Mountain kingdom gets squeezed
THIMPHU, Bhutan — Tucked like a jewel into the mighty Himalayas, the mountain kingdom of Bhutan has rarely commanded the world’s gaze, its hillside monasteries and emerald valleys long known only to select travelers seeking adventure or enlightenment.
But for two months, this quiet Buddhist monarchy found itself at the center of a bitter military standoff involving the world’s two most populous countries, each jockeying for primacy in South Asia.
Tensions eased Monday when the rivals, China and India, announced that they had agreed to withdraw their troops from a remote, 10,000-foot plateau near where their borders intersect with Bhutan’s. That ended an impasse that began in June when India sent hundreds of soldiers to block Chinese construction workers and border guards from extending a road running south across the plateau from Tibet.
Bhutan and China claim the plateau, and India, Bhutan’s closest ally, said it acted to protect Bhutanese interests. The disputed tundra is populated by yaks, and is frozen most of the year, but has come to hold immense geopolitical value.
China, under President Xi Jinping, has challenged India’s position as the hegemon in South Asia by deepening its partnership with Pakistan — India’s blood rival — and wooing Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives with lucrative trade deals and infrastructure loans.
Bhutan is the only country in the region that remains outside China’s orbit and firmly tethered to India. It has spurned China’s requests to establish formal diplomatic relations, and India has rewarded its loyalty with billions of dollars in investment that has helped bring the landlocked kingdom of 800,000 people into the modern age.
But in the wake of the Indo-Chinese military confrontation — 55 years after the two countries fought a brief war that began with a border dispute — many Bhutanese worry that their country is becoming trapped between its longtime patron and an aggressive new suitor, opening up fissures in a placid society whose guiding principle is the pursuit of “gross national happiness.”
“Nobody wants to be in a situation where two giants are fighting and you are getting squeezed in between,” said Sangpa Tamang, a Bhutanese civil engineer who writes a blog on current affairs.
Geographically isolated, with a small population and few resources, Bhutan might not exist today as an independent state without India, its southern neighbor with a population and economy each more than 1,000 times larger than its own. A century ago, Bhutan’s first monarch signed a treaty making it a protectorate of India, then under British rule.
Four kings and two updates of the treaty later, Bhutan no longer defers to India for foreign policy decisions. But New Delhi still retains such influence that the sprawling Indian embassy in Thimphu, the capital, is sometimes referred to as the Sixth King.
The arrangement has generally benefited Bhutan. In sleepy Thimphu, store shelves are stocked with consumer goods from India, brought in on Indian trucks along winding roads paved by Indian army construction crews. India is both the builder and customer of Bhutan’s main industry, hydroelectric power, and the source of 70 percent of its tourism, the second biggest earner.
In 1999, when the royal family finally lifted a ban on television, Bollywood movie channels quickly became the biggest entertainment force in the kingdom.
There is little natural affinity for China, located on the other side of the Himalayas and seen as pursuing a breakneck style of development that is at odds with Bhutan’s more modest, environmentally friendly ambitions.
Bhutan and China have held two dozen rounds of border talks, but Bhutan has refused to cede the plateau it calls Dolam, and which China refers to as Donglang.
Many analysts think Bhutan is protecting the interests of India, which regards the plateau as strategically vital, close to a narrow corridor known as the “chicken’s neck” that connects the Indian mainland to eight distant northeastern states.
Many Bhutanese also distrust China for its 1959 annexation of Tibet, the vast Buddhist region that once encompassed Bhutan.
Although Bhutanese Buddhists follow their own spiritual guides, they respect the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader who lives in exile in India. His familiar bespectacled face smiled down from above a kiosk at a mall in Thimphu, where 23-year-old Sonam Wangchuk was selling internet scratch cards.
“We have a long relationship with India,” said Wangchuk, who wore a T-shirt with an illustration of the Taj Mahal. “We have to be careful with China.”