Bhutan is a tiny country in the Himalayas sandwiched between the two giants of China and India. It has a population of just 673,000 and is around 5 times smaller than Britain. It gained its independence from India in 1948 which in turn got its independence from Britain the year before.
Like Britain, Bhutan is a monarchy. But whereas Britain is a democratic Constitutional Monarchy, Bhutan is an Absolute Monarchy with an all-powerful King (King Jigme Wangchuk). But the King wants to transform the country's monarchy into a Contitutional Monarchy on the British model i.e. a democracy.
Though there seems little desire amongst the Bhutanese to change things...
What use is democracy to idyllic Bhutan?
By William Dalrymple
Sunday 23rd March 2008
The Telegraph
Bhutan, with a population of just 673,000, is sandwiched between the two billion-strong giants of China and India. On the right is the nation's flag.
There could be no better illustration of the virtues of an enlightened monarchy than Bhutan. Even before your plane touches down amid the steeply tiered rice terraces of the Paro valley, you realise how different this idyllic country is from its Himalayan neighbours
A monastery in the Paro valley. In Bhutan, architectural carbuncles are banned by law and the only traffic light was taken down
Instead of the urban concrete sprawl of Kathmandu and Simla - romantic names, but disappointingly shabby realities - you pass over green hillsides dotted with large white Tibetan-style farmhouses made of stone and wood, with intricately carved balconies and verandahs.
Instead of clouds of pollution rising from corrugated iron roofing, there are thin wraiths of cloud hanging above thick conifer slopes. Instead of bare, deforested hills with landslips and erosion, there are great ranges of mountains clad with virgin deodar forests.
Popular: the current King
Jigme Wangchuk
These fall through terraces of maize and wheat, punctuated with flapping prayer flags and windbreaks of cypress, to verdant valleys filled with clear mountain streams and roads shaded by poplar avenues.
Instead of the abject poverty of much of Nepal, there is gentle prosperity in this country of 600,000 people. There are no beggars and unemployment is low.
Healthcare and education are among the best in the region. Bhutan has a healthy rate of GDP per head, and crime is virtually nonexistent. The future for exports of hydroelectricity to India is promising, and economists at the World Bank have been predicting growth rates of 14 per cent.
The countryside has not been wantonly destroyed like Tibet; colonised like Sikkim; nor besieged by hippies and tourists like Ladakh. Even the most modest peasant has a sturdy house, a small patch of land and a few chickens, a couple of cows and a pig.
It is not naïve to call Bhutan the last Himalayan Eden. To get some idea of what Bhutan is like, you would have to imagine that the Prince of Wales ruled over a vast open-air Himalayan national park, where everyone was compelled to farm organically and wear the traditional dress, at least while at work.
Modernity in the capital, Thimpu, extends to one nightclub and two karaoke bars. There used to be a traffic light, but it was taken down when the Bhutanese complained it was too impersonal.
Carbuncles are banned by law: even the filling stations in Bhutan are made of stone with flying eves and elaborate murals of dragons, Tibetan patterns and Tantric Buddhist deities.
Bhutan has been governed by the Wangchuk kings according to the notion of Gross National Happiness, a concept that tried to balance material prosperity and economic development with the retention of traditional values and environmental sensitivity.
For this reason, mass tourism has been banned and tourist numbers are carefully limited to 20,000 a year. Those who do get a visa have to pay tax of $200 a day. As a result, there are no tour buses, no theme parks, no litter, no jammed car parks. It might be a bit quiet for some tastes, but for those who have been lucky enough to explore it, Bhutan is as close to heaven as you are likely to get anywhere on this earth.
Now this remarkable environmental and economic success story is under threat.
Not by climate change, Maoist revolutionaries, Islamist terrorism or any of the usual suspects, but by a force we normally regard as wholly positive: democracy.
Tomorrow, a country that has been governed as an absolute monarchy since it was united in 1903, by the Wangchuk dynasty's founder, will go to the polls for the first time, intent on turning itself into a parliamentary democracy headed by a constitutional monarch
A dress rehearsal for the election took place in April last year. Voting machines were loaded on mules and sent over the high passes. Everyone voted for a different coloured dragon. In the end, despite a good showing by red, yellow dragons won.
When I was there in November, campaigning was hotting up. The country's only national newspaper, Kuensel, was running pages of instructions from the newly formed Election Commission of Bhutan on what a vote was, how to mark a ballot paper, and where the different polling stations would be.
The different dzongkhags - or administrative areas each looking to a different dzong (huge mediaeval fortress-monasteries where the local governors and their staff cohabit with the local lama and courtyards full of his red-robed monks) - would each form a constituency, and anyone was welcome to form a party or stand for election.
