February 3, 2007 ☼ Foreign Affairs
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
The maid’s tale—the inevitable corollary of the mystery that accompanies royal assassinations—has surfaced in Nepal. The book and its excerpts have been quick to emerge in Nepal after the expulsion of King Gyanendra. It’s the real “Kissa Kathmandu Ka”, the kind of mystery that requires a Feluda to solve.
A translated chapter from Rakta Kunda, a new book on the 2001 Royal Palace Massacre, that looks at the incident through the eyes of one of the surviving witnesses, Queen Mother Ratna’s personal maid, identified in the book as Shanta. The book, which the author says is a “historical novelâ€, claims that two men masked as Crown Prince Dipendra had fired the shots that led to the massacre in which Shanta’s husband Trilochan Acharya who too was a royal palace employee was killed, besides the 10 royal family members, including the entire family of King Birendra. The 22-chapter book which includes a conclusion also makes many surprising revelations, like “King Mahendra didn’t die of a heart attack; he committed suicide,†among others. [F&P]
Ideally, a thorough, impartial investigation of the Narayanhiti massacre would do much to bring closure and contribute to the process of national reconciliation in Nepal. But the new dispensation may not necessarily want the truth to be revealed so soon.
Related Post: The Gorkha prophecy
If you would like to share or comment on this, please discuss it on my GitHub
Previous © Copyright 2003-2024. Nitin Pai. All Rights Reserved.