Once upon a time, in what some calendars called the 1950s, there lived a young prince named Jigme Singye Wangchuck, whose father ruled over Bhutan, a maze of glacial valleys in the Himalayas almost perfectly isolated from events down below. Nearly a century earlier, Jigme’s great-grandfather, Ugyen Wangchuck, the First Dragon King of the Land of the Thunder Dragon, had unified a jumble of warring fiefdoms into a single country, and by proving to be a useful ally, preserved Bhutan’s independence from the British Empire in India. In the 1960s, Jigme became the first in his line to leave his country, and he was educated in a series of English boarding schools amid the dying embers of the very same empire on which the sun, it seemed, had finally set, reducing it from nearly a quarter of the Earth’s land mass in the nineteenth century to a few islands and protectorates.
In 1972, when the sixteen-year-old Jigme ascended to the throne as the Fourth Dragon King of Bhutan, he inherited the last monarchy in the Indian subcontinent. In an era of declining royal power, revolutionary leftist movements, increasing democratization, and economic globalization, Jigme understood that Bhutan’s independence, always precarious, would only grow increasingly more so, sandwiched as it was between India and China, which had swallowed up formerly independent neighbors such as Sikkim and Tibet. Eager to grasp the reins, Jigme toured the length and breadth of Bhutan to hold public audiences with his subjects. It became clear to him that his people wanted to preserve their country’s independence and cultural uniqueness, and to live in a society where the needs of the human spirit outweighed those of quarterly balance sheets.
Unlike his predecessors, Jigme attended international conferences, and in 1979, on his return by way of India—Bhutan had no airports then—from the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana, he was asked by an Indian journalist to speak to his country’s high levels of poverty. Jigme told the journalist that what really interested him wasn’t Bhutan’s gross national product, but rather what he called “Gross National Happiness.” Although royal insiders claimed that Jigme had toyed with the idea ever since he became king, this was the first time he had given his evolving ideology a name in public. Thus, while other nations on worldwide would continue to define their well-being purely in economic terms, Jigme proposed a radical—and yet, he was careful to stress, innately Bhutanese—idea: his country would measure its wealth by its people’s happiness. The phrase stuck, and the slogan came with a plan. Thenceforth, Bhutan would be guided by the four pillars of Gross National Happiness: environmental preservation, cultural conservation, transparent governance, and socioeconomic sustainability. If the people’s happiness depended on their culture being protected, then Jigme would protect it. He promoted a set of “Rules for Disciplined Behavior,” or Driglam Namzha, which included a strict dress code requiring all subjects to wear traditional robes, regardless of whether they lived in the mountains or the tropical lowlands. Likewise, all new construction would have to conform to architectural tradition, embodied by the monastery-fortresses called dzongs, with their flared red roofs and thick white walls.
Jigme’s great reforms included devolving power to an elected assembly, liberalizing the press, and harnessing the country’s mighty rivers into hydropower stations, turning Bhutan into one of the world’s newest and most sustainable democracies. Happiness surveys collected directly from the people flowed into government deliberations. Over the course of a single generation, Jigme’s program to concentrate on Gross National Happiness delivered free education, free health care, consistent growth, and higher life expectancy. Bhutan began to be called the happiest country in the world. In 2008, Jigme abdicated to his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, the Fifth Dragon. The photogenic, Oxford-educated Jigme Khesar would continue along the path his father had set while also breaking ground on “Mindfulness City,” a Western-designed high-tech city of the future, set to provide endless opportunities for the kingdom’s subjects in industries like cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, and surrounded by wildlife corridors in a kingdom where 60 percent of its surface has been set aside for forest preservation.
This fairy tale, such as it is, is the foundational myth of Bhutan, and as very few people are able to visit—there are no direct flights, it costs over a hundred dollars a day just to be there, and one is restricted to a supervised, weeklong visit—most of the world tends to believe it word for word.
The Expulsion
In November 2024, this tale was paraded as fact by Lesley Stahl and her team at CBS’s 60 Minutes as they toured Bhutan in the company of government ministers. Standing atop a promontory overlooking the site of the future Mindfulness City alongside Lotay Tshering, the former prime minister who will be the new city’s governor, Stahl surveyed the scene and exclaimed, “This is empty right now!” She failed to note that the only reason the area was empty was because it had been ethnically cleansed between the late 1980s and mid-1990s, when over 110,000 Bhutanese subjects—the so-called Lhotshampa, or “southerners”—were stripped of their citizenship and herded into refugee camps in Eastern Nepal, in one of the largest mass expulsions of modern times.
