Read Online So Close to Heaven by Barbara Crossette - Free Book Online

near the border of Sikkim. The great South Asian plain begins here as the Himalayan foothills drop abruptly, sending mountain streams meandering crazily as if in confusion onto flatland. Forests give way to jungle scrub, enough to hide guerrillas—in one place long enough to dig a trench almost under the nose of an administrative center. Bhutan has no road of its own here, and my car weaved in and out of Indian territory all along the route.
    On a morning walk around Phuntsholing, I could see schoolchildren crossing into Bhutan to take advantage of not only free but also more exciting schools with curricula designed to reflect the geography and life of the area. No one checked their identities at the border, or the identities of traders moving back and forth, some in Indian dress and some inBhutanese ghos and kiras. India demands the right of free access for its citizens; not surprisingly, they dominate cross-border commerce in this landlocked kingdom.
    The king speaks bitterly of how the very high levels of recent development in the southern districts acted paradoxically as a catalyst to further migration, pulling in more illegal immigrants to what he called “a paradise on earth.” Meanwhile, the efforts to raise living standards in the south—where much of the country’s new small industries such as cement-making and fruit-processing were built to be more accessible to subcontinental roads and ports—had brought him into sharp confrontation with conservative northern Bhutanese who wanted all assistance to the ungrateful region halted.
    All the while, rebels were bent on destroying the factories, schools, and clinics the government had built in the south, often depriving their own people and poor laborers from the Indian tea plantations across the border in the Cooch Behar area of West Bengal of the free health and education services they used in Bhutan. The king said that 60 percent of the patients who came to free Bhutanese hospitals along the border were Indian citizens. At one clinic I visited in Samchi, medical charts and files confirmed that there was a high proportion of foreign patients. On a bench in the sweltering courtyard, a family from India waited to have a sick child examined.
    “We felt that for all bona fide southern Bhutanese citizens we must do everything possible to bring them into the Bhutanese mainstream politically, economically, socially, by giving them much more than what we give to the northern Bhutanese people,” the king said. “I’d always hoped that if we could increase their per capita income, if we could give them more land, if we tax them less—and we did so—if most of our industries were established in the south, then a lot of employment would be generated for our people in the southern districts. I felt that this would be a tremendous incentive for them to want to be a Bhutanese national, and not want to be a Nepalese national or Indian national, because the economic conditions and social conditions and political conditions across the border were much worse. But unfortunately, this policy was not successful.”
    In the fall of 1992, the king told me that he had just faced the most turbulent National Assembly session of his reign. Many northerners and some Sharchopas, people from eastern Bhutan, who had rejected overturesto join a crusade against the Drukpa monarchy, wanted a get-tough policy and the public swearing of loyalty oaths to the king. Some threatened to take action against the rebels themselves. “Buddhists may be nonviolent,” an administrator in the south told me. “But you can’t push a Buddhist too far. Never poison the mind of a Buddhist or the Buddhist will go out of control. Cambodia was a peaceful land, but remember the Khmer Rouge.” And the militant monks of Sri Lanka, I thought to myself.
    The king tells the nation at every opportunity that he is committed to as humane a policy as possible in the south. If it fails, he is prepared to abdicate, he says.