Manvendra Singh Gohil, the openly-gay Indian prince, is set to marry his partner in a ceremony in Nepal, raising hopes that the war-ravaged country will begin to rake in business from gay tourists.

Prince Gohil, who rose to international attention after appearing on Oprah and the BBC publicizing his search for a lover, plans to marry his Nepalese partner Pajwal Miskin in a Hindu ceremony in Kathmandu.

Nepal’s tourism industry ground to a halt after a brutal decade-long civil war that ended in 2006. In 2008, Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered the government to enact laws to guarantee the rights of gays and lesbians after bowing to pressure from the Blue Diamond Society, run by parliament member and gay-oriented travel mogul Sunil Babu Pant. The country’s new constitution is currently being drafted and is expected to define marriage as a union between two adult individuals, regardless of gender, and to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Australia’s Big Pond News reports:

[Pant], the only openly gay member of Nepal’s parliament, has set up a travel agency catering specifically for homosexual tourists, who he says face severe discrimination in many Asian countries.

He believes Nepal… is well placed to cash in on an industry worth an estimated US$670 million (AUS$743.12 million) worldwide.

‘If we brought even one per cent of that market to Nepal it would be big. But I’m hoping we can attract 10 per cent,’ said Pant, who was selected in May 2008 to represent a small communist party in Nepal’s parliament.

The high-profile gay wedding is raising some Nepalese eyebrows here in the Rose City. “Most people back in Nepal do arranged marriage rather than love marriages,” explained Prajwal Ratna Vajracharya of Dance Mandal Nritya Mandala Vihara, the United States’ only Nepalese Buddhist temple. The Portland-based priest explained that the process of marriage in his tradition takes a considerable amount of time and dedication. “The [tourism-based gay marriages] sound like more of a Hindu thing than a Buddhist thing,” the priest explained.