Bhutan, Borders, and Bliss

THIMPHU, Bhutan—The Druk (dragon) Air flight from Bangkok via Dacca banks into its final descent to Paro Airport’s landing strip at 7,333 feet. Nestled in a high valley, surrounded by peaks ranging to 18,000 feet where planes thread their way deftly, it serves as the sole passenger airport in this tiny Asian kingdom. Those fortunate enough to be sitting in a left-hand window seat during the approach can spot the unmistakable majesty of Mt. Everest. Stretching off into the distant east is the remainder of the far Himalayas. Many of these mountains, which surpass 23,000 feet in altitude, remain unnamed. Most have never been conquered, out of respect to the spirits that are believed to make their homes there.

Beyond this year-round wall of snow and ice that forms Bhutan’s entire northern and much of its western boundary lies China, specifically the Tibet Autonomous Region. It is one of the most formidable and impassable borders in the world, whose legitimacy may be traced to the efforts in the first decade of the twentieth century of Sir Arthur Henry McMahon, the army colonel who served as foreign secretary of the British Indian government, the Raj. Today, this boundary that he traced, following the ridge line of the Himalayas, and the entire nation that lies south and east of it, serves as a strategic buffer between the two most populous countries on earth—China and India—whose common frontier would otherwise be extended another tense 292 miles. This function is, of course, only one of the reasons Bhutan has been able to survive as an independent kingdom, indeed until two years ago one of the world’s last absolute monarchies. But the reasons for its survival, while so many others in this part of the world have disappeared or been swallowed up—Sikkim and Cooch Behar come immediately to mind—are a compelling object lesson as to precisely what constitutes a nation in today’s world. For Bhutan, it is a complex amalgam of geography, religion, language, and culture. And ultimately, all come together in what may be its unique legacy to the world—Gross National Happiness.

Above all, Bhutan serves as a contemporary model for other nations, or wanna-bee states, living in the shadow of great powers—from Chechnya to Baluchistan, Kurdistan to Kosovo, and on to Georgia, Abkhazia, and the Ossetias, not to mention a host of tribal territories scattered across Africa—as to just what constitutes a viable, secure, and prosperous country.

Natural Realities

If there were ever an example of geography as a central element of nationhood, it is Bhutan. Certainly the Bhutanese are far more a Himalayan than an Indian people, geography notwithstanding. Only a few narrow passes, each above 15,000 feet, allow entry to the north into remote Tibet and China; the south is a broad flat plain stretching on for thousands of square miles into India. Indeed, India trains its mountain troops in the high Himalayas of its Bhutanese neighbor, while China has made few efforts to encroach on Bhutan.

“We are here because we cannot be anywhere else, but you must handle this in a way that is balanced. Then you start to have interactions,” Bhutan’s elegant foreign minister, Lyonpo Ugyen Tshering, tells me at lunch in a private dining room of the Taj, the capital’s lavish Indian-owned hotel. “You cannot choose your neighbor, but you can deal with your neighbor. The short answer is that we always have to be afraid, and that should be our maxim. But you must take every opportunity to make the situation better. At the same time, we must not lose the idea of who we are. You must understand where you are standing, which side is the hard ground and which side is the soft ground.”

The hard fact, however, is that Bhutan is a landlocked nation some 450 miles from the nearest port—and that path to the sea lies directly through India. So, not surprisingly, it is the interactions with India that are defining Bhutan’s present and, most likely, will continue to frame its future. Indian investments, workers, markets, and its educational and legal system have built modern Bhutan. The vast hydroelectric network—a system of dams, generators, and transmission facilities, all built by India—supply the bulk of Bhutan’s electric power, while the export of this electricity via hundreds of miles of high-tension lines, accounts for the nation’s largest single source of hard currency. Indian engineers and workers have built what there is of a national highway system, including most of the single west-east highway (often barely one-and-a-half lanes wide, snaking through the Black Mountains that bisect the nation). Much of the nation’s food supply (beyond the basic homegrown staples of red-hot chilis, cheese, rice, and potatoes) not to mention the very plates they are eaten on are a product of India or have arrived from the nearest port, Kolkata. There is no natural boundary with India. Bhutan’s flat southern plains and those of India’s north are all but indistinguishable physically—each flowing seamlessly into the other. Indeed, the only real point of contention was a 2.6 square mile tract around Dewathang, ceded by Bhutan to India in the Treaty of Sinchula in 1865 and restored in 1949 when the newly independent India finally and definitively recognized Bhutan’s independence.

