Monarchies are anachronistic affairs, in these times of growing modern sensibilities. It makes sense, therefore, for Nepal’s Maoists as also some ministers in the new government of Girija Prasad Koirala to suggest, plainly or in so many words, that King Gyanendra might have to go. The issue here is not what crimes or misdemeanours the monarch is guilty of, though there is much that Gyanendra can be held accountable to. He has presided over times of manifest wrong; and he has patently given people around the world to understand that monarchies as a rule are happy in their state of insensitivity. If the demand arises in Kathmandu today for the king to be put on trial, in much the same way that Charles I was made to appear before Parliament in the seventeenth century to answer for his tampering with life and the law, one ought not to be surprised. Even kings and especially kings commit wrong. And many of them have, throughout the meandering course of history, paid for that wrong.

The reason why King Gyanendra should go is one that should be coming from deep within his heart. With the Nepalese government having decided to strike out everything that is an invocation to royalty in the affairs of the kingdom (de facto it is no more a kingdom but a republic), with the armed forces slipping out of his hands, with the legislative body ordaining that the royal family pay taxes like everyone else, there is little reason for Gyanendra to continue. He can do the honourable thing, which is to abdicate and let the people and politicians of Nepal decide the future of a country long stifled in the embrace of its royals. And yet there is a bit of history to consider here. Kings and emperors have rarely, if ever, decided to go on their own. It was only the winds of change that compelled them into decamping with their lives and reputation. Some of them, once they found themselves jettisoned by their subjects, waited to be restored to their thrones.

Think back on the young Shah of Iran, who had little choice but to leave Tehran when General Mossadegh nationalised the oil industry in the early 1950s. It was the CIA that engineered his comeback; and once back, he embarked on a reign of terror, in literal terms. His security forces made thousands of Iranians disappear and left many more thousands in a state of permanent physical and psychological injury. There were all the pretensions to grandeur in him, arrogance that led him into celebrating the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy in 1971. The son of a military officer who then maneouvred his way into becoming king, the young man convinced himself that he was historically part of royalty. His pretensions came to an end in 1979 with the rise of the Ayatollahs in Iran. It was a deserved fall, though one is not quite sure whether the regime that replaced his has been able to position the country on a perch Iranians would have liked it to.

But you cannot really deny that the Ayatollahs, feisty and combative as they have been, have added to the self-esteem of Iran’s people. Take away the American hostage-taking issue of 1979, strike out all references, because they are less than sophisticated, to the Great Satan, take away too Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s invectives against Israel — and what you have is a better country than what the Shah made it out to be in his years of royal tyranny.

Ten years before the flight of the Iranian monarch, a young Libyan army officer named Muammar Gaddafi led a swift, short revolution in Tripoli. King Idris, truly representative of ancient feudalism, was deposed and Libya embarked on the road to constructive nationalism. You may have a good number of reasons to take issue with Gaddafi, but you cannot say, honestly, that he has not injected life and vigour into a nation that had long waited for his coming, or that of someone of his kind. The lesson here is a cardinal one: monarchies, being the vestigial aspect of old-fashioned politics they are, are ill-equipped to promote the public weal. Of course, there is the quite different matter of tradition, as in the United Kingdom, where the monarchy holds, and justifiably, extremely symbolic value. Abolish royalty in England, Scotland and Wales and what you are left with is a huge sense of vacuity. But such vacuity is not what we came by in the 1970s in Greece, when the democratic government of Premier Konstantine Karamanlis showed the already deposed King Constantine a polite way out through organising a referendum on his future. The king, in exile since the colonels’ coup of 1967, obeyed. These days, he grows old in thoughts of what used to be.

If the Greeks thought that the monarchy was redundant, the Spaniards adopted an entirely different view. King Juan Carlos, having been groomed for his duties by an old and certainly dying Generalissimo Franco, serves today as a necessary embodiment of Spanish political cohesiveness. He has used his moral authority to send plotters against democracy packing, in much the same way that Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej has often stepped in to chide squabbling politicians about their responsibilities to the country. In Spain and Thailand, more symbolism than anachronism has been at work. So far, the system has paid dividends.

How should one deal with the question of Ethiopia? Emperor Haile Selassie, who shook up the world with his call for freedom before the League of Nations in 1936, succumbed to a radical coup led by the likes of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1974. The new rulers displayed not the slightest respect toward the monarch and took the life out of him by pressing a pillow on his face. In 1978, Sardar Mohammad Daoud, cousin to Afghanistan’s King Zahir Shah, decided in the infinity of his wisdom that the monarchy needed to be thrown out the window. The consequences were horrifying. Afghanistan simply regressed from isolated feudalism to loud darkness, as first the Mujahideen and then the Taliban were to demonstrate so eerily. George Bush and Tony Blair, in their eagerness to place Hamid Karzai in office, were perspicacious enough to pave the way to a restoration of civilised government by first taking Zahir Shah back home, of course as a respected former king.

Monarchs sometimes render themselves open to ridicule. And there are some who take flight in the face of foreign aggression, sit out the occupation until their friends help their subjects liberate the land. The Kuwaiti royal family moved off to Taif in Saudi Arabia in 1990 and only came back after America and its friends had driven Saddam Hussein out of its kingdom. Today the Kuwaiti monarchy is an entrenched reality, as obstinate as the royal families of Saudi Arabia and (despite their pretensions to modernity) Jordan and Morocco. And that bit about ridicule, the ludicrous as it were, came through the inanity of what Jean-Bedel Bokassa called the Central African Empire back in the early 1970s. A man who had stormed to power through a coup, he called himself Emperor Bokassa I. Deposed in 1979, he went off into exile in France, returned some years later and was promptly thrown into prison. So much for his vaunted dynasty. The king of Bhutan marries, by tradition, not just the woman who will be his queen but all her sisters as well. That is a bonus, as much a cheering happenstance as the king of Swaziland periodically taking a new wife through picking one of the many bare-breasted women gyrating before him as part of traditional festivities.

King Gyanendra will not be amused by such tales of royal prerogatives. But he just might reflect on the brooding King Arthur of yore. ‘A dark day, a troubled day’, muttered the king as he walked up and down the long, lonely corridor of his palace. Merlin the magician corrected him. ‘It is a day, just a day, Your Majesty’, said he. ‘You have a dark and troubled mind’.