Who's in charge after democracy in Bhutan?

Happiness Land struggles with new Democratic Order

Bhutan vaulted from a feudal monarchy into a parliamentary democracy in 2008. That followed a royal edict in 2006 by the Fourth Druk Gyalpo (Dragon King) declaring abdication in favour of his eldest son and mandating democratic elections in 2008.

King Jigme Khesar Namgyel and Queen Jetsun Pema

For a mountain people who revere their King and don national dress every day, this sudden devolution of power has been most unsettling. Who is The Boss now? No one seems to know. None dare claim the role either.

Fourth King Jigme Singye crowns
Fifth King Jigme Khesar Namgyel

The civil service has been left floundering between an elected parliament of newbies still unclear about their remit and a monarch who stepped back. 

While the civil service acted on orders of the monarch, it was beyond challenge. That certitude has evaporated. The demand for transparency and accountability plus a proliferation of newspapers, has put the powerful bureaucracy on the defensive. 

The new democratic dispensation allows elected representatives to criticise administrative shortcomings in open debate. The newspapers amplify that embarrassment. This is an entirely novel experience for civil servants. They feel insecure and unloved. 

The resulting reluctance to take action on many pressing issues across the spectrum of administration, is beginning to slow down and paralyse the system. 

Even routine queries from the press are parried by bureaucrats for fear of being blamed for giving the 'wrong' answer. The civil servants feel they have been left high and dry without any precedent to follow. There is a leadership vacuum.

While devolution of power to the masses has a Utopian ring about it, the reality is that 70% of Bhutanese society is agrarian. The issues which preoccupy them are elemental - tilling the very limited (9%) arable land, tending livestock and eking out a subsistence in barren mountain terrain with difficult logistics, poor communications and a freezing cold most of the year. 

The finer points of parliamentary democracy and a free press seem too far from their lives to matter much. All the democratic noise and fury plays out in the capital Thimpu, where about 100,000 of Bhutan's 725,000 population and all its 12 newspapers reside.

Gross National Happiness (GNH) excites the UN

      Prime Minister Jigmi Yoezer Thinley & Keynote Speaker
President Laura Chinchilla Miranda of Costa Rica at the UN

The Fourth King Jigme Singye Wangchuk is credited with musing about the need to re-define traditional GDP factors about 40 years ago, for a more inclusive matrix of social progress and well-being. That evolved over time into the Happiness Index introduced in 2005, for which Bhutan is now universally lauded.

The trashing of the capitalist narrative in the USA and Europe, climate change effects from abuse and depletion of Earth's limited resources plus anger at the "1%" has coalesced into a search for alternative development models which put people and the environment ahead of profit. Bhutan's GNH approach is becoming an interesting model for many more nations.

In July 2011 the General Assembly of the United Nations unanimously adopted Resolution 65/309 empowering the Kingdom of Bhutan to convene a high-level meeting in New York on GNH - at its 66th session in April 2012. 

Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley led the discussions which received wide international media coverage. That has given the tiny landlocked Himalayan Kingdom sandwiched between China and India, an outsize international profile. The Bhutanese leadership basks in that limelight with great pride.

Perhaps too much GNH distraction?

Western academics have turned Bhutan's GNH into a conference-tourism industry. There is talk of a Centre for GNH to be built in Bumthang - a 10-hour drive through twisting hairpin bends and bumpy stretches - to facilitate international studies and research about the concept. Every other month there is a forum, seminar or international dialogue about GNH. There is no shortage of academic pilgrims journeying to Bhutan to talk GNH to death.

What is most curious about GNH seminars is that the speakers tend to be foreigners who do not live in Bhutan. The Bhutanese wisely stay out of the lecture circuit. They listen attentively and smile.

At the top where it matters, there is considerable GNH-fatigue and frustration with the hard realities Bhutan must confront. The young king, the deputy chairman of the National Council and the leader of the opposition are all railing for effective action to fix all the obvious problems.

India bankrolls the Bhutan economy, supplies most of its imports, builds its infrastructure of bridges and roads and provides unskilled labour for construction. Most of Bhutan's expatriate teaching faculty for schools and colleges are also recruited from India.

All of that has led to a 'rupee crunch' which saw the Ngultrum, previously accepted at par with the Indian rupee, being discounted by Indian Banks and traders. Now that has turned into a rigid demand for rupees only. Petty border trade is grinding to a halt with severe disruption to small business.

Bhutan has run out of rupee reserves to pay for its one-sided Indian trade. Emergency loans from India and conversion of Bhutan's US$ reserves into rupees is propping up the situation for the moment.

Panic measures by the Monetary Authority to stop loans and slow down rupee transactions fail to address the fundamental problem of the utter imbalance of Bhutan-India trade flows. It is one-way: Indian goods and services imported into Bhutan which have to be paid for in rupees. Bhutan has little to export to India other than hydroelectric power (which is financed, built and traded by Indian energy companies).

No thriving private sector to drive growth?

Entrepreneurial energy to drive a private sector to promote import-substitution and to generate export earnings is needed. Some have blamed excessive regulatory hurdles and difficult bank credit for the lack of a domestic private sector.

The agricultural sector is disorganized, handicapped by lack of silos to store rice, grain, vegetables and fruit and has to cope with long supply-chains across difficult mountain roads to get produce to market. 

Rural-urban migration depletes the availability of educated youth to organize the agrarian economy. University students all aspire to join the civil service for the prestige it still carries plus the job security and pension it entails.

The capacity for government to absorb university graduates annually is running out. Already 75% of the government's operating budget goes to pay salaries to its civil service. 

There is 9% youth unemployment and rising crime in Thimpu from drug and booze addiction compounded by undisciplined low-level imported labour.

Politicians and newspapers are gearing up for the second general election due 2013. Unless elected representatives in parliament can lead a bottom-up, self-sufficiency revolution across Bhutan to deliver a 'democracy-dividend', time is running out rapidly for Happiness Land. 

ENDS