Author: Neelesh Misra
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 205
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143027859
Description
This book takes us to the heart of the events that occurred on the evening of 1 June 2001 at the Narayanhiti Palace in Kathmandu. Relying on access to exclusive information, the author pieces together the jigsaw of sometimes conflicting accounts.
On the surface, everything was normal as the Nepalese royal family and their guests settled down to dinner… But the seeming tranquility of the evening was deceptive for, by its end, the king and queen, the crown prince, and his younger brother, besides others, would be among the dead and dying. The man held responsible for the carnage was Crown Prince Dipendra, who allegedly murdered his family because they opposed his plans to marry Devyani Rana. Curiously, it emerges that Crown Prince Dipendra and the woman he loved had in fact decided to get married, regardless of parental opposition.
Relying on access to exclusive information. AP correspondent Neelesh Misra pieces together the jigsaw of sometimes conflicting accounts. A wider national tragedy stands revealed: a nation with one foot in the sixteenth century and the other uncomfortably, in the twenty-first; and of a king whose grand plans for making that transition a smooth one would, in more ways than one, be brutally thwarted.
Contents
Acknowledgements
A Family Outing
An Embattled Nation
A Prince in Love
The Fall of a Monarch
The Trauma Room
Eleven Questions
Piecing the Jigsaw
The Corridors of History
Aftermath
Appendix I: An Interview with ‘Prachanda’
Appendix II: And Thus the Royals Fell