Today’s Indian ambassador to Bhutan, Pavan Varma, a gentle, professional diplomat of enormous intellectual accomplishment and deep personal understanding, nevertheless has inherited a position and a residence that places him in a position that can only be likened to an ancient Roman proconsul of the outlying possessions—tenuously linked to the empire but essential to its ultimate survival and prosperity. The residence, called India House, is a vast 70-acre tract in the middle of Thimphu, surrounded by a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire and patrolled on the inside by Indian troops. Within its perimeters may be found a golf course, tennis court, basketball court (the 30-year-old king is quite an accomplished basketball player, as it happens), and soon a hot stone bath, not to mention the palatial ambassador’s residence and the embassy offices.

When Bhutan’s national library needed a re-make, the ambassador rang up a friend in New Delhi who heads India’s library system. He was on the next flight north to launch a whole new network with augmented resources and computerized registry. But the interactions at all levels are vastly more complex. Since Bhutan has no law school, all the nation’s lawyers and by extension its judiciary head to India for their legal training, with a yearlong “post-graduate... orientation in our law,” as Supreme Court Justice Dasho Tshering Wangchuk explains to me. “India uses British common law,” he continues. “But we were never colonized, so we developed our own laws.”

In the hall of the mountain kingdom.

Indeed, the absence of a colonial past is a source of enormous pride and as it turns out national cohesion as well. Bhutan has really never been conquered. Geographically a string of lush, but narrow, often v-shaped valleys (even today, few even have enough flat territory at the bottom to allow for an airport landing strip), each separated from the next by steep mountains, what is today Bhutan began as a collection of fiefdoms, each ruled by the local penlop. Even today, the Crown Prince is on occasion referred to as the Penlop of Trongsa, the initial post held by the founder of the House of Wangchuck. The nation itself dates back to the early seventeenth century, when Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, the Tibetan lama and military leader, a victim of religious persecution at home, swept down from Tibet, building a fortress, or dzong, at the entrance to the strategic Thimphu valley, then moved ever eastward, consolidating his control. Since it often took days to make the arduous journey from valley to valley, the penlop system persisted until 1907 when the first king was unanimously chosen by his peers as hereditary monarch and the dynasty was formed. Four of his descendants mounted the throne, each identified by his numerical rank in the succession. Today, the 30-yearold fifth Druk Gyalpo, or dragon king, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, educated at Phillips Academy at Andover, Wheaton College, and Magdalen College at Oxford, rules a thoroughly united nation that all but worships him and the institution he represents.

Throughout its history, the region that is now a unified Bhutan has successfully resisted a succession of would-be foreign invaders, from early Tibetan forces to several centuries of an uneasy truce, punctuated by a few brief, violent confrontations with the British Empire. Today, neighbors India and Bhutan are both democracies, though of dramatically different sizes—and derivations, one emerging from a colonial heritage, another from a centuries-long monarchy.

Their friendship is clearly a great tribute to their individual, indeed divergent histories and cultures. India is without question the dominant nation in the South Asian region and has accumulated few friends. Pakistan, from which it was carved when the British pulled up stakes in 1947, is a Muslim nation, deeply suspicious of the motives and goals of its far larger Hindu neighbor. When India acquired a nuclear weapon, Pakistan was not far behind. Today, these two nuclear powers maintain larger armed forces across their nominally peaceful frontier than anywhere else on their peripheries. Other nations India has either absorbed or ignored. And then there’s Bhutan.

“The reason we get along so well is that India treats us an equal,” observed a member of Bhutan’s Senate over coffee. “There is no condescension on their part. And for our part, we recognize everything they have to offer.” An equal? Scarcely. But a nice fiction that both parties find thoroughly opportune to sustain.

Imagine for instance, India deciding it was somehow to its advantage to absorb Bhutan. Ignore the opprobrium that would descend on this democracy from all sides in the region and the world. Still, its hand would be stayed by one overwhelming reality. Faced with such a fait accompli on what would become its new border with an ancient adversary, China could then see itself free to claim portions of India that it coveted. The scattered Sino-Indian conflicts of past decades would be a mere amuse bouche for the resulting battle of the nouveau superpowers.

