An excerpt from 'The Kingdom at the Centre of the World'

14. Gorkhaland—the First Revolution

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he fall of Sikkim set off alarm bells in Bhutan. Not only were the royal families related to each other by marriage (the Queen of Bhutan’s sister was the last Chogyal’s mother), but Sikkim was the only buffer between Bhutan and Nepal— a country whose population was fifty times greater than Bhutan’s. The fear was that Nepali-origin people in Sikkim had overthrown a Bhutia monarchy to take over the country.

Could they do the same to Bhutan?

The end results of this fear were the refugee camps in Nepal where about a hundred thousand people have lived for the last two decades, without a country they can call home. Most of them are, or say they are, from southern Bhutan. Considering that the population of Bhutan is less than seven hundred thousand, Bhutan has produced more refugees per capita than any other country in the world.

Or so it is claimed.

The Bhutanese refugee problem is a difficult story to decipher. I have seen Nepalese go red in the face as they speak about the viciousness of the Bhutanese and the Fourth King. On the other hand I have heard Bhutanese speak in 149

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almost lyrical joy about their Fourth King, and at the same time spit poison at any mention of Bhutanese refugees. At the Bhutan Literary Festival in 2010, when I was only a few months into the writing of this book, I was asked by one member of the audience whether I would only focus on ‘one part of Bhutan’s story’.

I could guess what she meant, but wasn’t sure, so I asked her to clarify.

Struggling to express herself, she said that sometimes authors only looked at one issue and failed to give the full picture.

‘Every author edits,’ I replied. ‘Nobody can give you the whole picture, or promise to. My book won’t cover everything, just what I managed to pick up, and what I thought I could use.’

Exasperated, she finally named the problem. ‘But so many people just write about the Nepali issue,’ she said plaintively.

A number of books have been written on the topic.

When I began my research, the first two I read were Thakur Prasad Mishra’s Becoming a Journalist in Exile, published in Kathmandu in 2009, and Bhutan: A Movement in Exile, co-authored by D.N.S. Dhakal and Christopher Strawn, which had been published from Delhi in the mid 1990s.

Probably the best-known account of the issue is a book titled Torture Killing Me Softly by Tek Nath Rizal, a prominent leader of the Nepalese in exile. Considered Rizal’s major work, the book focuses on Bhutan’s use of sophisticated mind-control techniques of torture that employ ultrasonic sound waves and electromagnetism. Frankly, it sounds more like something from the X Files rather than the work of a credible human rights activist.

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The ‘Nepali issue’ has a long history; its origins predate Bhutan’s monarchy. It grew and seethed at the borders of the kingdom for more than a century before it finally exploded. The Gurkha state of Nepal had risen dramatically in the early 1800s, clawing territory from Sikkim, raiding into Tibet and north India. Although these raids were beaten back by China, and then by the British East India Company, the spread of the Nepalese could not be contained.

Border control in the lightly populated, heavily forested mountains of the Himalayas—where nobody really knew where the borders were—was an illusion, at best. Citizenship had little meaning in those days. There were no passports, no border check posts, and no identity cards that forced people into one identity or the other.

The expanding British empire in South Asia only added to this flow of Nepalese immigrants. The principal means by which the British expanded their power—and collected taxes—was by developing large areas into revenue generating districts. This was done by building roads and other forms of infrastructure, as well as by encouraging the large-scale plantation of cash crops—such as tea. These newly-created districts were lightly populated and the manpower for most of the British projects there came from Nepal. As roads and trade routes opened up, large Nepali populations settled down along them, although some of them were also occasional residents—herdsmen, casual labour and lumbermen who were all needed to draw the mountains into the civilizational embrace of the Raj. As the Nepali community spread across this region it created a ‘Gorkhaland’ of trade and labour within which Nepali was the lingua franca of commerce. The religious 151

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and cultural traditions looked west—towards Kathmandu, where the Nepali king ruled as both the head of state and head of the Hindu community, until the monarchy was abolished on 28 May 2008.

