“Nothing in Nepal’s Earlier History”
Compared to the massacre in Narayanhiti on June 1, but it was certainly not the first time there had been bloodshed within the palace. Internal strife and conspiracies were an all too familiar part of the shah family's heritage. Indeed, if automatic weapons had existed in the nineteenth century, there were plenty of flash points at which bloodletting on a similar scale might well have occurred.
To appreciate the profound loss to the Nepalese people, their sense of disbelief and denial, one has to go back in time. For in this mountain refuge of age-old traditions, the king is still revered in ways long forgotten elsewhere. Here the king is held to be a god, the father and protector of all his peoples. The killing of a king is not just regicide; it amounts to deicide as well."
