Politics of Bhutan - Preserving Traditional Culture

Preserving Traditional Culture

The codification of Bhutanese culture traces its roots directly back to Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel, the Tibetan lama and military leader who unified Bhutan as a nation state in the 17th century. The Shabdrung sought to unify the country not only politically but culturally as well. He established the Driglam Namzha, guidelines for architecture, festivals, and public dress and behavior. These guidelines were intentionally codified to encourage the emergence of a distinctive Bhutanese identity.

During the six 5-year plans for Bhutan's planned developing starting from the 1960s, authorities seemed to take the survival for Bhutan's tradition and culture for granted. During that period of rapid development a significant part of Bhutan's population, principally the youth, were exposed overnight to outside ideas, cultures, and influences. This period also saw a marked increase in immigrants from Nepal and India, most of whom settled in the south among the Lhotshampa.

By the 1980s, the government felt it necessary to safeguard the dominant Ngalop culture. In 1989 the government elevated the status of the Driglam Namzha dress code from recommended to mandatory. Afterward, all citizens were required to observe the dress code (the gho and kira) in public during business hours. This decree was resented by the Hindu Lhotshampa in the southern lowlands who voiced complaints about being forced to wear the clothing of the Ngalop. This was accompanied by regulations restricting employment and educational opportunities for residents who were not of full Bhutanese descent. However, the government finds it difficult to relent because it perceives a threat to tradition demographically and culturally. As a result of ethnic tensions, there were an estimated 107,000 refugees and asylum seekers, mostly Lhotshampa, in refugee camps in Nepal in 2008. By January 2010, an estimated 90,078 remained persons of concern.

About the causes and the course of the tension that prevailed in Bhutan since the year 1989, writes historian Sailen Debnath,"Not only in Samchi and Chirang District of Bhutan the Nepalese constituted the majority of the population, rather they grabbed a formidable percentage of Government services. At the sight of the alarming majority of the Nepalese in the Government offices except the posts of Lyonpos (ministers) and Dashos (deputy ministers and district magistrates), King Jigme Singhe Wangchuk and the members of the Tsogdu (Bhutanese National Assembly) considered the Gorkhaland movement too dangerous a signal for the Drukpas of Bhutan, and, therefore, took the decision of throwing the unwanted Nepali population out of Bhutan through the applications of different means. They became afraid right from the year 1989 of the inevitable consequences of the growing Nepali population in Bhutan and there was no difficulty in their realization that unless the influx of Nepali immigrants into Bhutan would have been stopped, Bhutan one day would certainly become another Darjeeling or Sikkim and the Drukpa Bhutanese would then become not only second class citizens rather unwanted in their own country. King Jigme Singhe Wangchuk toured all nooks and corners of Bhutan and delivered speeches to the Bhutanese students of different schools and Tserubse College on the indispensable necessity of national unity of Bhutan on the basis of Buddhist cultural heritage, social unity as well as Bhutanese national legacy of sovereignty.". As to the anxiety of the Bhutanese people and of the King of Bhutan, Sailen Debnath further adds,"The British Government encouraged the Nepalese to settle in the down-hills of Bhutan and King Jigme Wangchuk wanted to stop it. In 1950s, King Jigme Dorje Wangchuk adopted an undeclared policy to convert the Hindu Nepalese to Buddhism but failed. In 1989 King Jigme Singhe Wangchuk introduced “Di-lam-Namcha “ or national etiquette and national language policy by asking the Nepalese willing to stay in Bhutan to take to Dzongkha or Bhutanese national language. After a census at that time, King Jigme Singhe Wangchuk accused India in the language, “the total population of my country is only 6 lakhs, but in the U.N. record it is 1.2 million. Some Indian officers advised my father to show a much higher number in order to prove Bhutan per capita income wise a very poor country for the purpose of getting more U.N. aid”. The king wanted to mean that such a misstatement of total number of population should provide no excuse to the Nepali intruders into Bhutan with the claim that they had not intruded and population did not increase. Population increase was shown in paper as expediency; but the Royal Government took stringent measures in throwing out the non-citizen Nepalese from Bhutan. It has to be noted here that as nearly one lakh Nepalese were ousted from Bhutan and as refugees all of them did not return to Nepal, thousands of them settled along with their kinsmen in the Dooars and the Darjeeling hills leading to a destabilization in the set of language-wise population ratio in the area, and this has proved itself to be another cause of tension in North Bengal."