As the world’s attention was focused on the breakup of the Soviet Union, the war in the Balkans, and the genocide in Rwanda, the expulsion of the Lhotshampa went largely unnoticed.
In the early 1990s, as the world’s attention was focused on the breakup of the Soviet Union, the war in the Balkans, and the genocide in Rwanda, the expulsion of the Lhotshampa went largely unnoticed. Hailing from the fertile grasslands along the country’s southern border with India, the Lhotshampa, a community of Nepali-speaking Hindus who migrated to Bhutan in the 1700s, had long been treated as second-class citizens, supplying slave labor for public works projects in a practice that lasted well into the 1960s. Nonetheless, thanks in part to their emphasis on education, by the late twentieth century the Lhotshampa had come to occupy a large role in Bhutan’s governmental, financial, and agricultural life, and they were projected to one day constitute a majority of its population. As far as Jigme Singye Wangchuck was concerned, the Lhotshampa constituted an existential threat to the continued dominance of his own ethnic group, the Dzongkha-speaking Ngalop, who live in Bhutan’s mountainous center, practice Buddhism, and today comprise half of the country’s population of nearly nine hundred thousand.
Slowly but surely, and abetted by the tenets of Gross National Happiness, the culture of the Ngalop elite was promoted as the country’s only official culture. Soon, the purges began—quietly at first, with the dismissal of longtime government ministers. One of them, Tek Nath Rizal, a Lhotshampa royal adviser and elected representative who was conscripted as a sixteen-year-old to work for the Bhutanese government under its Compulsory Free Labor policy, was arrested in 1988 for presenting Jigme Singye with a petition protesting the new anti-Lhotshampa decrees, including the banning of the Nepali language in public schools. Rizal was tortured, tried summarily, and sentenced to life in a military prison, though he was released a decade later thanks to efforts by Amnesty International, his health in ruins.
Following this and other high-profile arrests, Lhotshampa schools and businesses were shut down, and fields and orchards were confiscated. Journalists and civil servants were dismissed. Soldiers with spotless records were dishonorably discharged and sent home, only to find those homes had been seized. The keys to entire Lhotshampa villages were handed over to new Ngalop residents. While some may argue that Bhutan had never carried out a proper census—the first took place in 2005—any Lhotshampa unable to produce extensive documentation to support their claims to either their citizenship or their properties were harassed into signing away their rights and transported to Bhutan’s border with India, where, in collusion with Indian government forces, the Lhotshampa were dumped on Nepal’s eastern border, forbidden to ever again set foot in Bhutan.
What had begun with dozens of expatriations in 1988 grew into thousands in 1991, and by 1996, the total number of refugees exceeded one hundred thousand. Having left homes and plots their families had occupied for centuries, which were quickly sold to new Buddhist owners, the Lhotshampa were rushed into bamboo huts with tarpaulin roofs and dirt floors, split among seven camps outside the Nepalese city of Damak. As the expulsions gained momentum, life for the Lhotshampa in Bhutan became so restrictive that some decided to go into “voluntary” exile in Nepal, partly so that their children would be able to attend Nepali-language schools. These cases would later be held up by the Bhutanese government as incontrovertible evidence that no Lhotshampa had ever been deported but rather left willingly. While the Lhotshampa lost many of their most talented to exile—civic and religious leaders and trained professionals among them—those who remained in Bhutan faced constant discrimination, finding it almost impossible to secure employment, apply for business licenses, or even move freely around the country.
As the dust settled in the mid-1990s, it became evident that Jigme Singye’s mass deportation campaign had successfully depleted the Lhotshampa community financially, intellectually, and politically. While they still constitute over a quarter of Bhutan’s population—down from a third pre-deportation—their influence is a pale shadow of what it used to be. From the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, fifteen rounds of ministerial-level talks were held between the UN and Bhutan on the question of repatriating the Lhotshampa. Following the failure of those negotiations, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees resettled the overwhelming majority of the Lhotshampa in eight Western countries: Australia, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with nearly ninety thousand heading for the latter. This resettlement process began in 2006 under the George W. Bush administration and ended in 2016.
