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Bhutan: Ethnic Groups
Bhutan is an independent Buddhist kingdom situated in the
Himalaya mountains between Northeast India and China (Tibet) (see Figure 1).
Over 60 per cent of the country is forested and there are no large cities:
Thimphu, the capital, has a population of around 25,000. The Bhutanese can be
divided into three broad ethno-linguistic groups: the Ngalongs (or Ngalops) of
the west; the Sharchhops of the east; and the Lhotshampas (or 'Nepali
Bhutanese') of the extreme south. There are also many other smaller groups. The
Ngalongs are in a minority overall, but they and the central Bhutanese occupy
most senior government positions, and the Ngalongs' language, the
Tibetan-derived Dzongkha, is promoted as the national language. The Ngalongs,
the central Bhutanese and the Sharchhops practise a Tibetan style of Buddhism,
which is supported by the state: they and the other Buddhist communities of
northern Bhutan are therefore usually known collectively as 'Drukpas', and
intermarriage is common between them. The Lhotshampas ('people of the southern
border') who inhabit the southern foothills are mostly Hindus who speak the
Nepali language. In 1980, when the total population of Bhutan was stated to be
1,142,200, the six southern districts (each of which probably had a Nepali
majority) were said to have a total population of 552,800 (Savada 1993:361).
Because of the somewhat bewildering change in the official figure for Bhutan's
total population, it is now impossible to state with any certainty the
proportion of the total population that is or was Nepali-speaking.
The terms 'Lhotshampa', 'Nepali', 'Nepali Bhutanese',
'Bhutanese Nepali' and so on should perhaps not be used interchangeably. These
terms can have political undertones: for instance, 'Lhotshampa' is
sometimes used by the Bhutanese government to denote the 'legal' or
'loyal' Nepali-speaking community that remains within the kingdom, to
distinguish its members from those who have departed, while 'Bhutanese
Nepali' denotes a Bhutanese sub-set of a larger Nepali entity. There are arguments
for and against adopting any one of these terms, but for the sake of consistency
this paper uses the term 'Nepali Bhutanese'.
The Nepali Communities of India and Bhutan
The borders of the kingdom of Nepal do not delimit
exactly the region whose dominant population is identified as 'Nepali' .
The Nepalis of Northeast India and Bhutan come originally from a variety of
castes and ethno-linguistic groups that have traditionally inhabited
specific sections of the eastern Nepalese hills, but
post-migration generations are unified by their use of the Nepali
language as a common tongue. Nepalis are in a majority in Sikkim (an
autonomous Indian protectorate until 1975 but now a state within
the Indian Union), in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal and in the foothills
of southern Bhutan. There are also Nepali communities in Assam and scattered
across the hill states of Northeast India.
The present positions of Nepal's international borders were finalized
in 1816, bar a few minor changes in the mid-nineteenth century. The kingdom
of Gorkha, a small principality in central Nepal, had embarked on a campaign of
conquest and expansion during the 1740s. Having taken the strategic Kathmandu
valley in 1768-9, the Gorkhalis were briefly rulers of territory that extended
beyond the present western and eastern borders of Nepal. Eventually, the
Gorkhalis ran up against the British and were defeated in 1816. A treaty
whose terms were largely dictated by the British drove them out of the
west and east, and the Mechi and Mahakali rivers have remained as Nepal's
eastern and western borders up to the present day.
In Sikkim and eastern Nepal the Gorkhali conquerors had
encountered a number of different tribes, each with its own language, culture
and land tenure system. To provide revenue for the maintenance of the newly-acquired
empire, taxes were converted to a cash medium and the peasant farmers of
eastern Nepal were sorely pressed. The new governors of some districts
used the peasants' indebtedness as a pretext for wresting ancestral lands
from their control . Many people responded by migrating eastward into
British India, where the grass was somewhat greener.
The British established the hill station of Darjeeling on
land gifted to them by the ruler of Sikkim in 1835. Very soon, Darjeeling
became the centre of a tea industry. As the Darjeeling hills were very sparsely
populated, plantation owners needed to import workers into what was a
highly labour-intensive industry. Thus, the hills of east Nepal supplied
tens of thousands of tea garden labourers, as well as Gurkha recruits for
the British India Army. The British also promoted the migration of
Nepalis into Sikkim and northern Assam (Pradhan 1991; see also English 1983;
Sagant 1980).
Although Sikkim had a Nepali majority by the time of its
first census in 1891 (Sinha 1975: 10), it appears that Nepali farmers did not
begin to settle in Bhutan in significant numbers until after about 1880. The
south of the country had until then remained a hinterland, where the kingdom's
rulers preferred not to settle permanently. At some point toward the end
of the 19th century it was decided to follow the example of the British in
Darjeeling and bring Nepali peasant farmers into southern Bhutan to bring
the land under cultivation (see Sinha 1993:154).
The first Nepali settlement took place in the far
southwestern district of Samchi and further east in Chirang. During the
1960s, Nepali Bhutanese were resettled in the far southeastern district
of Samdrup Jongkhar, possibly because of a shortage of cultivable land in
the districts of first settlement. Until 1958, when they became Bhutanese
citizens, these settlers and their descendants had the status of tenants, and
until about 1961 they paid their rents and taxes to the Bhutan Agent at
Kalimpong. After that, the south was administered directly from the new
permanent capital at Thimphu.
Although Bhutan has been the subject of a handful of
historical studies (notably Aris 1979; Rose 1977; Sinha 1991), the history of
its southern districts remains unresearched. Thus, the only sources on
the actual size of the Nepali population in Bhutan during the early
decades of the twentieth century (a crucial figure in view of the
Bhutanese government's allegation of massive illegal immigration after
1958) are the somewhat random reports left by British colonial officials who
passed through the region on their missions to the capital. By 1932, according
to one such source, about 60,000 had settled in the south-west of the
country (Sinha 1991:39, quoting Captain C. J. Morris).
The Indian Nepali community, which probably numbers between
three and six million, has a history of political activism which has not
endeared it to successive Indian governments. Indian Nepalis are still
liable to be considered foreigners within India despite family histories of
residence in India that go back several generations, and they have often fallen
foul of the various anti-foreigner movements that have swept the Indian
Northeast since the 1970s. In what is essentially a defensive strategy, their
leaders have sought to establish an identity for Indian Nepalis that establishes
them as a distinct group within India and also distinguishes them from the
Nepalis of Nepal. The prime example of such activism was the Gorkhaland
movement, a campaign of strikes and civil disobedience backing a demand for an
autonomous state in the Darjeeling hills. This degenerated into violence and
claimed some 200 lives between 1986 and 1988 before a compromise solution was
reached (see Subba 1992).
It seems very likely that the Gorkhaland movement inspired a
fear of Nepali-led activism among the Bhutanese ruling class. These fears added
to the longheld apprehension of a tiny Buddhist monarchical state that had
watched neighbouring Sikkim, whose ruling family was related through marriage to
Bhutan's, being absorbed into India, and had seen the original population of
Assam become a minority after massive Bengali immigration. In 1990, human
rights and democracy were the key slogans of a movement within Nepal
itself that reduced the king of Nepal to a constitutional monarch. The
fact that a group of Nepali Bhutanese exiles began to mouth the same slogans in
1989 can only have confirmed the rulers' perception of the large Nepali
Bhutanese population as a threat, and of their own position as an increasingly
exposed minority in an unstable corner of the Indian subcontinent.
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