By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS,
Kathmandu : Once, politics used to create strange bed fellows. Now social networking website Facebook is bringing together even more diverse people.
Nepal’s last king Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah, who lost his two-century-old crown last year, thanks to a dogged anti-monarchy civil war by the Maoist guerrillas, is now friends with the chief of the former rebels, Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda.
That is, on Facebook.
The deposed king has five different pages on Facebook run by different people, whose identities remain unknown.
While two of these are pages run on behalf of the commoner-king as a public figure, the other three are apparently run by individuals.
Of these, the most popular one shows the ex-king interacting with the public, wearing a flower garland and a smile, with his hands folded in the traditional Namaste greeting. One remains anonymous without any photo while the third shows the former king, who gambled away his crown by staging an army-backed bloodless coup, looking grim in army uniform.
The most popular Facebook account in the name of the last Hindu king in the world shows him to have 80 “friends”, most of whom are young Nepali men and women.
However, there is an exception.
One of the Facebook “friends” Gyanendra Shah has is Prachanda.
“Making friends” on Facebook is done by someone sending a request to the person he or she wants to have contact with and the recipient of the request accepting.
There are three different accounts currently run on Facebook in the name of Prachanda. While one projects him as a public figure with over 1,900 fans, the other two are also apparently run by individuals.
One such account has the photograph of a torchlight rally, a speciality of the Maoist party after they signed a peace pact and emerged from hiding, while the other has a photograph of the former revolutionary at a moment of triumph, with a vermilion smear on his forehead to signify victory.
The two men, who are among the most talked-about and powerful characters in Nepal, however have been reduced to butts of jokes by pranksters on Facebook, who have put up the pages, probably without their knowledge and permission.
The former king’s account has a photo album with three photographs. One shows a bus full of dogs with a tiny white one at the back having been tagged as “Gyanendra”.
Another shows a woman riding pillion behind an obese bareback man whose face is hidden by a safety helmet. The prankster has tagged the rider “Gyanendra” in the photo caption.
Such tricks are bound to anger royalists who still regard monarchy to be essential for the survival of Nepal.
The only royalist party in parliament, Rastriya Prajatantra Party Nepal, has announced it would start a protest programme against the abolition of monarchy from January, including enforcing a one-day general strike nationwide.
Prachanda, who once carried a price on his head that was greater than the bounty on Osama bin Laden’s, has also not come unscathed.
In one of the photos in “his” Facebook album, the man who led an armed insurrection against the state for 20 years is depicted as a bride dressed in red and getting married to Girija Prasad Koirala, the former prime minister of Nepal who played a key role in bringing the Maoist guerrillas back to mainstream politics.
The computer-manipulated photo also shows the “newly-weds” receiving the blessings of former American president George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
(Sudeshna Sarkar can be contacted at [email protected])