Monarchies in Asia: Crowns die Hard

Sreeram Chaulia 

Gradually the absolute powers of the monarchs are fading, in some places under pressure from the people and in others like Bhutan through the free will of the king. Perhaps Bhutan realized the inevitable and thought it wise to give up absolutism to have some kind of moral authority. However, there are others in Asia too who continue to play a meaningful role. 

The demise of the 239-year-old Shah dynasty in Nepal and its replacement with a Republic are momentous events in the political history of South Asia. They remove the vestiges of a bygone era that managed to survive the onset of the democratic age.

So dramatic was the fall of King Gyanendra Bikram Dev from the helm of affairs in Nepal that the king of neighbouring Bhutan, Jigme Namgyel Wangchuk, voluntarily eschewed absolutism and allowed free and fair elections in his feudal Himalayan kingdom in March 2008. The contagion of Nepal, where a combination of Maoist militancy and ‘people power’ brought King Gyanendra’s crown tumbling to the ground, weighed heavily on the minds of the young Bhutanese king.

Avoidance of Gyanendra’s fate was a motive for the guided ‘transition from above’ in Bhutan. This is due to the universal tendency of monarchs to closely follow the fortunes of each other and to learn lessons from the mistakes made by their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Kings stay in touch with other kings and are motivated by consciousness of the fate of their class as a whole.

In Wangchuk’s case, a carefully controlled move to democracy under royal oversight (i.e. a parliamentary monarchy) was more prudent than obstinately latching on to totalitarian control that might spark popular demands for freedom and representation. Both the winning and losing political parties in Bhutan’s first ever elections earlier this year were, thanks to Wangchuk’s farsighted relaxation, royalists who vowed to govern the country under the overall supervision of the King.

Gyanendra’s attempt to monopolise all power in his hands through declaration of emergency in 2005 backfired and rendered him empty handed and palace-less. Thus, the moral of Wangchuk’s deft reformist line of action is that one has to tactically concede a little in order to keep ruling. We could go further and praise his sagacity, since Bhutan did not yet have the radical conditions that could have generated immediate threats to the crown in the same way that Nepal’s anti-monarchical environment had matured by 2007.

With Nepal breathing freer as a Republic and Bhutan turning into a constitutional monarchy, Asia has only a handful of monarchs left who continue to dictate the politics of their respective countries. Apart from the despotic Arab royalty in the Middle East, the only two Asian monarchies that are still able to call the shots, informally or formally, are those of Thailand and Brunei. The interesting question is whether the “demonstration effects” (Samuel Huntington’s phrase) of Nepal and Bhutan will be felt in these two Southeast Asian countries, capping a wholesale sweep of monarchs from their pinnacles.

Could King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world’s longest reigning head of state, meet a humiliating Gyanendra-type end? Could Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei discard his full executive authority over the tiny coastal nation and usher in Wangchuk-style evolutionary liberalisation?

The answers lie in whether or not the ‘last men standing’ as potent kings in Asia harness the factors that are generally critical for the survival of monarchical regimes and royal influence.

The first necessity for a king to remain the de jure or de facto ruler is retention of the loyalty of the military. While this applies to survival of all kinds of regimes, including democracies, monarchies are especially entwined with the military because of their history. A particular dynasty rises from provincial to national lordship by means of a strong military that is personally beholden to it and that can subdue rival claimants whose own armed forces are weaker.

Be it the Wangchuks of Bhutan, the Shahs of Nepal, the Chakris of Thailand, or the Sultans of Brunei, royals consolidate their hold by unifying smaller kingdoms through the physical might of the military. Enjoying the faith of armies is central to royal survival, as much in the pre-democratic era as in modern times. This is why armies in monarchical countries have the prefix ‘Royal’, signifying that the commander-in-chief is the king and also beckoning to the glorious past when the militaries attached to the predecessors of the current monarch fought for state-building.

Gyanendra’s fall in Nepal owed a great deal to his failure to mobilise the Royal Nepalese Army (RNA) on his side at a crucial juncture in 2006. The moment the RNA assumed a neutral non-interventionist stance and its top General advised the king to desist from his aggrandising path, the die was cast for Gyanendra. Bhumibol’s sway over the Royal Thai Army, on the other hand, has remained strong for decades and shows no sign of letting up. The same applies to Bolkiah’s complete command over the Royal Brunei Armed Forces.                            

The second requisite for monarchs to stay on top is charisma based on religion. The kings of Nepal derive traditional obedience from the masses by virtue of the belief that they are reincarnations of the God Vishnu, one of the triumvirs of Hindu mythology. The Wangchuk dynasty ended a sequence of monk kings, but it nonetheless uses symbols of Bhutan’s Buddhist founders and is closely associated in popular imagination with Buddhist rectitude.

