world's royalty in attendance. The panchayat system his father had imposed in 1960 he kept, and a referendum in 1980, held after student riots, confirmed it by a narrow margin the opposition did not accept. The state was small, poor, dependent on India, whose trade blockade of 1989 over transit rights brought the economy to a halt and the parties into the streets. The Jana Andolan, the people's movement, began in February 1990 with the Congress and the Communists together, and on 8 April, with the crowds at the palace gates and the army having fired, he lifted the ban on parties, and the constitution of November 1990 made him a monarch who reigned. He kept to it. The decade that followed had eleven governments and, from 1996, the Maoist insurgency in the west, which he refused to send the army against, keeping it in barracks while the police lost the countryside, on the argument that the army was the nation's and not the government's. The massacre killed the king, Queen Aishwarya, Prince Nirajan and Princess Shruti among others. Dipendra was proclaimed king in his coma and died on 4 June. The official inquiry blamed the crown prince, the country did not believe it, and Gyanendra, who had been out of the palace that night, inherited the suspicion, the Maoists and the throne, which he lost in 2008.
- Lived: 1945 CE – 2001 CE
- Nationality: Nepali
- Roles: king, monarch
