To continue the discussion on the politics of development, Bhutan government’s model for development that pivots around what it calls gross national happiness, GNH, seems like pushing the whole idea of an amorphous region in the notion of development a little too far. It seems more of an opiate to soothe the people’s senses and in the process hide non performance, or at best the inability to effect growth in its economy. This is evident from the fact that the younger generation in the kingdom are opting to discard the GNH prescription and going in for lifestyles which the government calls bad influences. A BBC report (posted on its website www.bbc.co.uk), quite sarcastically titled as “Bhutan’s technological revolution”, cites how a hot national debate is currently raging almost surrealistically on the pros and cons of the internet, and how in the rural areas, away from the probing eyes of the government, people are opting for the sin of putting up dish antennas to catch multi-channel satellite television beams rather than sit through the daily sermons on gross national happiness on Bhutan’s newly set up national television transmission.

The fact also is, Bhutan is an income poor country. The total number of personal computers across the kingdom for instance, according to the report, is likely to be less than 5,000. Considered against this light, perhaps there is logic in Bhutan exhorting its citizens to be happy with what they have. Images of affluence flooding in from outside through the mass media can raise expectations to unrealistic limits. If the country’s GDP is low and its wages are poor, it must find other ways of convincing itself, and more importantly its people, that its riches are not about material things but elsewhere. Evoking nationalistic sentiments is a time tested strategy to obfuscate the issue. Happiness then becomes less about material comfort or benefits of affluence but of the preserving the uniqueness of national identity. The trouble is, nationalism in its extreme has necessarily embedded in it strong elements of xenophobia. The one lakh Nepalis who were thrown out of the country in the wake of the pro-democracy agitation in the country towards the close of the last century is evidence to this.

Where the Bhutan government has gone wrong is in its effort to de-link economic growth as measured by GNP/GDP from its vision of development. But Bhutan’s story is not unique, for it is also the story of most other autocracies and dictatorships. To take the example of two other neighbours, the cases of Myanmar and Nepal are there for all to see. With the emergence of the Maoists, political equations in Nepal is a lot more complicated, but it is Myanmar were a variant of the Bhutan strategy of politics of development is being played out. The country too has to depend on various rhetoric of nationalism to hold together in its times of economic downslide. We are however not Bhutan bashers and would qualify our criticism of the kingdom’s justification of shutting its doors to the dominant political wave of the present world order – democracy. Unlike Myanmar, where the self exclusion seems to be driven by the lust for power of the ruling military establishment, in Bhutan the compulsions are much more genuine. The equation is simple. If Bhutan were to adopt electoral democracy, the indigenous Bhutanese may end up having to give up power as they are today a minority in their own country. They were an even smaller minority before the country went into an official xenophobic frenzy and drove out a lakh of its Nepali citizens. Bhutan’s worry is not just about its own national demography but also of the region. In the latter environment, the ruling Ngalongs form a minuscule minority, and as in Sikkim, their fate can be relegated to the status of schedule tribes in their own country, fighting for reservation of seats in the Assembly and other government offices. Can democracy automatically add to the gross national happiness then?