Coronation: King Charles III to wear the British Crown on Saturday
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: They say the world now has only five important kings: four are on the playing cards and the fifth sits in Buckingham Palace in a fading, post-imperial London.
Despite facing multiple and urgent challenges—corruption scandals engulfing the ruling Conservative Party, underemployment, the rising cost of living, and slowing down life expectancy, among others—the United Kingdom of Great Britain is all set to crown its aging prince, Charles, 74, as the new King Charles III on Saturday.
But few are really interested in all this sound-and-bytes and unnecessary razzmatazz. Few important world leaders are actually attending the event. US President Joe Biden and his wife First Lady Jill Biden have declined to come—angering the Conservative media.
India’s President Draupadi Murmu attended the longest-serving monarch Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in September 2022. Now her deputy, Vice-President Jagadeep Dhankhar will represent India at the formal ceremony billed to cost the UK’s taxpayer a whopping USD 100 million to coronate a person who is one of the world’s richest, on a day declared as a national holiday.
As King Charles receives the Sovereign’s orb, scepter, and coronation ring, he will be anointed with an oil specially sacralized in Jerusalem. Millions of his subjects in and out of the UK will chant: “I swear that I will pay true allegiance to your majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So, help me, God.”
The British Crown is something most Britons—including the media—are most passionate about. They have an endless fascination with even the minutest details of the royal family and have dedicated ‘experts’ to keep tabs on them.
That is why Tory politicians and much of the British press have urged the people to be proud of their ancient rituals and medieval institutions, including the monarchy. This well-oiled machinery is the British Deep State which keeps the past camouflaged, perpetuates its social and economic inequalities and pushes under the carpet uncomfortable questions about the country’s elites.
But not all Britons are exactly excited about their new monarch.
According to a recent poll, 64 percent of Britons have little or no interest in the coronation event. The National Centre for Social Research’s survey revealed that only three out of 10 people in Britain think the monarchy is “very important.” This shows the fading interest in the royal family. And, nearly half of the respondents said the monarchy should be abolished.
Only 12 percent of 18-to 34-year-old Britons actually view the monarchy as “very important.” Most youngsters are also angry at their racist media which they feel had hounded Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle out of the country. Prince Andrew, King Charles’s brother, paid off his accuser to settle his sexual assault case in the US.
This new British generation is aware of the tricks of their “stalemate society,” where, as Prince Harry disclosed last week, the ‘establishment media’ diverts the public with “the most mundane and petty things” so as to obscure “critical issues.”
Even in the fewer former colonial countries where the British monarch continues to be the Head of State, support for the Crown is rapidly declining. Australia is set to become a Republic.
Ironically, Prince Charles—the new King to be—himself attended a ceremony in 2022 in which Barbados officially removed the Queen as its Head of State. There, he even spoke about the “appalling atrocity of slavery.”
But Charles has not yet responded to fresh revelations that his own ancestors owned slave plantations in Virginia and that priceless jewels looted from India by British imperialists ended up in the royal collection.
The elaborate plans for his coronation neutralized his previous claims that he wanted to modernize the British monarchy. He should at least give up his pompous office and lifestyle, the critics said.
