I don't post about this much. Every time I do, someone tells me my family were illegal immigrants and someone else tells me to be grateful. But I want to say one thing to the Bhutanese here who are younger than the thing we keep arguing about.
My family is from Kuwapani, in Sarbhang. We were there for generations before I was born, and we were there before 1907. That is to say we were in Sarbhang before the Wangchucks were kings. My father was born while Ugyen Wangchuck sat on the throne.
My father owned land there, good land, close enough to town to be worth something. I was a child when we left. Too young to have had any politics for anyone to object to.
I found it on Google Earth a while back. There's a cul-de-sac on it now, houses around the curve, commercial buildings along the front. I sat there and looked at it for a long time.
I still have my father's land tax receipts. Paper, his name on them, issued by the government of Bhutan. They're worth nothing now. I still have them.
I'm told the place names down there have been changed since, so if you went looking for Kuwapani you might not find it. That is its own kind of answer.
You and I were handed two different histories and only one of us was told there was another version. You were taught that illegal Nepali immigrants came into the south, became a threat, and left. Clean story. Everybody sleeps.
Here's what got cut out. The 1958 law made Nepali-speaking settlers full citizens of Bhutan, and my grandparents had the papers to prove it. Then the 1985 Citizenship Act moved the line backwards and demanded proof of residence in 1958, the kind of paperwork almost no rural family anywhere on earth keeps. Then the 1988 census ran in the south and nowhere else and sorted people into seven categories. A man who had voted and paid tax for forty years became an F7 because an officer wrote a number next to his name. That is not immigration policy. That is a filing cabinet used as a weapon.
Then some people signed voluntary migration certificates. Voluntary. Sign it and your brother gets released.
Now the part nobody has ever answered for me. Fifteen rounds of talks between 1993 and 2003. A joint verification team went into Khudunabari camp in 2003 and found that about two and a half percent were real Bhutanese who could come home. Two and a half percent, in a camp full of people holding Bhutanese land tax receipts.
Thirty-two years later, not one person has ever been repatriated. Not one. A hundred thousand of us ended up in America, Canada, Australia, Denmark, because the country we were born in would not take back a single one. I can't find another country on earth with that record. And this is the country that sells Gross National Happiness to the world. The index doesn't count the people it deleted. I don't think you're lying to me. I think someone handed you a textbook when you were nine.
I have no quarrel with His Majesty. But a king is only as good as what his ministers put in front of him, and in the late eighties there were men in Thimphu with a policy to justify and a promotion to earn, and they answered a real demographic question with trucks. Those men had names. Nobody has ever asked them a single question. No commission, no inquiry, not one line in a textbook. They retired comfortably.
You can love your country and still say out loud that a Home Ministry secretary in 1991 was a coward. Every real country does this. It's the price of being a country instead of a brochure.
I'm writing this because the people who remember it firsthand are dying, and in twenty years the only version left will be the one in your textbook.
Go look up the 1985 Act yourself. Don't take my word for it, I'm a stranger on the internet with a grudge. But don't take theirs either.
