So Close to Heaven (8 page)

In the fall of 1992, the king told me that he had just faced the most turbulent National Assembly session of his reign. Many northerners and some Sharchopas, people from eastern Bhutan, who had rejected overtures
to join a crusade against the Drukpa monarchy, wanted a get-tough policy and the public swearing of loyalty oaths to the king. Some threatened to take action against the rebels themselves. “Buddhists may be nonviolent,” an administrator in the south told me. “But you can’t push a Buddhist too far. Never poison the mind of a Buddhist or the Buddhist will go out of control. Cambodia was a peaceful land, but remember the Khmer Rouge.” And the militant monks of Sri Lanka, I thought to myself.

The king tells the nation at every opportunity that he is committed to as humane a policy as possible in the south. If it fails, he is prepared to abdicate, he says. “What can I lose when what is at stake is the future of the Bhutanese people?” Recognizing that monarchy is not a very popular form of government at the end of the twentieth century, he says that ultimately the Bhutanese must be free to choose whatever system they want. He is doubtful about democracy, however, saying that a society needs to achieve some kind of “perfection” before it will work. He noted that the expansion of voting in Bhutan in 1992 had almost instantly produced a political bribery case, the country’s first.

He greatly admires the king of Thailand’s devotion to the development of his country. The Thai monarch has made himself an expert on, among other arcana, urban sewage treatment, what to do with the water hyacinth that clogs the canals, and the dangers of planting too many eucalyptus trees, while also very skillfully using his immense moral and mystical authority to support democracy in times of crisis. “His Majesty in Thailand is one of the few monarchs who is keeping the flag flying for a dying race of kings,” King Jigme Singye Wangchuck says with a touch of sadness. Aware of the Thai king’s immense popularity and power of persuasion over the Thai people, the Bhutanese king is more deeply hurt by the personalization of the southern rebellion. Stricken by the image, he describes almost mournfully how southerners hang pictures on their walls of the king and queen of Nepal. “In their minds and hearts,” he says, “they feel they are Nepalis.”

Increasingly disheartened and even desperate, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck takes his message to the south, from village to village where citizens have applied to leave to join refugees in Nepal. His ministers and family fear for his safety. Since he has pledged his throne to the cause of peace in that turbulent region, he says he has no option but to go, again and again.

“I have no hatred for southern Bhutanese people,” the king said. “I don’t have any hatred or anger against antinationals who have perpetrated a tremendous amount of violence and bloodshed in southern Bhutan. Our hope was that if we could develop the south, this would go a long way toward winning the hearts and minds of our people. I had hoped that they would realize the benefits of remaining Bhutanese citizens, and I explained to them that if you emigrate, or if you abscond, or if you go to Nepal or to India, your future will be bleak. There is chronic unemployment in India, there’s chronic unemployment in Nepal. I cannot understand how they could possibly have a better livelihood outside the country.

“But the dissident groups who are outside want to make very sure that the development plan fails, because only in the atmosphere of discontent and only in a situation where there is a lot of suffering and unhappiness and disgrundement in the south can they be successful in getting the support of the local people. So their objective and our objective are at opposite poles.”

As if the disruption of a southern rebellion cloaked in a democracy movement weren’t enough to keep a monarch busy, the king of Bhutan also feels pressure from various factions within his own Buddhist community. The new middle class, allowed in the early 1990s to privatize the previously government-run tourism industry, now wants to expand it to make investments—in hotels, restaurants, trekking and camping equipment, and imported vans and cars—pay off more expeditiously. With only a few thousand tourists (not counting Indians, over whom Bhutan has virtually no control) allowed to enter the country every year, profits are not large. Furthermore, dozens of small enterprises jumped into action when government ownership of tourism as well as national bus routes ended and services were sold into private hands. If tourist numbers remain small, there is bound to be a shakeout of unviable businesses, some of them operating more or less from the backseats of battered jeeps. When the consolidation comes, the already rich (who took to tourism with alacrity) will be richer and the poor entrepreneurs will be in another line of work—and resentful.