Despite being scattered around the world, Lhotshampa communities in places as far-flung as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Sydney, Australia, have remained closely in touch, and as far as the data shows, the resettlement of the Lhotshampa in the West has been a success. Bhutanese newcomers have assimilated while remaining passionately devoted to their culture and committed to one day returning to Bhutan. Suraj Budathoki might be the perfect case in point. Born in Bhutan and raised in the refugee camps, Budathoki was resettled in the United States in his twenties and quickly rose to become a prominent youth leader, establishing the organization Peace Initiative Bhutan to open a dialogue between the Bhutanese government and the Lhotshampa. Over the years, Budathoki has led multiple delegations to Washington, D.C., in order to raise awareness of the challenges facing Bhutanese refugees and to build support for a congressional resolution urging Bhutan to acknowledge and address the forced displacement of the Lhotshampa. Thanks to his and others’ efforts, resolutions were introduced in the House by Representative Ro Khanna and in the Senate by Senators Sherrod Brown and Bob Casey in 2023. While both Brown and Casey recently lost their seats, Budathoki was elected to the New Hampshire state legislature, becoming the first Bhutanese American state representative in the country’s history.
There are still around 6,500 Lhotshampa living in the camps of eastern Nepal—now reduced to two from the original seven—comprising members of the community either too old or too ill to relocate, as well as some who refuse to be resettled as they believe doing so would permanently shut the door on their ability to return to Bhutan. Susan Banki’s The Ecosystem of Exile Politics, the result of sixteen years of research and fieldwork, suggests that resettlement may indeed have made the future repatriation of the Lhotshampa even more unlikely. While resettling refugees may at first appear to be a sound solution to a horrific problem, Banki argues that it can produce unintended consequences. First, resettlement “depletes refugee camps of leadership, skilled workers, and morale,” and second, while resettling protects some—if not all—refugees, it also “has the potential to encourage the kinds of behavior that lead to refugee flows in the first place.” Simply put, why should governments refrain from expelling their citizens when they know they will be relocated elsewhere? Of course, keeping refugees permanently in camps isn’t a solution either. Refugee camps are by their very nature meant to be temporary, and people usually hope to return home.
In her book, Banki also discusses the case of Ratan Gazmere, a Lhotshampa academic and one of the civic officials imprisoned during the purges. Gazmere created a database that would forever influence the fate of his community. While Bhutan had officially expelled many Lhotshampa on the basis of their claim that these individuals could not prove their citizenship, the overwhelming majority of these people actually possessed some form of documentation. Aware that refugee camps were prone to fires, and that these precious documents might disappear overnight, Gazmere, the head of the Association of Human Rights Activists, realized the pressing need to create a digital repository for all the documents possessed by the Lhotshampa community in Nepal. With the aid of a small grant from a Norwegian charity, Gazmere and his collaborators assembled a CD-ROM compilation of passports, identity cards, and land deeds, and personally presented a copy to Mary Robinson, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. While Gazmere was only able to collect information for roughly one out of every two refugees, this innovative resource produced two startling consequences: one, it showed that the Lhotshampa could prove they were Bhutanese citizens and had therefore been illegally deported, and two, that if they could not return to Bhutan, this database could serve as the basis for their claim to be resettled elsewhere as legitimate asylum seekers.
The act of safeguarding people’s documents—and thus the Lhotshampa’s legal basis for their return—had counterintuitively helped start the process that would take them thousands of miles farther away from home to new host countries, where they remain to this day. Clearly, resettlement is a complicated and partial solution to a problem, and it is not what one would call restorative justice. For their part, the Bhutanese government has remained remarkably consistent in its policy of neither addressing the expulsion of the Lhotshampa nor entertaining serious talks on the subject of their repatriation. It isn’t difficult to see why. Because of its proximity to India and China, Bhutan has long made a virtue of exploiting the strategic impregnability of its perch to preserve its autonomy, pitting larger and more powerful neighbors against one another. In the midst of ongoing territorial disputes with China, with the latter claiming stretches of land in Bhutan’s east and north, Bhutan has received unconditional support from India, and in a more minor way, from China’s other leading adversary, the United States, neither of whom are willing to raise the thorny subject of the Lhotshampa, despite the best efforts of activists like Budathoki and others.
