Bhutan-India relations in the 21st Century
Bhutan-India relations in the 21st Century
WRITTEN BY NITASHA KAUL AND SANGAY KHANDU
6 April 2020
Bhutan, sharing land borders with only India and China, is one of the least written about countries in South Asia. Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, its main relations have been with India. Bhutan has a friendship treaty with India going back over a century, but it opened formal diplomatic relations with its southern neighbour only in 1968, a decade after Chinese control was established over Tibet, and this was soon followed by Bhutan becoming a full member of the United Nations in 1972.
Over the fifty plus years since, Bhutan-India friendship has seen various ups and downs. This is unsurprising since Bhutan and India are very different. In terms of size, Bhutan is comparable to the Indian state of Kerala; India is 86 times larger than Bhutan. The population of any medium size Indian city is larger than the number of total Bhutanese. Given this stark asymmetry, conventional geopolitical understanding would dictate that a state like Bhutan would suffer from significant status anxiety and generally have a hard time prioritizing its national interests. And it is a fact that Bhutan’s economy is interlinked with India especially through hydropower export, its biggest source of revenue, followed by tourism, where too India has been the source of the largest numbers of foreign tourists to Bhutan.
While the official discourse emanating from both countries has predictably been about a steadfast and unwavering relationship with hardly any challenges, in reality, several aspects of this relationship have undergone a dramatic transformation in the last two decades. We find that a gamut of these changes testify to the growing and multidimensional calibre of Bhutanese diplomacy.
The close cooperation between Bhutan and India has often been visible on the international and regional stage. Leaders from the two countries have routinely exchanged visits at the highest levels. Notwithstanding the asymmetries of size, population and power, it would be a mistake to not acknowledge the impact of a sensitively calibrated diplomacy on the part of Bhutan in facilitating this continued perception of shared interests.
Key episodes concerning Bhutan that have had a bearing on Bhutan-India relations in the twenty-first century would be as follows – the operation ‘Flush Out’ undertaken by Bhutan in 2003 to expel Indian rebels from its southern territories; a long overdue updating of the Friendship Treaty that was renegotiated and signed in 2007 to remove the clause requiring Bhutan’s external relations to be under the guidance of India; the operationalization in 2007 of a resettlement program for Bhutanese refugees from camps in Nepal; Bhutan completing monarch-initiated non-traditional transition to becoming a parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy in 2008 with its first parliamentary elections held under the new system; the perceived role of India’s announcement of subsidy withdrawal as affecting the outcome of 2013 elections in Bhutan, which brought a party to power that was seen as being more pro-India than the opposition; the Doklam dispute in 2016 that brought India and China to war on the borders of Bhutan where a violent international confrontation was averted due to Bhutanese diplomacy; the decision in 2017 by the National Council (apolitical parliamentary chamber of bicameral legislature) not to ratify the India-led initiative of the BBIN (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal) motor vehicle agreement; the most recent decision in February 2020 by Bhutan to introduce a new tourism levy that would, from July 2020 onwards, affect Indians travelling to the country without any reciprocal move by India.
Looking at these developments, it is evident that neither asymmetry nor reciprocity can provide an exhaustive explanation. To borrow terms from the scholarly literature on friendship in international relations, Bhutan-India relations defy the characterisation as either strategic or normative, being a mix of both over the years. In the twenty-first century, Bhutan as a small country has navigated this relationship with a much bigger neighbour, in a way that has broadly safeguarded its own national interests. A democratic Bhutan with an elected legislature and a media that can raise questions about the appropriateness of Bhutanese policy for Bhutanese ends, is proving to be an effective supplement to the stable monarchic wisdom when it comes to the diplomatic management of Bhutanese objectives. We discuss the case of the 2020 tourism levy since it is a good example of how Bhutan has sought to achieve this.
The Parliament of Bhutan passed the Tourism Levy Exemption Amendment Bill of Bhutan 2020 on February 19, 2020. The law introduced a levy called the ‘Sustainable Development Fee’ (SDF) of 1200 Ngultrum (Bhutanese currency Nu. 1200, equivalent to roughly USD 17) per person per night for tourists visiting Bhutan from the neighbouring countries of Bangladesh, India and the Maldives. Foreign tourists from all other countries are required to pay USD 250-USD 200 per person per night to visit Bhutan in keeping with the ‘High Value, Low Volume’ tourism policy.
As the largest specific sub-group of tourists from outside of Bhutan (close to 70% of total tourist arrivals being from India), this recently introduced new change will largely affect Indians. Yet, not only has Indian government not introduced any reciprocal changes, a fact that was explicitly stated by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson, but it has also been supportive of Bhutan’s move. Is this the result of far-sighted Indian thinking, or growing realisation of compromises needed to keep a long term friend and ally on its side? Perhaps. But, in our view, incrementalist and continual Bhutanese efforts have been the single most important factor in making this work.
