So Close to Heaven (7 page)

I combed steamy Dhaka for warm clothes in something that would pass for an international style, and in a size bigger than any Bangladeshi woman would wear—if she wore Western dress, which very few did. I rounded up a knit skirt and sweater from a local designer who ran a boutique in a tourist hotel, then I had a morning left to tear through Dhaka’s vast bazaars in search of any shoes that weren’t sandals and something resembling warm tights or long socks that would at least clear my knees; mercifully, the skirt was longish. In Dhaka, they sold mostly imported (or maybe smuggled) tights made for doll-sized Thai women under five feet tall. I found some warm ones, but walking in them was a new experience, since they reached about two-thirds of the way up my legs. A day later, arriving in Bhutan wrapped in a shawl, I made my first project a visit to a handicraft store to buy a jacket made of
yatra
, a rainbow-colored rough woolen cloth, homespun and handwoven, that struggled catastrophically for compatibility with my slightly frumpy Dhaka designer ensemble. (After the interview, I threw all of this away except the jacket; hotel chambermaids tried to return only the shoes, uncertain why they were in the wastebasket.)

Altogether, I think I looked fairly absurd as I was driven to an afternoon audience with the king in a Foreign Ministry Mercedes-Benz. But the sitcom didn’t end there. The protocol officer assigned to me reacted in horror as I proceeded to get out of the car carrying a tape recorder and camera. Those are not permitted, he announced. I objected. We argued. He relented on the tape recorder; this was, after all, an interview on the record. But he held out, almost to the point of tears, over the camera. I gave in. When I later asked His Majesty if it might be possible to have a picture taken during the interview by a court photographer, the king asked me in return, “Didn’t you bring a camera?”

He summoned a royal photographer, who stood trembling halfway across the audience hall and took a few useless shots, while I told His Majesty that I had been asked to leave the camera in the car. He muttered something about how civil servants in Bhutan have a lot to learn about public relations.

The Druk Gyalpo was troubled but confident in that first interview. (A year later he would sound less optimistic about the future of Bhutan.)
“We have no choice but to preserve our culture,” he said. “Being a small country, we do not have economic power. We do not have military muscle. We cannot play a dominant international role because of our small size and population, and because we are a landlocked country. The only factor we can fall back on, the only factor which can strengthen Bhutan’s sovereignty and our different identity, is the unique culture we have. I have always stressed the great importance of developing our tradition because it has everything to do with strengthening our security and sovereignty and determining the future survival of the Bhutanese people and our religion.

“But we are not an orthodox race of people,” he continued. “In fact, we are very liberal-minded. We want to modernize the country and develop our country as quickly as possible. A lot of journalists in different parts of the world have given a very unfair and wrong impression that we want to remain a feudal state. No country in the world today wants to go back in time, and certainly this is not the case with Bhutan.”

King Jigme Singye Wangchuck is head of both state and government, serving as his own prime minister. His cabinet, still dominated in the early 1990s by middle-aged men older than he, drawn from the Bhutanese elite, is supposed to be helping to decentralize Bhutan, giving more power to district administrators and encouraging more local representation in lawmaking and development. When there is foot-dragging, the king loses his temper, a minister told me, describing a cabinet session that turned into a tirade. “He really tore into us,” he said. “What a lecture we got!” Most Bhutanese seem to accept the king as a committed and disinterested advocate of national development, though they are critical of some royal relatives and in-laws who appear to see openings to the newly freed private business sector as invitations to corner markets and reap huge financial rewards.

When not in his royal offices, on the road meeting his subjects, or at one of the four separate palaces of his four spectacularly beautiful wives, the youthful king lives in what appears (from a distant allowable vantage point) to be a reasonably small mountain lodge tucked into a steep side valley away from the main population concentrations along the Thimphu Chhu, the river that runs through the Bhutanese capital. When he travels, he makes a point of repeating, in even the poorest of crowds, the symbolic gesture of serving tea to his people. The understated lifestyle and demonstrations of humility seem to have paid off. The king said that
when he got a copy of an antimonarchical tract being circulated by southern Bhutanese dissidents, he was surprised by its limited scope. “After they wrote that I had four wives, they couldn’t think of anything else bad to say,” he recalled.

