by Ed Douglas
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These two events, the expedition to Everest and the fatal shooting in Mustang, coming as they did within weeks of each other, became linked in the minds of several historians. Was it simply coincidence or were they part of a pattern illustrating China’s ability to control Nepal’s borders as it saw fit? (‘You cry murder even when we do nothing,’ Mao had told Koirala, ‘and no one believes our protestations. Everybody prefers to believe you, the smaller states.’) Koirala responded to the crisis with calm authority, impressing the British ambassador with his leadership, while at the same time milking the situation for any political advantage over his opponents, the nationalist Gorkha Parishad party and the communists, who tended to side with China. Koirala had been regularly accused of being weak in foreign affairs, so his strong performance now was welcomed. In assessing Nepal’s situation that year, the Foreign Office concluded: ‘There is little doubt that this Government represents Nepal’s best hope for the future.’
Koirala’s administration certainly had its problems – a level of corruption, splits in his party and threats to public order – but Koirala had shown ‘a welcome determination to tackle the difficult problems with which they are faced’. Unfortunately, his government proved short-lived. Koirala met regularly with Mahendra, who had a fascination with his prime minister’s popularity as well as a fear of his agenda. ‘Once,’ Koirala wrote,
the king asked me to explain my aspiration. I told him they were to provide a standard of middle-class living, such as that of my family, for all the people. ‘How long will that take?’ he asked, and I replied that it would require me to win elections three times, and that I would work towards that.
Mahendra didn’t give him the chance: in December 1960, only months after the shooting in Mustang, he had Koirala and his cabinet arrested, chopping down Nepal’s democracy before it had spread its leaves.
Koirala, back in a prison cell, couldn’t complain he hadn’t been warned. In the early 1950s Mahendra had fallen out with his father Tribhuvan over whom to marry after the death of his first wife Indra. (This was more like a squabble between brothers than between father and son since both Mahendra’s parents were only thirteen when he was born.) Indra had been a granddaughter of Juddha Shamsher, the autocratic maharaja who had done his best to smash political opposition and humiliate Tribhuvan into the bargain. Rather than choose, say, a royal princess from India’s former princely states as his new wife, Mahendra chose to marry Indra’s sister Ratna. He was aligning himself once more with the influential Rana dynasty from which Tribhuvan had wrested control of the country and which still dominated the army. Tribhuvan knew what this meant and refused to attend the wedding, so Mahendra had sent B P Koirala to persuade him. Tribhuvan was having none of it, telling Koirala that the royal family should sever all links with the Ranas. Later, when Koirala had left, Tribhuvan warned those around him: ‘mark my words this crown prince will make you all sob; he will make you weep. I know him, and he will make you weep.’
In the weeks before he ousted Koirala, Mahendra had been in Britain. He and Queen Ratna stayed at Buckingham Palace for a lavish four-day state visit and then toured the country on Queen Elizabeth’s royal train. His son Birendra, the fifteen-year-old crown prince, then at Eton, was given leave to accompany him. There were aircraft factories to inspect and agricultural centres, but the highlight was a visit to Oxford. Mahendra was angling for an honorary degree just like the one Chandra Shamsher had been given half a century before. Alas, Oxford was no longer so pliable and there was no Lord Curzon as chancellor to square things. To rub salt in the wound, the university invited Mahendra to inspect the collection of Sanskrit manuscripts Chandra had donated to the Bodleian Library and then take tea with Chandra’s great-grandson Pashupati Shamsher. The Foreign Office thought this would be nice, since Pashupati and Queen Ratna were cousins, but there was a sour rivalry between the descendants of the two brothers Chandra and Juddha. (This rivalry would prove toxic. In June 2001, when the crown prince Dipendra massacred ten of his family, including his father Birendra and his mother Aishwarya, ordinary Nepalis knew the history: Aishwarya was a granddaughter of Juddha while Dipendra’s girlfriend Devyani, whom he wanted to marry, was the daughter of Pashupati and thus a descendant of Chandra.)
Just before he left London in early November 1960, Mahendra had lunch at 10 Downing Street with the prime minister Harold Macmillan, at Queen Elizabeth’s personal request. If Mahendra offered any clue to what he was planning when he got home there is no recorded hint of it. Those Nepali politicians he confided in warned Mahendra he might face a backlash from abroad; he should at least delay in case his grab for power jeopardised Queen Elizabeth’s return visit planned for late February. As things turned out, almost no one, at home or abroad, turned a hair. The Nepali writer C K Lal noted how
Not a dog barked in Kathmandu when Prime Minister B P Koirala, commanding a two-third majority in the parliament, was whisked away by the military from a public program of the youth wing of his party in the centre of the city.
