All right, ISO. As promised, here I am, under my own name, adding opposing views to your beliefs. I hope you won't take this "Inter-continental Ballistic Missile" fired from North America to China personally. ;) First of all, we've had these kinds of discussions amny times before, so whatever I am going to write may sound repetitive to you. However, since you have brought up same arguments, and for the benefit of the readers who might be new to these discussions, I do not mind repeating myself here again. Singapore, China, even Pakistan vs. Nepal In your response to newuser above, you have correctly said you can't compare apples with oranges -- Nepal is not Singapore, and Lee Kwan Yew is not King Gyanendra. Besides some very valid points that newuser has mentioned above regarding other dictatorial leaders vis-a-vis King G, all I have to add to that is that most of the other dictatorial rules that you've tried to justify had commoners at the helm of authority. Chinese leaders, Lee, Musharraf, etc. were all, at one time or another, ordinary citizens of their respective countries, and know exactly what it means to suffer as an ordinary citizen. They knew what is means to be poor, and they knew what it means to have to worry about daily survival. The fact that Nepali royalty lacks such nexus to people's real problems means that no matter how sincere their intentions may be, they will never be able to come to terms with the real problems of the people. If they could, King Mahendra's, whom I too would like to believe had very good intentions, would have succeeded in bringing prosperity to Nepal long ago. Talking about King Mahendra, yes, you are right he gave birth to new Nepali nationalism. Howver, he did so wrongly. Even Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia rallied the cause of nationalism to promote his personal agenda, and succeeded to some extent in the beginning. I do not have to remind you where that kind of negative sense of nationalism led Serbian people to. King Mahendra's intentions may have been sincere, but his Panchayat's way of promoting nationalism through coerced homogenity, through exclusive, repressive, and forceful policies sowed the seeds of conflict to begin with, of which we are now bearing the fruits (as displayed by Maoist conflict). The fact is, we could have enjoyed even greater sense of national unity through respect and recognition of our diverse ethnicity, rathaer than single language (Nepali), single religion (Hinduism), single bhesh (Daura Suruwal), etc. If India wanted to turn Nepal into another Bhutan or Sikkim, I don't think they would have been detered by Mahendra's policies -- they always could, and they still can, overhwlem Nepal with it's forces ANYTIME. I am sure there are many other factors, not necessarily simple goodwill, that has kept India from creating a protecrate state of Nepal. Lastly for today (I will be addressing other issues as time permits), you have chosen Jordan's case to juxtapose with that of Nepal to justify authoritarian King. Jordan's progress under dictatorial King can hardly be considered satisfactory. Instead, their recent leap towards progress can only be attributed to fast LIBERALIZATION under tremendous pressure particularly from the US. If we are to take an example of great success story in the Middle East, I'd rather point to Lebanon. Because Lebanon was sensitive to political and religious freedom from the time of it's inception, it achieved much, much more success thant the rest of Middle Eastern countries. Had it not been for the brutal civil war that it had to endure, Beirut was considered the "Paris of the Middle East," not only in terms of its beauty, but for it's economic achievements also. How did that happen? As I said above, Lebanese policies were the most democratic and free. They chose INCLUSIVE policies to accomodate their differences among Sunni Muslims, Christians, Druz, etc. Now that the civil war is over there, Lebanon is again on a fast track towards prosperity, both economic and social -- it has already become a country to envy among the Middle East countries. DEMOCRACY and the FREE WILL of the people worked marvels there, whereas the lack thereof in other Middle East countries continues to hold them back from achieving greater success.