Tortured Relations

With China, Bhutan has had a long and tortuous relationship. “You have to understand we dealt with the Tibetans not with the Chinese for all these years, for all these centuries,” Foreign Minister Tshering tells me. “It is only since 1959 that you actually had Chinese people. And here again, we are learning to live together.” But beyond a religion and heritage shared with the people of Tibet, there were other, more fraught issues with China. That nation’s communist rulers “came at a time when there was a beginning of the Cultural Revolution,” the foreign minister continues. “And Bhutan, as another Buddhist country, could not accept the damage to the Buddhist heritage in Tibet. Tibet historically has been the closest country, with which there have been lots of differences but also a lot of interaction.”

The goal was a simple one as far as Bhutan was concerned. Clearly, it was not going to persuade China to let Tibet remain a Buddhist state. But equally, it was determined that there would be no hostilities. And there have not been. While the iron curtain has in theory descended along the roof of the world that forms this, the world’s highest continuous frontier, the people on both sides of the border continue their interactions. “Officially, today the border is

closed,” Tshering continues, then smiles gently. “But you do have some clothing going across, there is some cross-border trading, there are TVs being carried over the mountains, and these communities are becoming very rich. But we try to keep the best relationships and China respects that also.”

Underlying the entire relationship, there will always be the undercurrent of religion.

Bhutan’s Cement

Ultimately, the cement that holds together the yak herder from the high Himalayas, the rice farmer from the 7,000-foot-high Paro valley and the vegetable farmer from the southern plains of Phuntsholing is religion. Buddhism has permeated every facet of Bhutanese life, family, society, even government. Though nominally a secular democracy, it is in many ways a more deeply devout nation than even the avowed theocracy of a Saudi Arabia or a Russia under the one-time state religion of communism.

The dzongs that dominate the hillsides and the confluence of rivers across Bhutan still serve as the capitols of each of the various provinces. Each fort is divided neatly into two courtyards. Around the secular courtyard are the offices where the governor and his bureaucracy oversee the prosperity and order of the farmers, herders, and businessmen of their region. The religious courtyard at the other end serves as the monastery where the lama and his monks tend to the spiritual well being of the same population. Both are, effectively, joined at the hip.

A tiny skybox, with narrow slit windows overlooks the flat, cobblestone outdoor amphitheater in the dzong of Mongar. Framed by soaring snow-covered peaks, the fort is located in the heart of the village, which serves as the capital of the thinly populated eponymous province in a remote eastern region of Bhutan. Inside, sharing locally-produced corn flakes like popcorn in a snack bowl, sits the governor of Mongar in festive dress with tall, colorfully embroidered boots. Huddled just next to him is the venerable lama, his shaved head and saffron robe suggesting his rank and station.

“The lama has the more difficult task,” smiles the governor, Dasho Dzongdag Sherab Tenzin, turning to his companion, poking him gently. It takes a lot to wrest a smile from the lama, however. “He gets up at midnight and then has to sit here all day and watch. Everything happens under his blessing.”

What is happening beneath them is Mongar’s annual teschu, or festival. A complex and vibrant amalgam of stylized dances, rhythmic music, vividly colored costumes that swirl into a kaleidoscope of frenzied pirouettes and leaps, even clowns prancing across the plaza, all the players concealed behind elaborately painted and decorated masks, many with enormous horns, antlers, and large ears, it is a ritual largely unchanged for a thousand years. Said to be an exact re-enactment of visions experienced by Bhutan’s great Buddhist saints, it is an integral part of the cement that holds together the people of Mongar and ties them to the rest of the Bhutanese people. At the same time, it allows the lama and governor to convey more contemporary messages.

The message this year is aids prevention. A large sign in English at the far end of the stone amphitheater proclaims, “We kissed, got out of breath, knew it would happen, I said ‘wait’ reached for condom, we smiled, we kissed, got out of breath.... Reach for a condom before it’s too late.” Meanwhile, clowns pass among the spectators with huge plastic garbage bags filled with condoms that they hand out even to the youngest members of the audience. Yes, the modern world does penetrate even to Bhutan, which did its best, until barely 40 years go, to keep it resolutely at bay.