The infant tourism industry also wants more of Bhutan’s temples and monasteries opened to foreigners. That request provokes sharp counter-reactions from the religious leadership and monastic orders. Monks wield considerable power in Bhutanese society. They not only resist the
further intrusion of tourists—saying that temple treasures will disappear and the sanctity of holy places will be irrevocably disturbed—but also quietly defy efforts to modernize monastic life and put thousands of state-supported monks into some form of public service.

“We have always had very close affinity, very close respect and cooperation and deep faith, with the clergy,” the king said. “There has always been total and complete harmony. One of the reasons is because the religious institutions in Bhutan do not interfere in the political aspects of the country, and the king does not interfere with religious affairs. In fact, I have emphasized to the government as well as to the religious community of Bhutan that it is important to give them more and more powers as far as religion is concerned. But even within Buddhism, changes have to take place, whereby the monks can no longer like in the past live in the four corners of the dzongs. They will have to go out and do social work. We would like them to be doctors, be health workers, help the farmers, help the poor people. I think that in this day and age, the Buddhist institutions in Bhutan will have to reach out to the people.”

Where the king and religious leaders seem to be in agreement is in their opposition to the creation of an urbanized plutocracy with only the thinnest of ties to traditional Bhutanese civilization. This, the king says, is why he has turned his attention to satellite dishes, which he has banned twice.

“In Bhutan, we don’t want several classes of people,” the king said, “a small number of people who are affluent, who are rich, who are prosperous, and a majority of our people who are poor and live on subsistence farming. A lot of journalists from outside incorrectly criticized us for not permitting satellite dishes to be installed by the rich and very affluent few. They didn’t bother to say that there were only twenty-nine satellite dishes, and eighty percent of them belonged to members of the royal family or rich business people. I don’t see why any individual should spend seventy or eighty thousand ngultrum [about $2,700–$3,100] to have a satellite dish installed for his or her personal entertainment when the majority of the people do not have safe drinking water, when they don’t have any proper sanitation facilities, when they have to walk days to get to their villages, when they don’t have the opportunity to see even one movie in a year.”

King Jigme Singye Wangchuck and his late father have, at some risk to the monarchy itself, given the Bhutanese one tool that makes the
outside world truly accessible: a command of the English language, now the medium of instruction in all the country’s schools. “This is a decision that was made a long time back,” the king said. “If the government and the kings of Bhutan had wanted to keep Bhutan on a feudal basis, we would never have given priority to mass education—and certainly not in English.” The introduction of English as a medium of instruction minimizes clashes over the use of Dzongkha, Nepali, or any other regional language, and also shortens the route to high-quality education and vocational training. Bhutan does not have the resources to waste money sending students abroad on government scholarships if they are unable to work in an international language.

“Bhutan is a very small country and we need all the successes we can get,” the king says. “We cannot afford any failure at all. We want our people to be educated and highly productive. We want them to be professionals in every field they take up. If you are a sweeper, we want you to be a professional sweeper. If he is a mechanic, we want him to be the best mechanic he can be. This is why we have opened over two hundred schools in Bhutan, and one hundred fifty-eight health facilities.”

The policy of aiming high in human development explains how Ugyen Dorji, the village lad from faraway Lhuntsi district, found himself in Bregenz, Austria, apprenticed to a pastry chef a decade ago. He tells the story as we sit over coffee in his Thimphu café, a sideline to the most popular bakery in town. He calls the bakeshop the Jichu Drake in honor of a sacred Bhutanese mountain. In the kitchen, burly men in clunky shoes, flour-splattered ghos, and sheepish looks were furiously stirring batter and dough, chocolate in one vat, white éclair paste in another. The ambience may have been small-town Bhutanese, with babies playing around the pastry counter, but the cream horns and vol-au-vents Ugyen Dorji produces are European in both inspiration and quality. They are served in all the best homes, in government offices, and at all kinds of parties. Business is good. Last time I saw the chef, he tooted as he passed by in a new imported car as I was walking back from a tour of the general hospital. Next time I came to town, he was off in India (or was it Bangkok or Singapore?) buying more kitchen equipment.