The British were indifferent. Harold Macmillan loftily waved away concerns about Her Majesty visiting a king who had recently locked up a competent democratic government.
Queen Elizabeth’s four-day visit was one of the first big stories Liz Hawley covered. Looking for a local human-interest angle, she wrote about a heavily pregnant Sherpa woman who had walked from Khumbu to Kathmandu to see the queen; she had stopped for a couple of hours along the way to give birth. (It was a boy, named Philip, after the Duke of Edinburgh.) Having made such a success of Mahendra’s coronation, it was left to Boris Lissanevitch of the Royal Hotel to manage things: the horse-drawn carriages, the picnics and parades, and the tiger hunt. The latter involved more than three hundred elephants – ‘nobody thought on the same scale as Boris’ – which raised their trunks in salute one by one as the queen departed. Prince Philip, soon to become a founder member of the World Wide Fund for Nature, got round the expectation that he would personally kill a tiger by feigning a trigger-finger injury. (That didn’t stop his aide Rear Admiral Christopher Bonham-Carter from bagging one, the foreign secretary Alec Douglas-Home having missed twice.) Newsreels showed Mahendra in his trademark dark sunglasses, like a despotic Roy Orbison, greeting the young queen; narrators revelled in the exotic clichés of Kathmandu – ‘crossroads of Asia’, ‘land of contrasts’ – but failed to mention how the vast crowds had so recently been denied their government. Newsreels showed the queen cruising in an open-top limousine through the fresh, unpolluted streets of Kathmandu waving at thousands of recently disenfranchised voters.
The people of Nepal had not forgotten their brief taste of democracy. If opposition to Mahendra’s coup had been muted, it soon began to build. As the US ambassador Henry Stebbins pointed out, in getting rid of B P Koirala and the Nepali Congress, Mahendra had ‘created a new set of problems’ and had no real idea about how he might solve them. In October 1961, Mahendra was in China to sign the completed border agreement that Koirala had negotiated. Mahendra had a reputation for playing his vast neighbours off against each other, a policy he dubbed ‘positive neutralism’, but he went out of his way to avoid saying anything that might annoy the Indians further. Then, right at the end of the visit, Mahendra found himself bounced into agreeing to China’s request to link Kathmandu and Tibet with a motor road: no road, no border agreement. If this was ‘positive neutralism’, Delhi didn’t much like it. That same month an armed insurgency against Mahendra’s regime was launched from inside India, formed from Nepali opposition parties that had joined forces to restore democracy. Mahendra was already contemplating compromise when India began an unofficial economic blockade in late September. He told his advisers he was prepared to release B P Koirala; they told him to wait for a couple of weeks.
Lucky Mahendra. On 20 October 1962 China launched its full military offensive on India’s borders and in the aftermath of India’s humiliation, Nehru suddenly needed a compliant Nepal. He switched off t
he insurgency and ended the blockade. Mahendra was free to promulgate his new constitution based on the ancient South Asian Panchayat system, ‘the assembly of five’: a system that left him entirely in control. Indian aid continued to flow into the country. B P was left to rot in jail.
To keep the Americans sweet, Mahendra burnished his anti-communist credentials by allowing Tibet’s resistance fighters to maintain their base in Mustang, even travelling by helicopter to meet their leader Baba Yeshi. Kennedy reciprocated by making Nepal one of the first countries to receive Peace Corps workers. But while Chushi Gandruk managed a handful of raids inside Tibet, they were never enough of a threat to rupture Nepali relations with China. In early 1964, the New York Times reported that twelve thousand ‘Nepalese farmhands’ were hard at work carving out the Nepali side of the road to Lhasa, backed with Chinese money and expertise. There were two traditional trade routes through the Himalaya from Kathmandu, one up the Trisuli valley and through Kyirong, the other to the east, up the Bhote Kosi to the village of Kodari. When China asked Mahendra which of these they should survey, he chose the Bhote Kosi route, since the country was more difficult and the road would take longer to build. Chinese engineers moved at lightning speed, finishing their side of the road by 1963. Vehicles were using the road later that year and the whole of it was fully operational by the spring of 1967.