The paper's centre pages contained an item named "Know Your Candidates", featuring mugshots and short Q&As with the local worthies who were thinking of standing. As the two main Bhutanese parties standing for election have almost identical platforms - both are competing to continue the king's existing policies - personality and clan loyalty are likely to be the most important factors in the election.
Judging by the answers given to the Kuensel questionnaire, the election is likely to be conducted in a rather more polite manner than those we see in the UK.
Here is a sample.
Q: Name?
A: Garab Dorji - 39.
Q: Your birth sign?
A: Lou - the sheep.
Q: Positions held?
A: President of the Gelephu Archery Federation.
Q: Last book you read?
A: 'The Healing Anger' by the Dalai Lama.
Q: A good politician is?
A: An honest person who delivers service with humility.
Q: What do you think of your opponent?
A: I find him sincere and humble.
Q: What is the biggest challenge to being a politician in Bhutan?
A: To fulfil the vision of our beloved king for a successful democracy, and to continue to bring peace, prosperity and happiness to the people in the way our kings have delivered in the past 100 years.
Q: Are Bhutanese politics getting dirty?
A: I am hopeful and optimistic that it will not get dirty like many other countries, since all the candidates are highly educated, dedicated and sincerely want to transform Bhutan in the way envisaged by our beloved kings.
The last two answers give some indication of the strange nature of this first Bhutan election. Unlike in Nepal, where an increasingly unpopular monarchy opposed democracy until a revolution brought it about by force, Bhutan has an incredibly popular monarchy which is foisting democracy on a slightly baffled people who have shown little desire for any change in what they regard as a perfectly good political system.
Instead, almost everyone I talked to was anxious that democracy could bring to Bhutan the sort of corruption and mismanagement, as well as ethnic and class divisions, that have bedevilled democratic politics in most other South Asian countries.
In Nepal, the advent of democracy brought about a looting of the state treasury and took the country to the brink of collapse, opening the way for the takeover of large swaths of the country by Maoist guerrillas.
Even in the most successful of the region's democracies, India, politicians are widely reviled as criminals, and many indeed are: in the last elections in the Indian state of Bihar, several candidates fought their campaign from behind bars in jail and at least 33 of Bihar's State Assembly MPs have criminal records. Dular Chand Yadav, who has 100 cases of robbery and 50 murder cases pending against him, can also be addressed as the Hon Member for Barh.
This illustrates the difficulty of introducing democracy to a country where such traditions are not deeply rooted. As Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka all show, corrupt, unrepresentative and flawed democracies without the strong independent institutions of a civil society - a free press, an independent judiciary, an empowered election commission - can foster governments that are every bit as tyrannical as any dictatorship.
Justice, good governance and democracy are not necessarily synonymous with each other, and it can take generations for institutions to grow strong enough to provide the checks and balances that allow a democratic system to function properly.
No one would argue that Bhutan in its current state is a perfect society. The press is far from free and criticism of the royal family in public is not possible.
It is intensely conservative and hierarchical: social ranks are denoted by different coloured shawls. Church (esoteric tantric Buddhism, believed to have been brought to the country by a guru on a flying tiger) and state are completely unseparated.
More seriously, there is great discontent among the Nepalese minority on the western border. Alleging serious discrimination against them, especially a refusal to issue them with Bhutanese identity cards, the ethnic Gurkhas rose up in the late 1980s and demanded equal rights.
The subsequent heavy-handed crackdown led to as many as 100,000 fleeing the country and their children now lie festering in refugee camps in Sikkim and Nepal. There has also been trouble with Maoist guerrillas spilling over the border from Nepal, leading recently to three small bomb blasts and one death.
Yet, despite these troubles, it is easy to understand the anxieties of the people of Bhutan as they prepare to go the polls. They like their king and they want him to continue to rule over them. Democracy may well be the best system humanity has found to govern itself, and it is almost always preferable to autocracy, but in Bhutan many people take the view that if their system is not broken then they should not be trying to fix it.
They look around their neighbours and shudder at what might be lost once rapid political change begins to erode the very comfortable status quo. Nor do the recent protests and massacres over the border in Tibet - which is very much part of the same cultural and geographical world as Bhutan - provide a very auspicious background to this new political journey into unknown territory.
The young king who is overseeing this transition is 28-year-old Jigme Wangchuk, who took over from his father (also Jigme Wangchuk) when the latter retired in December 2006, after ruling the country for 30 years. Educated at Magdalen, Oxford, where he helped his father rule Bhutan from a terraced house in Jericho, the new king has a reputation for approachability, honesty and integrity.
