Nepal Royal Palace Opens as Museum

Hundreds of Nepalese lined up outside of the former royal palace as it reopened as museum Friday. It was a chance for the common people to get a glimpse of the lifestyle their former King lived.

It was also a chance for them to pay tribute to the popular royals who were massacred in June 2001.

The mood for the Nepalese ranged from curiosity to outrage as they toured the Narayanhiti Palace. They got a chance to see the offices, bedrooms and banquet halls of the former King Gyanendra, who now lives a simple life in the Kathmandu outskirts.

Naina Simkhada, 26, waited for four hours along with her three-year-old daughter.

“I had never imagined that I would be entering the palace,” she told the AFP.

“I was always curious about their lifestyle. Now I am going to see it all and I am happy about it,” she said.

But some visitors found the disparity in wealth between Nepal’s one-time rulers and its ordinary people dispiriting.

“I didn’t like the kind of life they were living. It’s too depressing for normal people like me,” said Nilam Subedi, a 24-year-old student who said he had travelled for seven hours to see the palace.

“It’s good that we don’t have a king anymore.”

King Dipendra was ousted last year after Maoists took over the country, following a long civil war that left thousands of Nepalese dead and hurt the country’s economy, already a poor one.

Nepal’s Prime Minister Prachanda, the leader of the Maoists, hailed the opening of the museum as “one step forward towards institutionalizing the republic.”

“It’s a victory of the people against feudalism,” he said at the museum’s inauguration ceremony late Thursday.

“This shows the massive disparity between the life of a common Nepalese person and the king. Their lifestyle justifies our starting the people’s war,” said Nanda Kishore Pun, a former Maoist rebel visiting the museum.

Unpopular King Gyanendra as was, it was his brother, the late King Birendra who was extremely popular with his people before his death in June 2001.

The King’s death came when a drunken Crown Prince Dipendra went on a shooting rampage during a dinner party, killing his entire family before turning the gun on himself.

Dipendra’s uncle, Gyanendra was not at the dinner party and ended up succeeding the throne.

He was also accused of being behind the killings so he could become the monarch. But an official investigation ruled him out.

When the Nepalese people toured the Narayanhiti Palace, they were upset to find the mansion where the killings took place was torn down.

Bishwaraj Bhandari, a 52-year-old farmer, had come from Sankhuwasabha district in eastern Nepal to visit a place that was once out of bounds for commoners like him.

“It grieved me to see the razed down Tribhuvan Sadan where Birendra was killed,” he said. “He was a rare king, loved by all his subjects. The mansion should have been allowed to stand for generations of Nepalis to see and remember their king, it was wrong of Gyanendra to have that historic site pulled down.”

A sign marks the place where a fatally injured Dipendra was found after the gunfire subsided. Another sign by a pool marks it as the spot where palace employees found a pistol that Dipandra was said to have used to shoot himself with.

It resurrects the speculations rife about the killings, discounting the report by an inquiry commission that indicated Dipendra as the killer. The suspicions of a darker conspiracy were fuelled by the absence of the gun at Dipendra’s side.

“Even a dog would not believe that Dipendra was the murderer,” says a visibly moved Bhandari. “If he had killed his parents to marry the girl they were against, why did he then kill himself?”

Veteran Nepali journalist Kedar Man Singh feels the museum labels rake up sleeping suspicions. “I noted that they did not mention Dipendra as the killer,” he said.

Prime Minister Prachanda says he will reopen the investigation.

“People deserve to know what happened that night. I am committed to investigating the incident and punishing the guilty,” he said.