Environment
The name ‘Bhutan’ is thought to have been derived from the Sanskrit phraseology ‘Bhu-Uttan’ meaning ‘High Land’; Bhutan’s environment and geography reveal the reasons for such a name. Bhutan is a small, mountainous, land-locked, officially Buddhist kingdom located in the southern slopes of the eastern Himalayas, squeezed between India and China. Bhutan borders the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh to the east, Assam and West Bengal to the south, and Sikkim to the south-west. To the north, Bhutan borders Tibet, which is ruled by China. The whole of the country is mountainous with the exception of a 13-16 kilometre-wide strip of subtropical plains in the south. Thimphu, the largest city in Bhutan, is also its capital.
History
Bhutan is the centre of the Drukpa Kagyu school of Mahayana Buddhism, the state religion. The different peoples who are followers of the sect are collectively known as Drukpa, though this label is also sometimes used indiscriminately to refer to all the people of Bhutan. The diverse ethnic groups who are Drukpa Buddhists primarily include the earliest inhabitants of the country as well as Tibetan and Mongol peoples who settled in Bhutan as late as the tenth and eleventh centuries.
From the seventeenth century, when the foundation of present-day Bhutan coalesced out of the smaller holdings of local religious and secular strongmen, to the beginning of the twentieth century, Bhutan was a theocracy ruled by the reincarnate Shabdrung, a temporal and spiritual Buddhist leader similar to Tibet’s Dalai Lama. The British, while in control of the British East India Company and as colonial rulers of India, maintained an interest in the affairs of Bhutan. Territorial interests in the region led to the Duar War (1864-5) between Bhutan and British India. The end of the war resulted in a treaty ceding the Duars to British India and a recognition of Britain’s control over Bhutan’s external affairs. Plagued by local feuds and instability, the Shabdrung’s government was supplanted in 1907 by the establishment of the hereditary monarchy of the Wangchuck dynasty. Ugyen Wangchuck was unanimously chosen as the King by an assembly of Buddhist monks, heads of prominent families and other officials. Following India’s independence from British rule in 1947, the Indian government took over control of Bhutan’s foreign relations, with Bhutan remaining closely allied to India primarily to balance against Chinese geopolitical ambitions.
For many decades the monarchy instituted measures to protect what was regarded as Bhutan’s unique culture, with the country opening up to international tourism only in the 1970s. While foreign influence and the effects of globalization have grown, particularly since the government allowed internet and television usage in 1999, Bhutan remains relatively isolated from the rest of the world.
Governance
The foundations of a democratically governed Bhutan were laid down by King Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, who in 1953 formed a legislative National Assembly. A cabinet-style government with a consultative status was established in 1963. Despite the constitutional changes, the King nevertheless retained absolute legislative and administrative powers. In 1971, Bhutan was admitted formally to the United Nations. In 1972 King Jigme Singye, who succeeded his father on the throne at age 16, was the fourth of the Wangchuck dynasty to occupy the throne.
During the 1980s, Bhutan’s treatment of its citizens, in particular its Nepali-speaking Lhotshampa population, became a matter of international concern. In its efforts to stop what it considered a demographic and cultural threat, the Bhutanese government introduced discriminatory citizenship laws aimed at Lhotshampas, which stripped them of their citizenship. In particular, the 1985 Citizenship Act allowed the government to exclude thousands of Bhutanese of Nepali descent from claiming Bhutanese nationality through naturalization, effectively designating them either as illegal immigrants or refugees within Bhutan. Following years of harassment, in 1991 Bhutanese security forces began a campaign of expulsion in which more than 100,000 Lhotshampas were forced to flee to Nepal. International observers consider these acts to have constituted ethnic cleansing.
Talks began on the refugee and immigration question in November 1992 between the governments of Bhutan and Nepal, but negotiations made little headway. The Bhutanese government refused to recognize exiled Nepali-speakers as citizens, asserting that only a small number could be legitimately repatriated to Bhutan. Further attempts were made to resolve the crisis through mediation and deliberation. Talks in July 1993 led to the establishment of a joint ministerial committee with the mandate to determine the different categories of people claiming to have come from Bhutan in the refugee camps in eastern Nepal; specify the position of the two governments on each of these categories; and arrive at a mutually acceptable agreement on each of these categories as a basis for the resolution of the problem. The joint committee had its first sitting in 1993 in Kathmandu and agreed to categorize the refugee population into four groups: (1) bona-fide Bhutanese forcibly evicted; (2) Bhutanese who emigrated; (3) non-Bhutanese; and (4) Bhutanese who have committed criminal acts. No agreement was reached about the criteria or the mechanism to be used to decide which categories people would be placed in. Nepal claimed it was not in a position to keep the refugees indefinitely in its territory.
The situation persisted for decades, with tens of thousands effectively caught in a limbo, many of whom lacked the basic rights of citizenship. By 2010 there were approximately 89,000 Lhotshampa refugees living in Nepal who did not have citizenship in any country and were thereby rendered stateless. However, a large-scale resettlement programme launched a few years before by the UN refugee agency UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in 2007 saw more than 100,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees resettled in third countries, though thousands of Bhutanese refugees are still living in Nepal, waiting for resettlement or repatriation. Nepal has called on UNHCR to persuade Bhutan to accept the voluntary repatriation of the remaining Bhutanese refugees once the third-country resettlement programme has come to an end.
Bhutan evolved from an absolute monarchy to a democratic constitutional monarchy when a new Constitution was enacted and parliamentary elections were held in 2008; the pro-monarchy Bhutan Harmony Party winning 44 out of 47 parliamentary seats while another pro-monarchy party took the remaining seats. While international monitors considered these elections to be free and fair, they also noted that Nepali–speakers had been turned away from voting because they were deemed ‘non-nationals’. In a second election in 2013, Lhotshampa and Sharchop voters and representatives were again restricted in their ability to participate in electoral politics. The Election Commission restricted the use of languages other than Dzongkha, which is not widely understood by most people in the south and east, the majority of the country’s population.