"He was in the front seat! In traffic!" said Krishna Chetri, a 56-year-old shop owner.

"Where's the majesty?" he asked. "This is something I never would have believed."

In this Himalayan land, the Shah dynasty of kings reputed to be reincarnated Hindu gods is being pushed to possible extinction by the fallout from a decade-long communist rebellion and King Gyanendra's own autocratic ways.

Nepal votes Thursday for an assembly that will rewrite its constitution, the latest effort to transform a troubled, near-medieval land into a modern democracy.

And the assembly's first order of business: eliminating the monarchy.

"This king has done too much harm. He's shown us that we don't need kings," said Krishna Prashad Sitaula, a Cabinet minister and a leader of the centrist Nepali Congress party who helped negotiate the peace deal with the rebels, known as the Maoists.

Not everyone is so sure.

"This king lost the people's favour," said Ram Shresthra Prasad, a 42-year-old priest at the Pashupatinath Temple, the clamorous shrine to which Gyanendra drove last month.

But "this talk of a secular republic is ignorant," he said. "Our kings created Nepal. They protect our Hindu religion. The kings are the symbol of Nepal."