I first got to know him when he was in Delhi, studying at the defence college, and have visited him since in Bhutan. He is an intelligent, private, shy, earnest, hard-working and extremely sincere man, with immaculate manners and a hugely generous nature.
It felt rather like visiting in Russia at the time of Peter the Great, or arriving in Vienna as the guest of Maria Theresa: he loaned us ponies and we trekked slowly through the bucolic Bhutanese landscape on horseback, seeing the country in what we knew would be its last days as an enlightened monarchy.
The king was thrown into his current position at short notice: he seems to have had no more warning than anyone else of his father's decisions to step down and to ask his son to oversee the transition to democracy.
But he is clearly determined to succeed and to transform his dynasty into a successful constitutional monarchy on the British model. As he told a recent gathering: "In the womb of a strong and peaceful monarchy we have begun to nurture the hopes of a vibrant democracy. It is this endeavour that we must uphold as our greatest priority: the success of democracy."
No one seemed to be quite clear why the king's father suddenly came to the conclusion that the moment had come to bring democracy to Bhutan. Perhaps it was part of a wider policy of engagement with the modern world - a few years earlier, for example, a few carefully chosen satellite channels had been allowed into the country and it is now possible to watch the BBC News, and indeed Desperate Housewives, at 12,000ft in Thimpu.
Partly also the king's decision may have been connected to the shock of watching the downfall of the now widely reviled Nepalese royal family. Either way, he moved from his palace to the outside of Thimpu, along with his four beautiful wives, who are all sisters. He now reportedly spends his time playing tennis and offering advice to his son when he asks for it, while touring the country to see what needs to be done to improve the life of his people.
In the meantime, as the Bhutanese head to the polls tomorrow, there is little enthusiasm for the change from monarchy to democratic self-government.
The people I talked to said they were hoping that the king will be willing to step in again if their politicians prove as flawed and corrupt as those in others countries of their region: "If we had a chance to vote for the king and against democracy that vote would be carried with a 99 per cent majority," said the Bhutanese lady I sat next to on the flight home. "But that choice doesn't seem to be on offer. In the meantime I am extremely anxious about the changes these politicians could bring. Who now knows what the future holds for us?"
William Dalrymple is author of The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (Bloomsbury), which won the Duff Cooper Prize for history and biography.
telegraph.co.uk
Like Britain, Bhutan is a monarchy. But whereas Britain is a democratic Constitutional Monarchy, Bhutan is an Absolute Monarchy with an all-powerful King (King Jigme Wangchuk). But the King wants to transform the country's monarchy into a Contitutional Monarchy on the British model i.e. a democracy.
Though there seems little desire amongst the Bhutanese to change things...
What use is democracy to idyllic Bhutan?
By William Dalrymple
Sunday 23rd March 2008
The Telegraph
Bhutan, with a population of just 673,000, is sandwiched between the two billion-strong giants of China and India. On the right is the nation's flag.
There could be no better illustration of the virtues of an enlightened monarchy than Bhutan. Even before your plane touches down amid the steeply tiered rice terraces of the Paro valley, you realise how different this idyllic country is from its Himalayan neighbours
A monastery in the Paro valley. In Bhutan, architectural carbuncles are banned by law and the only traffic light was taken down
Instead of the urban concrete sprawl of Kathmandu and Simla - romantic names, but disappointingly shabby realities - you pass over green hillsides dotted with large white Tibetan-style farmhouses made of stone and wood, with intricately carved balconies and verandahs.
Instead of clouds of pollution rising from corrugated iron roofing, there are thin wraiths of cloud hanging above thick conifer slopes. Instead of bare, deforested hills with landslips and erosion, there are great ranges of mountains clad with virgin deodar forests.
Jigme Wangchuk
These fall through terraces of maize and wheat, punctuated with flapping prayer flags and windbreaks of cypress, to verdant valleys filled with clear mountain streams and roads shaded by poplar avenues.
Instead of the abject poverty of much of Nepal, there is gentle prosperity in this country of 600,000 people. There are no beggars and unemployment is low.
Healthcare and education are among the best in the region. Bhutan has a healthy rate of GDP per head, and crime is virtually nonexistent. The future for exports of hydroelectricity to India is promising, and economists at the World Bank have been predicting growth rates of 14 per cent.
The countryside has not been wantonly destroyed like Tibet; colonised like Sikkim; nor besieged by hippies and tourists like Ladakh. Even the most modest peasant has a sturdy house, a small patch of land and a few chickens, a couple of cows and a pig.
