No Man's Land

Though sandwiched in between the world's two most populous giants, the mountain kingdom of Nepal is a sort of no man's land, as yet uncommitted to any particular time or to any particular future. Last week, having covered a Nepalese tour by U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, who is accredited to both India and Nepal, TIME Correspondent Donald S. Connery filed a report on a nation that seems to be having such a trying time breaking into the 20th century:

Youthful (37) King Mahendra, ardent chess player, hunter and poet,* is an absolute ruler who earnestly does not want to be one. All week he pored over new drafts for a possible constitution. He also called in the leaders of four major political parties, got them to agree to help him set up a coalition government to rule until the scheduled general election that he hopes to hold in 1959. But it is a sign of Nepal's condition that in spite of himself, Mahendra, King of Kings, Five Times Godly, Valorous Warrior and Divine Emperor, continues to govern by palace rule as Prime Minister, Cabinet and Parliament rolled into one.

Pack of Lies. The politicians who answered the royal summons last week head parties so torn by splinter factions that none is strong enough to lead. Except for the King, the best known man in Nepal is wily, mustachioed K. I. Singh, who for 110 tempestuous days last year ruled as Prime Minister, and is strongly suspected of being under the thumb of Red China, where he once took refuge for three years. Last week, after abruptly refusing to attend the King's parley, Singh let loose with an anti-U.S., anti-British diatribe. Three months in office, stormed Singh, had convinced him that "Nepal is under imminent danger to her sovereignty and independence at the hands of British and American people in Nepal."

The fact is that Nepal, home of the famed Gurkha soldiers, has so far proved singularly impervious to outsiders. When India built Nepal a 78-mile road, some Nepalese concluded that Nehru was planning to take over the country--an attitude that India found as disconcerting as the U.S. often finds India's. Of the $12 million that Red China is pouring in, most has vanished down the well of government deficit, and Nepal has flatly refused to allow Chinese technicians inside its borders. As for recent U.S. aid--development projects in more than 1,200 villages, the ridding of the Rapti Valley of malaria-carrying mosquitos, the building of more than 600 classrooms, a $5,000,000 system of roads--it has met with an equally disheartening reception.

"The Thing." Most politicians assume a haughty obliviousness to foreign aid, in spite of its obvious results and the dedication of those who administer it. President Dilli Regmi of the Nepali National Congress simply refuses to believe that the U.S. has built any roads at all. Singh declares that the U.S. antimalaria campaign has brought more mosquitoes into Nepal than ever. When asked about the giant Rapti Valley reclamation project, he merely shrugs, for he comes from a different part of the country: "That is an isolated place unfit for human beings."

Beyond the shaky world of politics, Nepal lives as if nothing would ever change very much. Of its 10 million people, 97% are illiterate, and most are peasants who are mortgaged to their feudal landlords for generations to come. With tender care they terrace the steep slopes of the hillsides, cheerfully trudge treacherous mountain paths with their incredible loads as they have for centuries. Today the sights and sounds of Nepal are still for the most part the timeless ones--stubby men in tiny houses, women carrying their children papoose-style, the faithful spinning the prayer wheels at the base of mound-shaped stupas, and old men talking endlessly about the possible existence of "the Thing"--the Abominable Snowman. If foreigners want to look for the Thing, they must pay a special 5,000-rupee fee (about $750) to the government, and promise not to shoot it dead, except in self-defense.

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