The Privation of Happiness
While the question of whether the Lhotshampa will ever return to Bhutan remains unanswered, King Jigme Khesar Wangchuck has pulled out all the stops to make Mindfulness City happen. His vision includes a special economic zone that covers an area of nearly one thousand square miles, with a high-capacity international airport and a railway line connecting Bhutan to India. According to the World Bank, Bhutan’s government has invested millions of dollars in equipment for cryptocurrency mining, despite the fact that cryptocurrency, which is extremely energy-intensive, is at odds with the image of sustainability Bhutan likes to project abroad—it is, for instance, an exporter of clean hydropower to India. The city’s plan, a bizarre web of Tetris-like bridges suspended over the region’s rivers, has been designed by Danish starchitect Bjarke Ingels. The Fifth Dragon has enlisted high-profile supporters, among them Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and Nobel laureates Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz. All that remains is to build it.
The Fifth Dragon may well discover he has spent a fortune building one of the world’s most expensive ghost towns.
However, once the work is complete, the Fifth Dragon will face a more difficult challenge: finding enough of his subjects, many of whom are leaving the country in droves, to populate Mindfulness City. Over the past five years, and increasingly since the end of global travel restrictions, Bhutan has been experiencing unprecedented levels of emigration, especially among the young, well-educated Buddhist majority. According to Reuters, more than twelve thousand young Bhutanese relocated to Australia in 2023, with many of them finding work in hospitality and clerical positions or securing places to study at the country’s universities. Many more appear set to follow. While Australia has always attracted the Bhutanese elite for educational or recreational purposes, these numbers point to an exodus of Bhutan’s best and brightest, all helped by Australia’s easing of visa restrictions to help overcome their ongoing labor shortage.
This exodus of young talent points to a larger problem. The 2019 World Happiness Report ranked Bhutan 95 out of 156 countries, down from 79 in 2015. A report issued by the Asian Development Bank in 2011 noted that the poorest members of Bhutanese society were female heads of rural households, and as of 2023, only 56.8 percent of women were in the labor force, compared to 72.4 percent of men. Despite a construction boom in cities like the capital, Thimphu, there is an affordable housing crisis, and well-paying jobs are hard to find. Indeed, despite Bhutan’s repeated insistence that it places its people’s happiness at the heart of all its decisions, the numbers show that the country has been slipping down the very global happiness indices that Gross National Happiness helped to inspire in the first place. Increasingly seen as an alternative to development indices like GDP and HDI, Gross National Happiness burst onto the global stage in 2011, when the government of Bhutan introduced Resolution 65/309 (a.k.a., “Happiness: Towards a Holistic Definition of Development”) to the UN General Assembly. The General Assembly unanimously adopted the resolution, and a World Happiness Report has been issued annually ever since. Interestingly, Bhutan’s set of statistics are among the report’s most incomplete; out of 156 participating countries, it’s in the company of Cuba, Guyana, and Oman in that respect. Not only does the instigator of the World Happiness Report fare badly by its own metrics, it also fails to release the data necessary for guiding public policy and satisfying its goal of transparency—a pillar of Gross National Happiness—before the court of international opinion.
Thus, if the Fifth Dragon cuts the ribbon on Mindfulness City, he may well discover he has spent a fortune building one of the world’s most expensive ghost towns. It would be an apt fate for a city that is to be built on the land of displaced people. As Tankanath Bhujel, a resident of one of the Lhotshampa camps in eastern Nepal, pointed out, “40 percent [of our residents] are from Gelephu,” referring to the former Lhotshampa town where the new city will be built. There is, one might say, some poetic justice to Bhutan’s current emigration crisis. Having violently exiled a tenth of some of its most educated citizens a generation earlier for speaking a different language and worshipping a different god, the contemporary brain drain in Bhutan is how the Fifth Dragon must contend with the sins of his father. An exodus prompted by fears of a Hindu takeover has given way to a new migration, this time a voluntary one, as young members of Bhutan’s Buddhist elite line up to escape the happiest country in the world.