Of course the Nepalese, certainly those who settled in these lands, would have been aware that they were in other countries. This would have been especially obvious in Bhutan, where each small province—or dzhonkhag—had a dzhongpon who collected the revenue for the district. But as there were no real rules for citizenship, the Nepali community could continue to pay their taxes to the Bhutanese state, while at the same time maintaining their own cultural traditions. If they were prominent landowners and close to the centre of power in northern Bhutan, they often found that their loyalty lay closer to the king of Bhutan and his court than to their country of origin, and thus they had no problem adopting the manners of the northern Bhutanese.

Other than language, there was one particular aspect of the cultural traditions of the Nepali community that made integration into the Bhutanese state difficult: religion. Bhutan was established as Druk Yul by the Shabdrung, a Tibetan Buddhist state with its identity rooted in the Drukpa Kagyu school of thought. At its centre was the Tsa Yig Chenmo that functioned as the Constitution of the Bhutanese state until 2008. The Tsa Yig Chenmo is deeply imbued with Buddhist thought. However, the Nepali community was overwhelmingly Hindu. It would have been difficult for the Nepalese to immerse themselves into a Buddhist system of laws. Nevertheless Hinduism and Buddhism share strong philosophical roots, and the moral codes taught by Buddhism 152

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are not hugely dissimilar to those taught in most Hindu schools of thought. Unfortunately, there was another complication. There existed a rival for the affections and loyalty of the Nepalese. Nepal was a Hindu state, and its king was considered an incarnation of the god Vishnu, to be worshipped by his people—as no king of Bhutan could be worshipped. Most of the Nepalese who could afford to do so, had a picture of the Nepali king in their homes, and rarely one of the king of Bhutan—certainly not one that they could worship.

If this was not enough there was one further consideration.

As Hindus the Nepalese were also bound by the rules of caste. This affected social interaction in a host of ways, most importantly in marriage. Inter-community marriages, between members of the Bhutia community and the Nepali community, were rare. Instead it was a truth universally acknowledged in southern Bhutan that a single man in possession of a decent livelihood must be in want of a wife, from Nepal proper. This swelled the numbers of the community, and kept it isolated from the local culture.

Until the middle of the twentieth century this divide did not matter too much. The Bhutanese state was happy to merely collect revenue and the Nepali-origin people were happy to continue working on development projects, clear forests, and maintain their separate traditions.Then Gandhi and the Indian independence movement changed the face of India and South Asian politics forever. They ousted the British from India, undoing the crucial link around which the British Empire was built, and without which it would swiftly fall apart.

One of the first people to be affected by Gandhi’s ideas 153

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and style of politics was a young Nepali named Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala, who grew up in India. He joined the Indian National Congress in 1934, and after the fall of British power in India, heturned his attention to the monarchy in his native Nepal. He founded the Nepali National Congress in 1947, and was arrested when he returned to Nepal to start a labour movement. In 1950 he changed the name of the party to the Nepali Congress Party. It must have been a lucky name, because the next year he led an armed uprising that managed to overthrow the Rana clan that had ruled as the prime ministers in Nepal for more than a century.

Koirala went on to become Nepal’s first elected prime minister. His brother, Girijia Prasad Koirala, also went on to become prime minister of Nepal—four times, to be precise— and he has a role in Bhutan’s story too.

In 1952 G.P. Koirala became one of the founding members of the Bhutan State Congress—its name and purpose remarkably similar to the Nepali National Congress and the Sikkim State Congress. Unlike the other two movements, however, the Bhutan State Congress (BSC) was almost completely a movement in exile. It also faced a far more competent opponent: the Third King of Bhutan, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck.

The BSC tried to mobilize the millions of Nepali-origin people living on the borders of Bhutan, in the Indian states of West Bengal and Assam, into a non-violent noncooperation movement against Bhutan’s monarchy. It was meant to be along the lines of Gandhi’s struggle against the British, except that in this case it looked remarkably like an invasion. Moreover, the Nepal-origin people living within Bhutan had no wish to risk their status in a country where 154

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they had been living happily enough for many years.

The Third King responded swiftly. He had ascended the throne in October 1952 and his first step was the abolition of serfdom in Bhutan, putting an end to the feudal tradition once for all, and giving full citizenship to all the people living in the country. In 1953, in a nod to the BSC, he set up the Tshogdu—or National Assembly—and made sure that there was representation of the Nepali-origin Bhutanese.