Ugyen Dorji began his education in the mountains of eastern Bhutan by trekking for several days to a distant school at the beginning of each term, a sack of rice on his back. The rice was all his widowed mother could afford to give him for the food he would need as a boarder. She
had pleaded with local officials not to take her son away to school; they were insistent that he had ability and would benefit from education. From time to time, Ugyen Dorji said, she would take precious time to walk to his school to visit him and replenish his small stock of food. After completing a basic education, he drifted to Thimphu, where he eventually found a job in a government hotel, the Motithang. His knack with food got him noticed. The apprenticeship followed. He spent five years in Bregenz, and he returned a master, this mountain boy. But his mother, still living in a Lhuntsi village, has yet to make the trip to Thimphu to see her successful son at work. And he can’t spare the time very often for days of walking to his hometown.

There are other Ugyen Dorjis now, young men with scrubbed knees and new shoes or what are obviously their first pair of Western trousers, waiting at the Paro airport for a flight into the modern world to become engineers, doctors, business leaders, or maybe sanitation experts. Europeans welcome them as good investments in scholarship aid. They don’t seem to get homesick. They work hard. And when they come home, they make a difference, just as King Jigme Singye Wangchuck expects they always will. He takes a paternalistic pride in every Bhutanese achievement because they were born of royal policy, not public pressure—at least in the past.

“What most people don’t understand is that this development in Bhutan has not been asked for by the people; it was not thrust upon us,” he said of the monarchy. “We have done it because we believe that this will go a long way in educating our people in becoming more politically conscious, and at the same time to be able to actively participate in the decision-making process in all forms of development programs, both in their districts as well as nationally. If democracy in essence means that the government has to be supported by the people, decision-making has to be shared by the people, then I feel that in essence we have a far more democratic system than practically all the developing countries and some of the developed countries.

“We want to develop as rapidly as possible, but nevertheless what is important to us is that the pace of development and the ability of Bhutanese people to stay abreast of that pace—the gap between our own ability to do development programs and the pace of development that we implement—should not be so wide that it can never be bridged,” he said. “We also at the same time do not believe that more money means
more development. We don’t believe that unless the infrastructure is there it is not feasible for any developing country to achieve overnight economic prosperity and bring overnight changes, economically, socially, and politically.”

Though he wants more political participation, he returns repeatedly to his reservations about democracy. “In Bhutan, I myself feel disillusioned both about the democratic system of government as well as monarchy, because both have very serious flaws,” he said. “Like democracy, for instance, only works when you have a perfect society. You have to have a society which is highly literate, politically very conscious, and also enjoy a very high level of economic well-being and prosperity. Then at the same time, when it comes to monarchy, if you have a good king, he can do a lot of good. And if you don’t have a very good king, then he can do a lot of harm. The flaw with monarchy is that too much depends on one individual, and in Bhutan we cannot hope that for all time to come we will have a wise and good king.

“The king does not have a monopoly over what system of government we should have,” he said. Nor, he added, should anyone be making commitments about the future, when new generations may have different ideas. “Whatever changes we bring about in Bhutan, so long as it is in the best interest of the country, the final decision lies with the Bhutanese people. And that is how it should be.”

A few hours after the interview, when night had fallen over Thimphu’s small central square and I was back in the modest Druk Hotel, a car from the palace arrived and two men soon appeared at the door of my room bearing gifts: a thangka in brilliant embroidered silk, a ferocious ritual mask like those used in classical temple dances, and a tiny box made by Bhutanese silversmiths. I decided not to send them back. They live with me still, reminders of a culture on the edge.