Thai monarchs have, likewise, carefully preserved the self-image of Buddhist dhammarajas (virtuous kings) who are the fountainheads of piety, ritual and benevolence. The Sultan of Brunei promotes conservative Malay Islam (Melayu Islam Beraja) which designates him as the ultimate defender of the religion.

Divine origin myths have always been the bedrocks of monarchical power, but they also imply a certain expectation from the masses that the holy king should rule in an upright and spotlessly clean fashion. Charisma is not automatic, even in a hereditary religious line of succession, but earned through acts that remind people of the religious sanctity of the throne. Nepal’s Gyanendra forgot this crucial aspect and squandered all remnants of respect and adoration that his predecessors earned. From personal licentiousness to alleged criminality, the scandals and negative publicity about the royal family that Gyanendra failed to contain dug his grave in the popular eye.

When the king is not as compassionate or magnanimous as the God he claims to be, he forfeits the worship of the public. This peril is particularly ominous during royal successions, when the sons have to start all over again to prove that they are worthy of their fathers’ legacies. Neither King Bhumibol nor Sultan Bolkiah has to worry on this count, because their image managers have ensured that the Thai and Brunei populations have unquestioned faith in their superhuman qualities, which are projected as dedicated to national welfare and perched above the humdrum of politics.   

The third requirement for monarchies to ward off regime threats is existence of a strong political Centre that will neutralise the Left. In the contemporary age, the Centre comprises mainstream political parties that are not necessarily all royalists, but are unified as representatives of propertied and socially dominant groups of society. These parties fear redistribution of wealth through revolutionary means and are resolutely anti-Leftist, a position that serves the monarch who stands to the extreme Right of the political spectrum. When the Centre and Left are rivals and the former contains a royalist strand, the king is secure.

In the case of Nepal, Gyanendra lost the game when the mainstream bourgeois parties shed their ambivalent or pro-royal sloughs and allied with the Maoist guerrillas waging violent insurrection. A Centre-Left alliance in which the Left includes armed revolutionaries is a king’s nightmare. Bhumibol warded off this calamity by crushing communists (plus Republicans branded as communists) in Thailand with an iron hand and by constantly meddling in political parties with the support of the military.

The father of Sultan Bolkiah took British assistance to crush Leftist rebellions in the 1960s and cleared the political field of dissenting voices. Both in Thailand and Brunei, the very line of cleavage has been altered by kings from ‘Left versus Right’ into ‘Royalist versus Non-Royalist’. Constitutions have been manipulated with the aid of Centrist politicians to insulate royals from damage and consecrate kings as infallible.   

The fourth factor that has a bearing on regime prolongation of monarchs is a country’s level of economic development. Nepal and Bhutan are extremely poor countries with per capita incomes below $1500. Extreme privation and inequalities in society are susceptible extreme Leftist ideology, as Nepal’s case demonstrates.

Thailand and Brunei, however, are richer countries with respective per capita incomes of $8000 and $33,600. Anti-systemic redistributive impulses in these two countries will have limited appeal compared to Nepal or Bhutan due to the large size of middle and upper classes. The adroitness with which Bhumibol and Bolkiah have anointed themselves as inspirers of economic prosperity is an insurance policy that places them on a pedestal.              

The fifth and final factor necessary for monarchical stability is for kings to convince powerful foreign allies that they are indispensable. If a sovereign is deemed essential by a foreign great power that has interests in a region, then he can depend on reinforcements from abroad that will shield him from domestic opponents.

Nepal’s Gyanendra committed a fatal error by displeasing India, the pre-eminent power of South Asia, by openly siding with China. For long, India was viewed in Nepal as a bulwark of the Shah dynasty that would rush in to prevent any loss of ground for the monarchs. Once Gyanendra misplayed his diplomatic cards, he lost appeal in New Delhi, emboldening his detractors at home to deliver the coup de grace.

Bhumibol of Thailand is a proven master at sewing diplomatic ties with the United States and ASEAN member states during and after the Cold War. Bolkiah of Brunei has also been adept in convincing the British and ASEAN of his strategic and economic importance in Southeast Asia. By shoring up the foreign front, both these kings add one more layer of safety to their well entrenched regimes.

Each of the five factors outlined in this essay point to the inescapable conclusion that Thailand and Brunei are not destined to go the way of Nepal or Bhutan. As and when a combination of these factors grows unfavourable to King Bhumibol and Sultan Bolkiah, we can expect changes away from monarchy and towards more democratic politics. For the moment, though, Asia will not have total riddance of ‘His Holinesses’ and ‘His Highnesses’.