For the rest of his reign, which ended unexpectedly in early 1972 with a fatal heart attack, Mahendra was able to feed off the residual tension created by China’s move against India. By 1968 he was confident enough of his position to release B P Koirala and his ally Ganesh Man Singh from prison, although B P soon escaped into exile when his political campaigning went too far. Mahendra’s son Birendra was a milder king: his Nepal was a ‘zone of peace’, a gentler version of ‘positive neutrality’. That didn’t save his kingdom from the shifting tectonic plates of geopolitics. In 1972 President Nixon went to China to meet Mao and restore relations between their two countries. American support for Tibet was turned off like a tap. The following year, India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi sent troops into Sikkim, at the invitation of the ethnically Nepali prime minister, to quell a rebellion there; the semi-independent kingdom was swallowed whole. The three-century rule of the chogyal, Sikkim’s Tibetan monarchy that had once enraged the British Raj by capturing Joseph Hooker, was ended. Neighbouring dynasties in Bhutan and Nepal took careful note. Soon after, in June 1975, India itself was plunged into its own autocratic darkness, with Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency, which allowed her to rule by decree and saw widespread human rights abuses. Dissidents like B P Koirala found they were no longer welcome, and he was forced to return to Kathmandu and face arrest.
Despite such setbacks, Nepal’s course was a steady if slow return to democracy. Rapid population growth was filling the country with young people eager for change. The convulsive events of 1989, when Eastern Europe shrugged off decades of Soviet repression, galvanised Nepali opposition to the Panchayat rule imposed by Mahendra. Facing an Indian economic blockade and an irresistible popular uprising, the jana andolan, or ‘people’s movement’, Birendra agreed to restore multiparty democracy. By then B P Koirala had been dead for eight years.
Liz Hawley was a great admirer of B P: ‘one of the few remarkable men that we had in Nepal and one political leader who stuck to his beliefs’. In Liz’s eyes, the lost opportunity of his 1959 government cast a long shadow over the democratic administrations of the 1990s, which saw the Nepali Congress and various communist factions mired in infighting and corruption; frustration among Nepal’s poorest communities grew. In 1996, a small splinter group of Maoist political leaders began a People’s War, using Mao’s On Guerilla Warfare as its textbook. Nepal’s leaders, political and military, stewed together unhappily in the introverted bowl of the Kathmandu valley as the Maoists spread their influence over the rest of the country. The crown prince’s massacre of his family in 2001 seemed symptomatic of a nation being hollowed out from the inside. The new king, Birendra’s brother Gyanendra, was much more like Mahendra. In 2005, he repeated his father’s bold decision to take power away from democratically elected politicians and faced a similar backlash. This time there was no international crisis to save him. When Gyanendra returned power to Nepal’s politicians, among them B P’s younger brother Girija Prasad ‘G P’ Koirala, they had the backing of the people to do away with the monarchy altogether. Mahendra might have got away with betraying democracy; his dynasty did not.
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As well as stringing for Time Inc. and then Reuters, Liz had made ends meet working in Nepal’s embryonic tourist industry, doing administrative tasks for an ex-Gurkha called Jimmy Roberts, sometimes called the father of the trekking industry, and his company Mountain Travel. Both of them had a reputation for being at once shy and rather waspish, but she learned a great deal from him about recent mountaineering history. She did a similar job for John Coapman, the burly, charismatic, unreliable and widely disliked founder of the Tiger Tops wildlife lodge in western Nepal, modelled on African safari camps and their equivalents in India established after the Great War by the big-game hunter turned naturalist Jim Corbett. Coapman had bonded with Mahendra over big-game hunting and been with the king when he suffered his fatal heart attack. Foreigners couldn’t get far working in tourism without some kind of royal patronage. The 1960s was when Nepal’s tourism industry really caught fire and Liz had been a shrewd witness to it all. She was there when the first jetliner landed in 1967, watched the hippies come and go: the Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert tripping on mescaline, learning to ‘be here now’, the title of his book; Cat Stevens smoking hash at the Cabin Restaurant and writing three albums’ worth of material. She was there for the boom in adventure travel that followed, enduring the huge and sudden growth of the city that buried its gem-like temple squares in concrete and tangles of telephone wires.