There is a timeline to the Bhutanese decision, which would seem to have come about as part of an ongoing debate. In 2016, the National Council brought to the attention of the government the need for a policy to manage the increasing number of tourists to Bhutan, owing to the concerns about the absorptive capacity of infrastructure and environment, both natural and social. Bhutan opened up to tourism in 1974 and the original levy of USD 65 per person per night was part of Bhutan’s tourism policy that focused on striking a balance between manageable tourism and generation of the required convertible foreign currency. This idea of sustainable tourism aligned itself well with Bhutan’s development philosophy of Gross National Happiness (GNH).
In 2012, Bhutan crossed the 100,000 tourist arrival mark for the first time (that year saw 105,407 tourists, an increase from 64,028 in 2011). In 2018, the number more than doubled again with 274,097 tourist arrivals. Bhutan has thus seen a 1000 fold increase of tourist numbers in less than half a decade between 1974 and 2018, and on average, nearly 70% of the total tourists to Bhutan in the last 3 years have been from India. Bhutan’s internal public discourse worked its way through the incentives from regional tourism versus the growing concerns of environmental or cultural vandalism, overcrowding and chaos, or worse, accidents or deaths. Given Bhutan’s marketing of itself as a unique and exclusive destination, this latter was perceived as a concern in itself. For a time, Bhutan had experimented with change to a ‘High Value, Low Impact’ tourism policy, but the focus is now back on low volume.
Against this backdrop, the announcement of the policy, in a noteworthy departure from norm, surfaced in Indian news from New Delhi in November 2019 alongside the discussions between the Foreign Ministers of the two countries.This was almost three months ahead of the introduction of the Bill in Bhutan’s parliament. Several inaccurate and speculative accounts appeared in the Indian press even before the Bill was introduced, often alleging that the SDF levy was going to be equivalent to USD 250. An excerpt from an Indian news made clear the Government of India’s concerns: “New Delhi’s hesitation comes as the new SDF, while a seemingly small amount compared to the fees charged to other nationalities, could be seen as a way of making Indian tourists feel unwelcome.” It was also reported that the Bhutan government would publicize the rules in India before implementation so as to avoid confusion and problems.
The Bhutanese position has been that the SDF levy will not only contribute to an important source of revenue, but more importantly, allow Bhutanese and visitors alike, to enjoy its culture and its environment sustainably. A clear voice of support came from a former Indian Ambassador to Bhutan, Mr. Bambawale, who expressed support for the Bhutanese policy in an op-ed titled ‘India should have friendly, sensitive foreign policy for Bhutan’. A close look at this latest episode in Bhutan-India relations indicates the significant role of the ‘friendship’ vocabulary in bridging over any parallelism in the institutional official and public popular discourses in the two neighbouring countries.
The close cooperation between Bhutan and India has often been visible on the international and regional stage. Leaders from the two countries have routinely exchanged visits at the highest levels. Notwithstanding the asymmetries of size, population and power, it would be a mistake to not acknowledge the impact of a sensitively calibrated diplomacy on the part of Bhutan in facilitating this continued perception of shared interests. This has proceeded alongside the pursuit of cautious internationalisation of Bhutanese outlook in endeavours with varying degrees of success, for instance as evidenced by Bhutan’s ambition to bid for a non-permanent seat at the UN Security Council in 2011 or Bhutan sponsoring the resolution that led to the designation by the UN General Assembly of March 20th as the International Day of Happiness.
In the contemporary world, adherence to environmental (or other agreed) norms is both a leveller and an enabler for small states. The case of the Sustainable Development Fee (SDF) levy by Bhutan on tourists from India (along with Bangladesh and the Maldives) shows how a small state can pursue its national interest by bringing globally agreed norms into effective action alongside leveraging pre-existing concessions. The next node for the trajectory of Bhutan-India relations, and indeed for the balance between regional connectivity and ecological concerns, would likely be the terms of the eventual closure for Bhutan on the BBIN.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer(s) and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biographies
Nitasha Kaul is an Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) at the University of Westminster in London. Over the last two decades, she has published and spoken on themes relating to identity, democracy, political economy, feminist and postcolonial critiques, Kashmir, and Bhutan. A continuing strand of her research since 2006 has been on different aspects of Bhutan’s history and politics. She is also the author of the Man Asian Prize shortlisted novel Residue. Her latest book Future Tense was published by Harper Collins in 2020. Her website, with links to all her work is available here.
Sangay Khandu is a former National Council parliamentarian from Bhutan, having represented Gasa for two terms between 2008-2018. He is also the co-founder of the Center for Local Governance and Research (CLG), and a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) at the University of Westminster in London. Image credit: by Ministry of External Affairs (India)/Flickr.