The king’s style drives his enemies wild. “He is
so
charming,
too
charming, our lovely king,” a southern Bhutanese student in self-imposed exile in the United States remarked acidly as he tried to convince me in New York that all foreigners are too easily taken in by this earnest young man who is the sole survivor of a lost brotherhood of Himalayan Buddhist kings. The theme of foreigners being hoodwinked by an articulate and elegant ruler runs through all Nepali-Bhutanese exile publications emanating from Kathmandu. There is no denying that as long as the king stays in control of policy in the south, and is the international face of Bhutanese Buddhism, rebels will have a difficult time winning a long-term propaganda war. Only a few years into the insurgency, by which time the king had pardoned more than fifteen hundred southern rebels, dissidents were already focusing their wrath and their news releases on a few government officials, usually the foreign minister, Lyonpo Dawa Tshering, or the home minister, Dago Tshering (who are not related: Tshering is another common Bhutanese name, first or last). Both men, incidentally, seem to have a veto power over decisions on admitting writers and scholars to the country, and that power has been used irrationally or at least inexplicably on some occasions, given the critical importance of getting a hearing for Bhutan abroad.

King Jigme Singye Wangchuck says he believes that the most important qualities of character a king or any other leader should have are fairness, honesty, and common sense. “Of course, any other human qualities, as many as possible, are good,” he added. The crown prince, who was born in 1980, is being raised in the same spirit, the king said. “I am very strict with him. I’m not strict with all of my children, but I’m very strict with him, because I don’t want him to be spoiled. I want him to lead a normal life, and I want him to understand the Bhutanese people and the way we feel.” The crown prince is now also a regular in the pages of
Kuensel
, as he takes on more ceremonial tasks.

The king used to play basketball nearly every day—a court was installed in Thimphu’s largest public park—but his preoccupation with the southern rebellion, and with the toll it is taking on the country’s development, has sapped both his energy and his hopes, he said, speaking in
an English colored lightly by British and Anglo-Indian accents. I asked him if it was a lonely and tormented life at the top, especially in such difficult times. He replied, veering off into more generalized introspection: “I don’t find it a very difficult problem because of the fact that I don’t have any personal ambitions for myself. I don’t do what is best for the king, or for the monarchy. I have found in the last thirty years, what is good for yourself is ninety-nine percent of the time bad for the country, and what is good for the country ninety-nine percent of the time is not good for yourself.” He wants to be remembered more than anything as a pacifier and developer of Bhutan, building on the example of his father.

“Real development only started in Bhutan in 1961, and in the first ten years we spent all our time constructing roads, building schools, building even office facilities for our government departments and staff, for our different ministries. So in the true sense, development programs started in the last twenty-one years,” he said. “What is important for outside countries to know, as well as our own neighbors in the region, is that we today, after thirty-one years of very rapid development, have achieved primary health coverage of ninety percent and primary education coverage of sixty-seven percent, child immunization of eighty-four percent. Our literacy level has increased from twenty-five percent to fifty-four percent, and our per capita income is right now around four hundred and twenty-five dollars.” The figure was higher than that of India, as are the Bhutanese literacy rate and the level of primary school attendance. But all the achievements, confirmed by international organizations that see Bhutan as something of a model for development, are threatened by the rebels the king calls “antinationals.”

“We were very confident in 1990 that before the year 2000 Bhutan would be the first South Asian country that would be able to provide universal free primary education as well as primary health coverage, as well as one hundred percent child immunization, to all our people. But the problems we are facing in southern Bhutan have had a very, very negative impact. We feel that unless peace and normalcy returns in Bhutan this objective, which we could have easily achieved before the year 2000, now today seems a very remote objective to fulfill. The problem has had a very, very serious effect on the well-being and also on the future prosperity and development of our people, not only in the south, but in all parts of Bhutan.”

