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Police quickly shut down protest effort in Nepal's capital

Police detained dozens of people in the heart of the capital yesterday as they unfurled political party flags and shouted slogans against King Gyanendra's power grab last month.

Police bundled the protesters into vans at Ason market including a former minister in the dissolved parliament, Bahadur Rai, and a Nepal Communist Party-United Marxist and Leninist (NCP-UML) member of the upper house, Hira Bahadur Singh.

Organizers said there were protests in other parts of the capital, but a police spokesman said only 10 people had been arrested throughout the city.

The group was part of an alliance of five political parties that had pledged to risk arrest to protest the king's sacking of his government and assumption of total power over the tiny Himalayan kingdom on Feb. 1.

Gyanendra said the move was necessary to try and crush a Maoist rebellion that has killed more than 11,000 people since 1996.

"The anti-king protests will continue until the king restores democracy in the country," Singh told journalists yesterday before he was detained.

Scores of police and security forces, including plainclothes policemen, patrolled the market and other locations throughout the city, witnesses said.

Earlier yesterday, Maoist rebels torched four buses to enforce a new transport blockade until the end of the month. The buses were torched at Itahari, 540km southeast of the capital Kathmandu, according to a spokesman for the Eastern Nepal Transport Entrepreneurs Organization.

"But no one was injured in the incident," the official said.

Maoist leader Prachanda issued a notice on the rebel Web site on Sunday calling for "general strikes, a transport blockade and blockade at local and regional level between March 14 and April 1" to protest the king's takeover.

Political parties are not aligned with the Maoists, but have called for talks with them to bring an end to the uprising. Maoists rebels in turn have assured the parties of their support in organizing protests against the king.

"We urge all the political parties to create a new basis for re-establishment of democracy by forgetting past differences," Prachanda said on Sunday.

But analysts said anti-king rallies held until now lacked popular support.

"Political parties have to protest because they can do nothing else to show that they are still around," said Kunda Dixit, editor of the widely read Nepali Times weekly.

"The king probably thinks as long as that does not happen [wider public participation] he has nothing to worry about."

The media is being closely monitored by security forces and are banned from reporting anything the government feels will boost the morale of Maoists.
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