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Citizenship
In 1958, the 'Lhotshampa'
population of the southern districts of Bhutan was granted
Bhutanese citizenship and tenure of its lands. The Bhutanese
government later pursued a policy of integration
that met with considerable success: having allowed the south
to run its own affairs for decades with minimal
contact with the north, the government began to train
Nepali Bhutanese for government and for some years even offered
a cash incentive for Nepali-Drukpa intermarriage. Thus, the
Nepali Bhutanese began to play a more
important role in national life, occupying some senior
positions in the administration and sometimes even
representing the kingdom overseas.
During the 1980s every
adult member of the Bhutanese population was issued
with a printed citizenship card bearing a photograph of its
holder. But in 1985 a new Citizenship Act made a number of
far-reaching changes: it amended the legislation on
citizenship by birth so that citizenship could only
be acquired automatically from both parents instead of
through the father alone; it required evidence of
permanent domicile on or before 31st December 1958 as
the basis for citizenship by registration; and for
citizenship by naturalization it required a number of
criteria that could not be met by most Nepali
Bhutanese, such as fluency and literacy in the national
language, the Tibetan-derived Dzongkha.
In 1988, a census began
to 'identify Bhutanese nationals' in the southern districts.
The term 'census' has always been used by the Bhutan
government for these operations, but they do not produce the
statistical profile of the population of Bhutan that one
might expect from a national census. Instead, their main
purpose is to guard against illegal immigration, a constant
threat in the south where the border with India is porous.
Accordingly, 'censuses' appear to have been conducted
annually in southern districts since 1988 but have not taken
place regularly in the northern districts, except perhaps in
Thimphu. The 1988 census led to unease because, according to
those who have since become refugees, excessively strict
standards were set for documentation. According to the
government, a survey of the south had detected the presence
of over 100,000 illegal immigrants, and the population was
to be placed into seven categories, from 'Fl' to 'F7' as
follows:
Fl
Genuine Bhutanese citizens
F2
Returned emigrants
F3
Drop-out cases (i.e. people who were not around at the
time of the census)
F4
Children of Bhutanese father and non-national mother
F5
Non-national father married to Bhutanese mother, and
their children
F6
Adopted children
F7
Non-nationals
It has been argued that
the 1985 Citizenship Act would not have posed major problems
for most Nepali Bhutanese, who were accustomed to retaining
documents such as land tax receipts, if it had been
implemented fairly during the census (Dhakal and Strawn
1994:179-82; Strawn 1994:1056). But in the event many who
could not provide documents that proved they resided in
Bhutan in the specific year of 1958 itself were apparently
categorized as returned emigrants or non-nationals,
regardless of whether or not they held citizenship cards,
land tax receipts etc. Amnesty International concluded that
the current situation in the south of Bhutan had been
exacerbated due to the government's failure to specify and
make known in advance what would happen to people in
southern Bhutan once they had been categorized under F7
(1992:6).
Driglam
Namzha
Bhutan's sixth Five-Year
Plan (1987-92) included a policy of 'one nation, one people'
and introduced a code of traditional Drukpa dress and
etiquette called Driglam Namzhag. The dress element
of this code required all citizens to wear the gho (a
knee-length robe for men) and the kira (an
ankle-length dress for women) in the following contexts:
inside and outside Dzong
premises [fortress-monasteries now used as centres of
district administration); [at] all
Government Offices; at the Schools; [at] the Monasteries;
at the official functions and 'public congregations' (RGB
1992b: appendix. The appendix also stated that pandits,
pujaris [Hindu priests] and non-nationals would be exempt
from the requirement).
This rule, it is now
admitted by the Bhutanese authorities, was applied far
beyond the letter of the decree, to the extent that many
Bhutanese could not venture out of their homes in
their everyday attire without facing the prospect of an on-the-spot
fine or imprisonment (Hutt 1992:7). Thus, in the author's
1995 visit to the camps, two informants who had been
in charge of a pathshala (a non-government school
that teaches a traditional Sanskrit/Hindu curriculum) in
southern Bhutan explained that when the dress code was
introduced the children had to wear gho and kira in
the government school first, but soon the rule was extended
to the pathshala too. Soon everyone had to wear national
dress everywhere, they said, and an initial fine of Rs. 100
(approximately US$3) quickly rose to Rs 150. (Per capita GNP
in Bhutan is said to be US$440 (Savada 1993:247).)
A half-blind woman who now
lives in the Sanishchare camp claimed that in midsummer 1991
she was insulted and beaten by a soldier because she was
wearing a blouse and had turned her kira down at the
waist, due to the heat. She said that she was made to stand
beside the road in the sun for three hours before he let her
go home. Incidents such as these (and they appear to have
been widespread) go a long way towards explaining the
resentment the policy caused in southern Bhutan.
Language
A central plank of the
Bhutanese government's policy since the late 1980s has been
to strengthen the role and status of Dzongkha in
national life. One effect of this has been a downgrading
of the role of Nepali generally (the claim that Nepali is
'banned' in Bhutan is an overstatement) and
its removal from the syllabus of schools. Greater
stress began to be laid on a knowledge of Dzongkha,
and local officials and school staff in southern Bhutan
had to attend compulsory Dzongkha classes from 1990 onward.
Many camp residents were
proud to show off a knowledge of Dzongkha, which is
surprisingly widespread among the educated young. One
ex-Mandal said that he had been issued with a Dzongkha-Nepali
dictionary (published in Thimphu in 1984) just before the
'movement' began in September 1990 and was told to
learn Dzongkha within three years.
At the beginning of the
school year in March 1990 the teaching of Nepali was
discontinued and all Nepali curricular materials disappeared
from Bhutanese schools. The Bhutanese government's case now
is that because English had been the medium of education in
Bhutan since 1961, the need for schoolchildren to
study a third language in the south put them at a
disadvantage; that Nepali was only one of many languages
spoken in Bhutan and was, moreover, the national language of
a foreign country; and that new curricular materials could
not be produced in Nepali in line with the New Approach to
Primary Education programme, for reasons of cost (Thinley
1994:60-61). However reasonable these arguments might be,
the move came on top of the census and the dress code and
could only add to a growing sense of cultural
marginalization among the Nepali Bhutanese.
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