It is not naïve to call Bhutan the last Himalayan Eden. To get some idea of what Bhutan is like, you would have to imagine that the Prince of Wales ruled over a vast open-air Himalayan national park, where everyone was compelled to farm organically and wear the traditional dress, at least while at work.
Modernity in the capital, Thimpu, extends to one nightclub and two karaoke bars. There used to be a traffic light, but it was taken down when the Bhutanese complained it was too impersonal.
Carbuncles are banned by law: even the filling stations in Bhutan are made of stone with flying eves and elaborate murals of dragons, Tibetan patterns and Tantric Buddhist deities.
Bhutan has been governed by the Wangchuk kings according to the notion of Gross National Happiness, a concept that tried to balance material prosperity and economic development with the retention of traditional values and environmental sensitivity.
For this reason, mass tourism has been banned and tourist numbers are carefully limited to 20,000 a year. Those who do get a visa have to pay tax of $200 a day. As a result, there are no tour buses, no theme parks, no litter, no jammed car parks. It might be a bit quiet for some tastes, but for those who have been lucky enough to explore it, Bhutan is as close to heaven as you are likely to get anywhere on this earth.
Now this remarkable environmental and economic success story is under threat.
Not by climate change, Maoist revolutionaries, Islamist terrorism or any of the usual suspects, but by a force we normally regard as wholly positive: democracy.
Tomorrow, a country that has been governed as an absolute monarchy since it was united in 1903, by the Wangchuk dynasty's founder, will go to the polls for the first time, intent on turning itself into a parliamentary democracy headed by a constitutional monarch
A dress rehearsal for the election took place in April last year. Voting machines were loaded on mules and sent over the high passes. Everyone voted for a different coloured dragon. In the end, despite a good showing by red, yellow dragons won.
When I was there in November, campaigning was hotting up. The country's only national newspaper, Kuensel, was running pages of instructions from the newly formed Election Commission of Bhutan on what a vote was, how to mark a ballot paper, and where the different polling stations would be.
The different dzongkhags - or administrative areas each looking to a different dzong (huge mediaeval fortress-monasteries where the local governors and their staff cohabit with the local lama and courtyards full of his red-robed monks) - would each form a constituency, and anyone was welcome to form a party or stand for election.
The paper's centre pages contained an item named "Know Your Candidates", featuring mugshots and short Q&As with the local worthies who were thinking of standing. As the two main Bhutanese parties standing for election have almost identical platforms - both are competing to continue the king's existing policies - personality and clan loyalty are likely to be the most important factors in the election.
Judging by the answers given to the Kuensel questionnaire, the election is likely to be conducted in a rather more polite manner than those we see in the UK.
Here is a sample.
Q: Name?
A: Garab Dorji - 39.
Q: Your birth sign?
A: Lou - the sheep.
Q: Positions held?
A: President of the Gelephu Archery Federation.
Q: Last book you read?
A: 'The Healing Anger' by the Dalai Lama.
Q: A good politician is?
A: An honest person who delivers service with humility.
Q: What do you think of your opponent?
A: I find him sincere and humble.
Q: What is the biggest challenge to being a politician in Bhutan?
A: To fulfil the vision of our beloved king for a successful democracy, and to continue to bring peace, prosperity and happiness to the people in the way our kings have delivered in the past 100 years.
Q: Are Bhutanese politics getting dirty?
A: I am hopeful and optimistic that it will not get dirty like many other countries, since all the candidates are highly educated, dedicated and sincerely want to transform Bhutan in the way envisaged by our beloved kings.
The last two answers give some indication of the strange nature of this first Bhutan election. Unlike in Nepal, where an increasingly unpopular monarchy opposed democracy until a revolution brought it about by force, Bhutan has an incredibly popular monarchy which is foisting democracy on a slightly baffled people who have shown little desire for any change in what they regard as a perfectly good political system.
Instead, almost everyone I talked to was anxious that democracy could bring to Bhutan the sort of corruption and mismanagement, as well as ethnic and class divisions, that have bedevilled democratic politics in most other South Asian countries.
In Nepal, the advent of democracy brought about a looting of the state treasury and took the country to the brink of collapse, opening the way for the takeover of large swaths of the country by Maoist guerrillas.
Even in the most successful of the region's democracies, India, politicians are widely reviled as criminals, and many indeed are: in the last elections in the Indian state of Bihar, several candidates fought their campaign from behind bars in jail and at least 33 of Bihar's State Assembly MPs have criminal records. Dular Chand Yadav, who has 100 cases of robbery and 50 murder cases pending against him, can also be addressed as the Hon Member for Barh.