Charm Offensive
One wonders whether the Fifth Dragon considered the irony of all this when he visited Australia in October 2024 to address a stadium full of young émigrés to lure them back to Bhutan and help him build his city of the future. Almost twenty thousand of them came to hear members of the king’s entourage deliver a presentation on Mindfulness City and how these new immigrants to Australia could be part of this initiative over the course of a two-day “royal audience.”
Bhutan has largely gotten away with an attempt at ethnic cleansing, and its bright, orange-robed international image remains mostly untainted.
Would it not make a great deal of sense, one might ask, for the Bhutanese government to open a dialogue with Lhotshampa leaders and thereby solve two problems—and redress past wrongs—with a single decree? After all, it makes little sense to beg students to return to Bhutan when there are so many skilled and educated Bhutanese already begging for their right to return. Nonetheless, there is no indication of any desire among the Ngalop elite to see the Lhotshampa return to Bhutan. In fact, this level of thinking is likely anathema even in the Fifth Dragon’s innermost circles, at least while his father is still alive. As far as many observers are concerned, Jigme Singye remains the real power behind the throne, despite having abdicated eighteen years ago. He may be responsible for the Bhutanese government’s lack of interest in revisiting these events, especially since there is little to no international pressure being applied to Bhutan by its partners and collaborators: India, the United States, and now Australia.
As such, and sad as this conclusion might be, Bhutan has largely gotten away with an attempt at ethnic cleansing, and its bright, orange-robed international image remains mostly untainted. It is distressing to see what little regard the Lhotshampa question receives whenever the subject of Bhutan arises in the West, where Gross National Happiness has increasingly come to be seen as a viable framework for socioeconomic development and is the subject of much uncritical discussion, including in academic and political circles. Kingdom of Bhutan, a U.S. Congressional Research Service report issued in 2023, noted that Bhutan had become one of the world’s newest democracies in a process “spearheaded by the monarchy,” although nothing could be further from the truth. Most executive power remains in the hands of the royal family, and the entire “democratic” process rests on the king’s presumed benevolence. Elections in Bhutan remain tightly controlled, and political parties are closely vetted; most of the legitimate ones, especially those representing the Lhotshampa or other minorities, remain banned. Newspapers and television stations are strictly censored and public criticism of the government is illegal. Even so, Bhutan’s charm offensive on the international stage continues unabated, helped by the rose-colored spectacles of many Western media outlets. “If anywhere can rip up capitalism’s shibboleths, it’s Bhutan,” wrote Charlie Campbell, an editor at Time magazine earlier this year. It’s another example of how successfully Bhutan has benefited from the tired colonial trope of the noble savage. Only a country as underdeveloped and isolated up on its Himalayan perch could possibly both rehumanize capitalism and address the waning spirituality at the root of the West’s malaise, something beyond the reach of the rest of us in the lower, material world.
Bhutan, of course, is not alone in mistreating its citizens on the basis of their difference in our community of nations. It has been over two hundred years since the advent of modern nationalism, and despite recent challenges, the nation-state still regulates much of our lives and helps shape our identities. Many of the world’s peoples want to be in a country they can call home, where they believe they have a historical or religious claim. The twentieth century even witnessed the establishment of new countries, like Armenia and Israel, to house diasporic or minority peoples who had long faced persecution and genocide. Nevertheless, one of the most monumental ironies of the age of nationalism has been that the list of stateless peoples has only grown longer—sometimes as a direct result of the creation of these new states. Indeed, once one enters that list, it is difficult to leave it, as the long-standing travails of the Kurds and Palestinians tell us, both of whom continue to suffer genocidal attacks by people who tried to supplant them from their homelands.
The way that the Lhotshampa were resettled inevitably shapes how other populations might be rehoused elsewhere in the future, including President Trump’s recent proposal to relocate the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. Who will be next? There are at least 4.4 million stateless people residing in nearly one hundred countries of the so-called Fourth World, as some sociologists have dubbed it. In recent decades, it seems that we have merely been adding to that list—the Assyrians, the Hmong, the Bidoon, the Uyghur, the Rohingyas, the Dominican Haitians, to name only a few—and while never enough attention is paid to any of their cases, one would be hard-pressed to find a community whose story has received less attention than the Bhutanese Lhotshampa, who were quietly but violently ejected from villages they’d occupied for centuries by a dragon king, who, as that old fable goes, just wanted to make his people happy.