By the turn of the twentieth century, it had already become clear to Bhutanese leaders and foreign visitors that the influx of Nepali-speaking settlers in southern Bhutan would someday be a problem. After Indian independence in 1947, before King Jigme Singye Wangchuck was born, tensions rose and finally a minor revolt erupted, sparked by a new Nepali-led Bhutanese Congress Party. It taxed the early years of his father’s reign.

“As a child I wasn’t very aware of these complexities and problems,” he said. “In 1953, when we had that uprising, the main reason was because India was flush from independence, it had democracy, and the main political party in India was the Congress Party. So the Nepalese felt that if you called their party the same as the Congress Party you would automatically get the support and sympathy and cooperation from the Indian Congress Party.

“Nevertheless, my father was a very forgiving man,” the king said. “By 1958, he gave Bhutanese citizenship to all nationals who were residing in Bhutan at that time. But it is no secret, everyone knew that sooner or later we were going to have a problem in southern Bhutan because of the large influx of illegal immigrants, and also because our southern Bhutanese people, who are Bhutanese citizens, were going all out to try and bring as many nationals from outside as possible to increase their demographic population. We have a very porous southern border of about seven hundred thirty kilometers. It is totally, completely impossible to close it.”

Later, I drove along part of that open and ill-defined frontier, from Phuntsholing, a noisy market town on the only easily accessible road to India, westward to Sibsoo, a hamlet near the border of Sikkim. The great South Asian plain begins here as the Himalayan foothills drop abruptly, sending mountain streams meandering crazily as if in confusion onto flatland. Forests give way to jungle scrub, enough to hide guerrillas—in one place long enough to dig a trench almost under the nose of an administrative center. Bhutan has no road of its own here, and my car weaved in and out of Indian territory all along the route.

On a morning walk around Phuntsholing, I could see schoolchildren crossing into Bhutan to take advantage of not only free but also more exciting schools with curricula designed to reflect the geography and life of the area. No one checked their identities at the border, or the identities of traders moving back and forth, some in Indian dress and some in
Bhutanese ghos and kiras. India demands the right of free access for its citizens; not surprisingly, they dominate cross-border commerce in this landlocked kingdom.

The king speaks bitterly of how the very high levels of recent development in the southern districts acted paradoxically as a catalyst to further migration, pulling in more illegal immigrants to what he called “a paradise on earth.” Meanwhile, the efforts to raise living standards in the south—where much of the country’s new small industries such as cement-making and fruit-processing were built to be more accessible to subcontinental roads and ports—had brought him into sharp confrontation with conservative northern Bhutanese who wanted all assistance to the ungrateful region halted.

All the while, rebels were bent on destroying the factories, schools, and clinics the government had built in the south, often depriving their own people and poor laborers from the Indian tea plantations across the border in the Cooch Behar area of West Bengal of the free health and education services they used in Bhutan. The king said that 60 percent of the patients who came to free Bhutanese hospitals along the border were Indian citizens. At one clinic I visited in Samchi, medical charts and files confirmed that there was a high proportion of foreign patients. On a bench in the sweltering courtyard, a family from India waited to have a sick child examined.

“We felt that for all bona fide southern Bhutanese citizens we must do everything possible to bring them into the Bhutanese mainstream politically, economically, socially, by giving them much more than what we give to the northern Bhutanese people,” the king said. “I’d always hoped that if we could increase their per capita income, if we could give them more land, if we tax them less—and we did so—if most of our industries were established in the south, then a lot of employment would be generated for our people in the southern districts. I felt that this would be a tremendous incentive for them to want to be a Bhutanese national, and not want to be a Nepalese national or Indian national, because the economic conditions and social conditions and political conditions across the border were much worse. But unfortunately, this policy was not successful.”