“One thing we find out about Buddhist society is that we are by nature not very expressive,” Governor Tenzin observes. “A Buddhist would not be able to say, ‘I love you,’ even to his wife. That is the way we are. So you come to a festival here, you see a lot of clowns; talking about sex is difficult, so we show it here, what you would not normally discuss. What we are trying to tell people is that there is a disease called aids and safe sex is important. And one of the options, one of the better options, is the condom.”

Indeed, Bhutan is always anxious to keep the worst, not to mention much of the world, at bay. When we arrived at Paro Airport, at the height of the global panic over swine flu, masked medical technicians greeted each of us before we were allowed as far as passport control, held an electronic thermometer against our forehead and asked if we felt any flu-like symptoms. As for aids, there have been barely 160 cases officially reported in Bhutan, and while the World Health Organization estimates 500 or so may exist throughout the country, only a small fraction are out here in Mongar, where the vast bulk of its 40,000 inhabitants of the entire province are scattered across farms and tiny hamlets.

This is one of the most remote corners of Bhutan, accessible, for the moment, only by the single east-west road through the high mountains. It is so remote that it even has its own language—Sharchop, vastly different from the Dzongkha that is spoken west of the Black Mountains that divide this nation neatly in half. Though the king and the various governors are doing their level best to make English the national language, few here were able to stammer out more than a few words. For a small group of young monastery students, we were the first Americans they had ever met.

Still, it is the culture—celebrated by the teschus that happen throughout the year across the country—together with its Buddhist overlay, that are the real cement that makes Bhutan a nation. That, and his royal highness.

From Monarchy to Democracy

Until two years ago, Bhutan was officially one of the world’s last absolute monarchies. The House of Wangchuck has been blessed by a succession of gifted rulers and heirs. Each has endeared himself to his 700,000 subjects. From the beginning, the kings have traveled, crisscrossing the entire country, making themselves personally accessible to the lowliest individuals. Even before there was a single passable road, they would trudge for hundreds of miles at times on foot, at times on horses, or at higher elevations on yaks, seting off with their retinues for the most remote hamlets. In December, in the wake of a catastrophic earthquake, the fifth king set off in a dozen automobiles for the collapsed villages, across the Black Mountains. On such visits, the king would distribute his land (the royal lands comprise the vast bulk of unsettled territory in the country) to worthy or needy individuals. At a stroke, he has been able to settle disputes, award citizenship or even marriage licenses (as he did to the parents of one friend of ours in Thimphu), and distribute largesse of all types.

But two years ago, Bhutan left the realm of absolute monarchies, elected a popular parliament and became a democracy—though the fifth king remains the head of state. His father, the fourth king, had initiated the process. Still, across the nation, even at many of the highest levels of this democratic government, there is a quiet admission that if a referendum were held on the question tomorrow, the overwhelming choice of the people would be to scrap democracy and return to an absolute monarchy.

“They see what has happened in other democracies, even in India,” explains one leading politician. “And they worry.”

But of far greater worry to the fourth king, according to several of those who have advised him, was what is generally referred to as the genetic imperative. Bhutan has been blessed by a succession of capable, even dazzling rulers. But can it always count on that? The future of the nation, perhaps its very survival, cannot rest on a genetic roll of the dice. What if the next heir somehow falls short of the attributes of his predecessors? Democracy, it seemed to the fourth king, was the only alternative. Perhaps.

But if the monarchy is sold on democracy, the people still have some profound reservations. In the first parliamentary election two years ago, voters sent to Thimphu 45 members of the government party and two members of the opposition. As Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley tells me in the course of an hour-long conversation in his offices decorated in lavish Bhutanese style in the parliament building, “I guess what the people wanted was continuity with the past. And I think between the two parties they felt that our party represented continuity, in the sense that there were five of us from the previous government and many of us were directly trained by the fourth king and served the fourth king from the day he was crowned. And the other party had only two, of which one of them had been with his majesty the king soon after he came to the throne.... The thrust of our campaign slogan was “not so much change.” The other party emphasized change and I think they placed too much emphasis on the need for change, while not being able to clearly convince the people. So what people saw, I think, was reason for the fear of the unknown.”

Which is not to say there are not those with some reservations about the true benevolence, as well as the power, of the monarchy. On our way back west from Mongar, we are stopped for an hour or so at a roadblock. Road workers are repairing a section of the highway that had been washed away. We wander down toward the work site.

