Susan Banki on the battles of Nepali-Bhutanese refugees: State of Southasia #16

Bhutan’s Nepali-speaking diaspora, created by the expulsion of the Lhotshampa in the 1990s, can help the country’s tottering economy, the researcher says – if the Bhutan government were ready to reach out.

In the introduction to her book The Ecosystem of Exile Politics: Why Proximity and Precarity Matter for Bhutan’s Homeland Activists, Susan Banki, a researcher of the international refugee system, tells the story of Bhakta Ghimire, a homeland activist from the community of Nepali-speaking Bhutanese. In the early 1990s, Ghimire was a young man working in a cement factory in Samste, in southern Bhutan. One day, he heard rumours that Bhutan’s ethnic Nepalis – also known as the Lhotshampa – were being evicted from their homes following a national census exercise. He rushed to his parents house to find it empty, crossed into India to find them, and eventually joined the stream of Nepali Bhutanese leaving Bhutan.   

Tens of thousands of Nepali-speaking Bhutanese were forced to flee their homes in southern Bhutan after a citizenship policy disenfranchised them, a cultural policy imposed Bhutan’s dominant Drukpa traditions – including clothing norms – on them, and a census exercise forced them from their homes. These families have lived as refugees in Nepal, India and other parts of the world – many in precarious conditions in refugee camps, others resettling in countries such as the United States and Australia. And activists like Ghimire have been asking for the right to return to Bhutan.

On this episode of State of Southasia, Banki speaks to Nayantara Narayanan about the status of these refugees today, the history of the Lhotshampa question and why Bhutan’s king and government are missing an opportunity by not reaching out to the Nepali Bhutanese community amid Bhutan’s current economic troubles. She says that Bhutan’s Nepali-speaking diaspora, created by the expulsion and refugee crisis of the 1990s, can help the country’s tottering economy with remittances and through exchange programmes, if the government were to reach out to them.

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