NEPAL’S prime minister is proposing to save the country’s disgraced monarchy by installing the five-year-old grandson of the present king on the throne.

The plan is said to have the backing of India and the United States, which fear Nepal will fall further into the hands of Maoist rebels if it abolishes the 240-year-old Snake Throne.

Last week Girija Prasad Koirala, the prime minister, said the monarchy could continue if both King Gyanendra, 59, and his unpopular playboy son Crown Prince Paras, 35, abdicated in favour of Paras’s son Prince Hridayendra.

According to Koirala’s colleagues, he put his idea directly to the stony-faced king at a secret meeting to discuss the monarchy’s bleak future, but was met with silence.

Gopal Man Shrestha, a former minister, said Koirala had told the king: “You and your crown prince are unpopular but if you abdicate, the people will accept your grandson.” The prime minister and his royalist colleagues had hoped his proposal would be welcomed by Gyanendra, who was briefly a boy-king himself.

He was first crowned Nepal’s living incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu at the age of three when his family fled to India in protest at the domination of the Rana dynasty, which effectively controlled the country. In 1951, after two months in exile, his grandfather returned to Kath-mandu and took back the throne.

Gyanendra finally became king in June 2001 after his older brother King Birendra and most senior members of the royal family were shot dead by Crown Prince Dipendra, 29, who was enraged by his parents’ refusal to let him marry his girlfriend, Devyani Rana, considered to be of lower social status. Dipendra, who shot himself, was declared king as he lay in a coma, but died three days later.

The fact that Gyanendra was away from the royal palace at the time of the massacre, but that his son Paras escaped unscathed, caused widespread suspicion among his new subjects.

In the face of a growing Maoist insurgency, Gyanendra sacked his government in February 2005 but just over a year later was forced to relinquish power after millions of protesters brought the capital to a standstill.

Since then he has faced successive humiliations. Among them, the army dropped the word “royal” from its title and his head was removed from all banknotes.

A senior Nepalese politician with close links to the royal family said he favoured the coronation of a boy-king. “What Nepal needs now is a harmless monarchy,” he said.

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