On the left of the road, next to a pile of large rocks are squatting a dozen women. Using metal hammers, they are, one by one, breaking up the rocks into smaller rocks and creating a pile of large-scale gravel. It is hard, backbreaking labor. The most elderly, and clearly the most outspoken, tells me she’s been doing this every day for some 40 years. She is not very bitter at her lot. The work has allowed her to raise a lovely family, of whom she is clearly quite proud. What does irk her, however, is a deeper slight that has been festering for years. Over the past decades, she has applied several times for a grant of land from the king so that she might find a way back to the village where she was raised.

Each time, she has been either refused or ignored. No reason is ever provided. None is required either by law or tradition. But she sees others from her village who have been so favored. Still, she goes back to work each day. Breaking rocks. Is she happy, I ask? She shrugs. Sure. She is happy. Buddhists are rarely unhappy with their lot in life. But she could be happier. Perhaps the largest question facing Bhutan is how to keep its people happy—or, better yet, make them even happier.

What, me worry? Gov. Sherab Tenzin of Mongar Provice.

Gross National Happiness

Indeed, beyond Buddhism and the monarchy, happiness is the other glue that holds this nation together and that has made Bhutan best known far beyond its borders. Sometime during the reign of the fourth king, he decided that Bhutan’s place near the bottom of the world’s nations by the traditional measure of gross national product (gnp) did not quite reflect the quality of life in his kingdom. Another measure of success was necessary. He hit upon the concept of Gross National Happiness, or gnh.

Basically, the concept, which has evolved into a complex system to measure the state of mind of every individual, from the most remote hamlet to the capital, is assessed by a series of 72 indicators organized in nine domains ranging from psychological wellbeing and community vitality to the economy, the environment, and security. Every government initiative, every law, every investment must be run past the gnh Commission. If it doesn’t pass muster, it doesn’t happen. When American entrepreneur Daniel Spitzer was launching his investment in hazelnut production, with the intention of bringing 25,000 trees to Bhutan, it had to stand the test of gnh. It did.

“Our task is to make gnh ever more concrete so it can guide policy in the government, so that all actions are consistent with this policy, and so that we are able to attain Gross National Happiness as required by the Constitution,” says Dasho Karma Tshiteem, secretary-general of gnh.

Every two years, a group of carefully-trained pollsters will be fanning out across the country to assess the nation’s gnh. The first such effort did not take place until 2007 and it was very much a work in progress. This first round selected 350 families, with one member taken through a list of questions, some 128 pages in length. It took eight hours to administer the poll, and each respondent was paid 250 nultrums ($5.38) for their participation. At times, it took the pollsters eight hours of walking to reach the more remote locations. Over the next two years, the poll was refined. Now, it’s just 54 pages and takes two hours to administer, as it was last year to 950 families. They will do it again later this year, with a vastly expanded group of 8,000 respondents.

What did they learn? “People who are earning more are actually happier than those who aren’t,” says Tshoki Zangmo, who helps administer the poll at the Center for Bhutan Studies. “Also, people in Thimphu are the ones who are the most stressed and who don’t socialize much with their family.”

What this means in terms of policy, is quite clear to Zangmo. “We cannot just let our people be led by their illusion that money is everything,” she says. “Our government has to try” to broaden the definition of happiness.

Out in the provinces, where the rubber meets the dirt road, officials like Sherab Tenzin, the governor of Mongar, are trying to do just that. The biggest problem for the governor is how to keep his people down on the farm. Ultimately, that means how to keep them happy. “Mongar is basically agricultural countryside,” he says. “But if your activities are not productive, no matter what I feel, what the government feels, they will not stay on the farms. I would like to see by and large that people maintain their values. People will get educated and modernized. What we have done is to show people that if we don’t support our customs, our institutions will also go very fast. We must stay in touch with our values. This is our top priority.”

Indeed, it is a priority that small nations like Bhutan must learn if they are to continue to survive, even prosper, rather than being ground between or absorbed by far larger and more prosperous neighbors.

Or as Foreign Minister Tshering puts it, “The role of Bhutan is to be silent and do what we must in the small place called home. And not have to be too worried with the broader universe.” Perhaps this is the true secret of happiness.