Rise of the nuovo-rajas

Louis XVI of France was unseated from his throne by his own people, and met a violent end in 1793 during the French Revolution. One of the most despotic Czars, Nicholas II of Russia, was dethroned by his people in 1917 in a largely bloodless transition. In 1947, the British queen ended her rule over India, demanding the price in the form of Partition and Lord Mountbatten remaining governor-general of free India. In 2008, Gyanendra of Nepal lost his throne, and became a commoner in a peaceful transition through a decision made by the elected government. Are the after-effects of the departure of these dynasties from historical time down to the present comparable? These events are historically important, but what has humanity learned from them? On the face of it, two words that are commonly associated with these transformations, realistically or otherwise, are nation and vote-based democracy. The French Revolution is considered to be the origin of these two concepts, which quickly spread to other parts of Europe. They got further transplanted to Southasia by the British colonisers, through their institutions.

The British ruled most of the Subcontinent directly, and influenced the governance of the rest of the region through treaties and by posting 'residents' in the various capitals. With British rule in India ending in 1947, a collection of kingdoms, at least cartographically, coalesced as a 'nation', and voting based on adult franchise was accepted as the instrument for governance. This was a truly remarkable evolution. Subsequently, the kingdoms of Bhutan, Nepal and Sikkim also underwent transitions to various forms of vote-based election and government. The end of monarchy is seen by most Southasians as the birth of a 'nation', the beginning of 'democratic' governance. But is it really so mechanical a transition? There has been little effort to explore the structure of these 'nations' and the characteristic features of electoral democracy. Amidst the fatalism of the tribal-agrarian cultural framework, the Subcontinent took the European model as the universal prescription for democratic governance.