When My Family Cheered the Coup

Editor's note: This is a placeholder article illustrating the personal voice format planned for Foreign Affairs.

When King Gyanendra dissolved Nepal's parliament in February 2005 and declared direct rule, the international press called it what it was: an authoritarian takeover. My grandmother called it a relief.

I grew up hearing this story at the dinner table. My family is from a village in the Terai, the southern flatlands, and by 2005 the Maoist insurgency had been grinding on for nearly a decade. Checkpoints, disappearances, forced recruitment of young men. My uncle had already left for Qatar. The state, in any meaningful sense, had ceased to exist in our part of the country.

So when the King moved against the parties and promised to restore order, a lot of people in places like ours quietly exhaled. The democracy that was being suspended had never really reached them anyway.

I am not defending what Gyanendra did. The crackdowns, the press restrictions, the arbitrary arrests — these were real and they were wrong. But growing up between my family's memory of that period and the Western narrative I encountered at school, I kept noticing the gap. The coup is remembered internationally as a straightforward assault on democracy. At home, it was more complicated than that.

That gap is what Foreign Affairs at The UWC Press is supposed to sit inside. Not to validate every government that claims to restore order, but to take seriously what politics looks and feels like from the ground — not just from Geneva or Washington.

My grandmother is still in the Terai. She votes in every election now. She also still thinks 2005 wasn't the disaster the history books make it.