This illustrates the difficulty of introducing democracy to a country where such traditions are not deeply rooted. As Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka all show, corrupt, unrepresentative and flawed democracies without the strong independent institutions of a civil society - a free press, an independent judiciary, an empowered election commission - can foster governments that are every bit as tyrannical as any dictatorship.
Justice, good governance and democracy are not necessarily synonymous with each other, and it can take generations for institutions to grow strong enough to provide the checks and balances that allow a democratic system to function properly.
No one would argue that Bhutan in its current state is a perfect society. The press is far from free and criticism of the royal family in public is not possible.
It is intensely conservative and hierarchical: social ranks are denoted by different coloured shawls. Church (esoteric tantric Buddhism, believed to have been brought to the country by a guru on a flying tiger) and state are completely unseparated.
More seriously, there is great discontent among the Nepalese minority on the western border. Alleging serious discrimination against them, especially a refusal to issue them with Bhutanese identity cards, the ethnic Gurkhas rose up in the late 1980s and demanded equal rights.
The subsequent heavy-handed crackdown led to as many as 100,000 fleeing the country and their children now lie festering in refugee camps in Sikkim and Nepal. There has also been trouble with Maoist guerrillas spilling over the border from Nepal, leading recently to three small bomb blasts and one death.
Yet, despite these troubles, it is easy to understand the anxieties of the people of Bhutan as they prepare to go the polls. They like their king and they want him to continue to rule over them. Democracy may well be the best system humanity has found to govern itself, and it is almost always preferable to autocracy, but in Bhutan many people take the view that if their system is not broken then they should not be trying to fix it.
They look around their neighbours and shudder at what might be lost once rapid political change begins to erode the very comfortable status quo. Nor do the recent protests and massacres over the border in Tibet - which is very much part of the same cultural and geographical world as Bhutan - provide a very auspicious background to this new political journey into unknown territory.
The young king who is overseeing this transition is 28-year-old Jigme Wangchuk, who took over from his father (also Jigme Wangchuk) when the latter retired in December 2006, after ruling the country for 30 years. Educated at Magdalen, Oxford, where he helped his father rule Bhutan from a terraced house in Jericho, the new king has a reputation for approachability, honesty and integrity.
I first got to know him when he was in Delhi, studying at the defence college, and have visited him since in Bhutan. He is an intelligent, private, shy, earnest, hard-working and extremely sincere man, with immaculate manners and a hugely generous nature.
It felt rather like visiting in Russia at the time of Peter the Great, or arriving in Vienna as the guest of Maria Theresa: he loaned us ponies and we trekked slowly through the bucolic Bhutanese landscape on horseback, seeing the country in what we knew would be its last days as an enlightened monarchy.
The king was thrown into his current position at short notice: he seems to have had no more warning than anyone else of his father's decisions to step down and to ask his son to oversee the transition to democracy.
But he is clearly determined to succeed and to transform his dynasty into a successful constitutional monarchy on the British model. As he told a recent gathering: "In the womb of a strong and peaceful monarchy we have begun to nurture the hopes of a vibrant democracy. It is this endeavour that we must uphold as our greatest priority: the success of democracy."
No one seemed to be quite clear why the king's father suddenly came to the conclusion that the moment had come to bring democracy to Bhutan. Perhaps it was part of a wider policy of engagement with the modern world - a few years earlier, for example, a few carefully chosen satellite channels had been allowed into the country and it is now possible to watch the BBC News, and indeed Desperate Housewives, at 12,000ft in Thimpu.
Partly also the king's decision may have been connected to the shock of watching the downfall of the now widely reviled Nepalese royal family. Either way, he moved from his palace to the outside of Thimpu, along with his four beautiful wives, who are all sisters. He now reportedly spends his time playing tennis and offering advice to his son when he asks for it, while touring the country to see what needs to be done to improve the life of his people.
In the meantime, as the Bhutanese head to the polls tomorrow, there is little enthusiasm for the change from monarchy to democratic self-government.
The people I talked to said they were hoping that the king will be willing to step in again if their politicians prove as flawed and corrupt as those in others countries of their region: "If we had a chance to vote for the king and against democracy that vote would be carried with a 99 per cent majority," said the Bhutanese lady I sat next to on the flight home. "But that choice doesn't seem to be on offer. In the meantime I am extremely anxious about the changes these politicians could bring. Who now knows what the future holds for us?"
William Dalrymple is author of The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (Bloomsbury), which won the Duff Cooper Prize for history and biography.
telegraph.co.uk
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