As the BSC mobilized the Nepali-origin community surrounding Bhutan, the king mobilized Bhutan’s traditional militia. Bhutan had never had a standing army, but each dzhongpon was allowed to mobilize the people within his authority into a fighting force. This was the way that the Shabdrung had fought the Tibetans, and how Jigme Namgyal fought the British.

The BSC attempted a Gandhian-style satyagraha movement in March 1954. The plan was to march to the town of Sarbhang—in the present-day district of Gelephu— and fill the jails of Bhutan. Gandhi’s marches drew people from the areas where the protest marches were held, but in this case the protestors had to cross the border to protest in another country. They had not calculated how difficult this would be. Once they did cross the border, they ran into the militia under the command of J.B. Pradhan, the District Commissioner of Southern Bhutan, and of Nepali origin himself. Faced with the incoming protestors, Pradhan’s forces opened fire. Approximately 25 people died, and a few dozen were wounded. The rest fled. The movement collapsed. (Strawn 1994) Nevertheless, just to be safe, the Third King decided to create Bhutan’s first standing army to make sure that any 155

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future threat would be easily met. The Nepali-origin southern Bhutanese were among the recruits. They also found positions in the police, bureaucracy and judiciary.

In 1958 the king granted parcels of land to the former serfs. These were also distributed to those members of the Nepali-origin community in the south who had previously not owned land. Simultaneously, the National Assembly passed the National Law of Bhutan and in 1959 the king imposed a ban on open immigration. The National Law also stated that anybody already resident in Bhutan was eligible for citizenship, and set down clear rules for this: 4. (1) If any foreigner who has reached the age of majority and is otherwise eligible presents a petition to an official appointed by His Majesty and takes an oath of loyalty according to the rules laid down by [the] official, he may be enrolled as a Bhutanese National, provided that: a) The person is a resident of the Kingdom of Bhutan for more than ten years, and b) Owns agricultural land within the Kingdom.

(2) If a woman, married to a Bhutanese National, submits a petition and takes the oath of loyalty as stated above to the satisfaction of the concerned official and that she has reached the age of majority and is otherwise eligible, her name may be enrolled as a Bhutanese National.

5. (1) If any foreigner submits [a] petition to His Majesty according to rules described in the above sections, and provided the person has reached the age of majority and is otherwise eligible, and has served satisfactorily in Government service for at least five years and has been residing in the Kingdom of Bhutan for at least 10 years, 156

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he may receive a Bhutanese Nationality Certificate. Once the certificate is received, such a person has to take the oath of loyalty according to rules laid down by the Government and from that day onwards, his name will be enrolled as a Bhutanese National. (Amnesty International 1992)

The BSC shifted its demands to the revocation of this new law. Obviously the Nepali-origin people within Bhutan did not share the BSC’s point of view, as this law codified their citizenship rights for the first time. The difference between the desires of those living inside a country and a freefloating Nepali population that could exercise rights in multiple states was stark. Within a few years the BSC had collapsed completely, and in 1969 the Third King pardoned all its members, allowing them to re-enter Bhutan if they so wanted. They jumped at the chance, and the BSC never rose again.

The victory, however, was ephemeral. The conflict over the character of the Bhutanese state, and who had the right to define it, had only been postponed. It would erupt much more ferociously two decades later, with murder, torture, rape, and tens of thousands of people with no place to call home.

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15. The Tibetan Refugees From Expulsion to Expulsion

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he early threat from the south had been adroitly neutralized by the Third King, and it did not flare up again in his lifetime. Nevertheless the idea of citizenship would continue to plague Bhutan in one form or the other during the rule of his son, the Fourth King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck.

It started with the Tibetan refugees.

March 10 is celebrated as National Uprising Day by Tibetans in exile. On this day in 1959, the Tibetans rose up in revolt against the Chinese authorities. Although the Chinese suppressed the uprising in a matter of days, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tensin Gyatso, used the chaos to escape to India, along with approximately 80,000 followers.

Some of the Tibetans escaped through Bhutan, but in 1961, as relations between India and China soured, India sealed off its northern borders and approximately 3,000 refugees were trapped in transit within Bhutan’s borders. The government of Bhutan set aside land for seven settlements for the refugees—financed by the Indian government—and after the short India-China war of 1962, Bhutan permanently 158