Although Liz had tried to learn Nepali when she first arrived, she concluded that anyone she needed to speak to already spoke English. She was certainly well connected to the elite, the royals and Ranas she met at the Royal Hotel, where she quickly became part of the scene around Boris Lissanevitch. Her introduction to the mountaineering world came on her first New Year’s Eve in Kathmandu when she met Ed Hillary for the first time. Two years earlier, almost to the day, Hillary had reached the South Pole in a converted Massey Ferguson tractor, the third party to do so after Amundsen and Scott, ignoring the furious demands of his expedition leader Vivian Fuchs, approaching from the other side, that he slow down. Hillary’s behaviour, politely ignored in Britain, had earned him a reputation elsewhere for arrogance. The French journalist Raymond Cartier, a columnist at Paris Match, wrote: ‘Few men have come into contact with [Hillary] without having reason to complain of his egocentricity.’
Rather bruised, Hillary had retreated to New Zealand and resumed his old occupation of beekeeping, until ambition and restlessness drove him from home again. When Liz met him he was in the middle of a landmark medical research expedition based in the Khumbu region of Nepal on the slopes of Ama Dablam. The scientific leader was the physiologist Griffith Pugh, from the 1953 Everest expedition, but Hillary had got crucial funding from a Chicago encyclopaedia company who wanted him to find the yeti. Scouting around the high valleys of Khumbu for mythical beasts, he had visited the desperate refugee camp below the village of Thami sheltering thousands of Tibetans who had fled the Lhasa Uprising and the security crackdown that followed. Back in Kathmandu he was helping a Swiss pilot deliver relief aid to the refugees; in return the pilot had promised to fly in materials for a school building in the village of Khumjung. The idea of helping the Sherpas had come to him sitting around a campfire with his sirdar, or lead porter, Urkein. Hillary had wondered aloud what the future held for the people of Everest. Urkein had told him they suffered from the absence of schooling. ‘Our children have eyes but they cannot see,’ he said. The school was the first project in what would become a lifelong mission for Hillary: the
development of Khumbu through the charity he founded, the Himalayan Trust. Liz was one of many friends he brought in as collaborators and as the years passed they developed a strong bond. When Hillary’s first wife Louise and their daughter Belinda were killed in an air crash at the end of May 1975, it was Liz who flew to where Hillary was working in the mountains to give him the news.
It was her friendship with Hillary that also sparked her interest in mountaineering as a subject. Politics had featured heavily in foreign news coverage of the Himalaya in the post-war period, with China’s occupation of Tibet and the postcolonial optimism of Indian independence. By the 1960s that interest was fading; adventure was a much easier sell to editors than confusing local politics, especially with the Americans trying Everest in 1963. But there wasn’t much to report after their success, at least not for a while, not least because in March 1965, a few days before an official visit by China’s foreign minister Chen Yi, Nepal announced a ban on climbing that lasted for the next four years.
Why they did so is not altogether certain. A Chinese engineer working on the Friendship Highway to Lhasa had recently defected to Taiwan, claiming the road’s Nepali bridges were designed to bear the weight of Chinese tanks. Tensions were also high in Kashmir as India and Pakistan drifted towards war. A more likely reason was an unauthorised television documentary shot in 1964 focusing on a group of fighters based in Tsum in Nepal, not far from the main force of four thousand in Mustang. The man responsible was George Patterson, a Scottish missionary dedicated for many years to the cause of Tibet, who reported on the Lhasa Uprising for the Daily Telegraph. By the mid 1960s he was a well-respected journalist based in Hong Kong and in 1964 he travelled to Nepal with a film crew to meet the Tibetan rebels based there, persuading a small group of Tibetan resistance fighters based in the Tsum valley to mount a raid on Chinese forces for Patterson to document. Once the footage was safely out of Nepal, he had confessed all to the British ambassador, Antony Duff, a former submarine captain and later head of the British intelligence service MI5. He in turn passed the news to Mahendra. Up until that point, Nepal’s government had chosen to deny the presence of the Tibetan fighters and China had chosen to believe it. Mahendra now warned Duff the film would be ‘a big headache for us and for you’. Although the documentary itself wouldn’t be aired until 1966, Patterson published an article shortly before China’s Foreign Minister, Chen Yi, was due to visit Kathmandu, describing what had happened, which was quickly picked up by Indian newspapers. It seems likely Mahendra imposed the mountaineering ban to placate China and prevent anything similar recurring.