Restive Nepalese Are Turning Against Harsh Monarchical Rule : Protest: Pro-democracy demonstrations have brought police gunfire and deaths. Hundreds of dissidents were jailed in a crackdown.

Jyoti Bagra Shakya had never thought much about democracy until last week.

At 50, his entire life had been his grimy, one-room sweets shop. The poverty endemic to this remote Himalayan kingdom had largely isolated him from news of the extraordinary wave of democracy that has been sweeping much of the outside world.

But then last Monday morning, the most distant ripples of this international wave touched his little town of Bhaktapur as a pro-democracy demonstration took place just down the street. Its force changed Shakya’s life forever.

His only son was shot and killed by the police.

“Now I would like to die for this,” Shakya, told a couple of visitors in the dingy fluorescence of his shop, his voice trembling with anger and despair. “I would like to put myself in front of the guns now and shout against this government.”

Today, Shakya and the thousands of other Nepalese who have grown increasingly disenchanted with three decades of sometimes-harsh monarchical rule will have their chance.

Billed as “Black Sunday” by its organizers, a planned pro-democracy demonstration will be the latest in a series of anti-government protests that have left at least 10 dead and hundreds injured--and the nation deeply concerned as it joins in the rising global clamor for democracy.

Leaders of Nepal’s pro-democracy movement--they call it “The Stir”--say they were inspired by the recent success of similar movements in Eastern Europe, an international wave that has finally reached “the top of the world” in the Himalayan country that is the site of the world’s highest mountain, Mt. Everest.

“The wave of democracy, which is sweeping the whole world, has encouraged the opposition forces in Nepal,” Govinda Biyogi, president of the Nepal Journalists Assn. and a staunch supporter of The Stir, declared the other day.

So far, though, the government’s reaction to the movement has had less in common with that of most governments in Eastern Europe than with events in China, Nepal’s ally and northern neighbor, where soldiers killed hundreds of people last spring in suppressing the pro-democracy demonstration in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square.

For example, in Monday’s protest in Bhaktapur, the riot police quickly opened fire, killing at least four people, after the demonstrators began pelting them with stones. The police started firing even though, according to witnesses, they outnumbered the protesters by at least 4 to 1.

On Friday, nearly 1,000 Nepalese doctors and nurses staged an emotional sit-in and silent protest march alleging that police are using special fragmentation bullets that they said have caused maximum internal injury.

Marching under a banner proclaiming “Medics Against Violations of Human Rights,” the strikers also condemned the police for refusing to release the bodies of slain demonstrators to their families for cremation rites. The rites are sacred in Nepal, but police said they fear the corpses might be used as emotional catalysts in future rallies.

In fact, the crackdown began even before the protest movement got under way last Sunday in the capital, Katmandu, and other major cities. Government forces swept through the capital and arrested hundreds of dissidents.

According to a government spokesman, 760 leaders and protesters are now in jail. But members of the opposition put the number of detainees in the thousands--a charge supported by independent diplomats. Even the government concedes that its jails are so crowded that many prisoners are being held at a Katmandu granary.

In addition, more than a dozen independent newspapers have been shut down, some by the government and others in protest after their owners refused to obey censorship orders.

Now many Nepalese, among the world’s friendliest and most engaging people, are afraid to talk to strangers. The few who do talk decline to give their names.

“No one likes this government now,” said one of the many guides who make their living in Nepal’s booming tourist trade. “They’re just killing too many people. And, more and more, the people are blaming it all on the king.”

But the campaign for democracy here is unlike any other in the world. What sets it apart are King Birendra, the Nepalese culture and the monarchical tradition.

“Politics moves to a different rhythm here,” one diplomat based in Katmandu said. “They’re much less aggressive, much less violent. This is a society where the level of political consciousness has never been very high, due largely to the low literacy, rugged geography and superstitious traditions.”

Opposition leaders are not calling for the overthrow of the king, despite a widely held view that the king has ruled as a virtual autocrat and that his family is responsible for deep-seated official corruption.

Rather, the opposition is appealing for the king’s support in its bid to create a multi-party system and an elected legislature more independent than the rubber-stamp National Assembly created by King Birendra’s father, Mahendra, 30 years ago.

“So far, there is no one calling for the abolition of the monarchy,” the diplomat said. “The role of the king is an all-important one, part of the uniqueness of the country.”

Nepal is the world’s only officially Hindu nation, and many of its 17 million people still believe that their king is divine, an incarnation of one of many Hindu gods. He is venerated by many, respected by most and heeded by all.

Yet many analysts are predicting that the king’s popularity and power will wane if he fails to defuse the present crisis.

Members of the National Assembly are popularly elected from among a list of candidates largely handpicked by the monarchy. This system was adopted in 1960 under King Mahendra after a decade of near-anarchy under a multi-party system.

Supporters of this panchayat system argue that it is a form of democracy best suited to Nepal, but the National Assembly has never challenged the king or his Cabinet ministers, not in enacting laws or in making policy.

“This system cannot last forever,” another diplomat said.

He predicted that the pro-democracy movement will ultimately bring about some kind of change.

“The king will have to allow a National Assembly that is more representative of the people,” this diplomat said, “rather than an executive body that does what it thinks will please the palace.”

Diplomats and other analysts said the opposition has been strengthened by a recently formed alliance with old-guard, conservative politicians from the Nepalese Congress Party, which ran the multi-party National Assembly in the 1950s, and the hard-line Communist parties, a mixture of Maoists and Marxists who have strong organizations in several areas.

“The presence of the Communists in the pro-democracy cause makes this a strange movement,” another diplomat observed. “The government loves to point out that this movement is being led by a discredited ideology.”

Up to now, the united opposition has managed to bring only students and old firebrand politicians into the streets. Most mainstream Nepalese have been spectators.

But there are indications that popular, grass-roots support is growing, especially after the shootings Monday in Bhaktapur. It is not clear, though, whether this support will translate into larger protests in a nation where the riot police inspire fear.

The Nepalese, who are among the world’s poorest people, are reeling from unprecedented inflation, the result of a yearlong trade dispute with Nepal’s southern neighbor, India. Most analysts predict that continued government-sponsored bloodshed could easily turn the popular tide in favor of the demonstrators.

“A lot depends on the kind of police tactics that are used,” one diplomat said. “In the Katmandu demonstrations last Sunday, they were pretty restrained. But Bhaktapur is an example of precisely what they cannot afford to have happen here this Sunday, which is seen as an acid test of the future of this movement.”

Bhaktapur was tailor-made for the confrontation. An ancient city of spectacular, wood-carved temples and palaces, it is deeply mired in poverty and has been a Communist stronghold for years.

And its recent history is at least as brutal as the ancient Hindu battles described in Vedic texts. About a year and a half ago, a former Communist leader who had abandoned the party to join the National Assembly was seized by a mob while distributing earthquake relief to his supporters. The mob stripped him naked, poked his eyes out with an umbrella tip, castrated him and then beat him to death.

It is this kind of violence that the government now fears, analysts said, and in the angry, desperate eyes of townspeople like Jyoti Bagra Shakya, even an outsider can detect such sentiment.

Shakya has not been able to claim the body of his son, Nirmal, 24, despite several days of appealing to police officials and doctors at the hospital where, he has been told, the young man’s remains lie on a mortuary slab.

Every time he has tried, the police have refused. They reiterated their fear, he said, that he and the townspeople might use the body as the focus for another anti-government procession.

Such fear seems well-founded. On Thursday, a crowd of several hundred protesters gathered outside the hospital to demand that the bodies of the victims of last Sunday’s shooting be handed over.