Bhutan army sees action at
last By Arun Bhattacharjee
JALPAIGURI, on the India-Bhutan border - The
small Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, no more than a dot on
the world map, has suddenly been dragged out of its
peaceful hibernation by two unrelated events: its fight
with insurgents along its border with India, and the
publication of the largest book ever written on the
country (it weighs 60 kilograms and costs US$10,000) by
Michael Hawley, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology
researcher.
Over the past century Bhutan has not
fought any war, and its army has remained little more
than the royal bodyguard to Oxford-educated and
Scot-style-kilt-wearing King Dorje Synghe Wangchuk.
Although the Royal Bhutan Army was trained by India
under a treaty signed in 1948 that permits India to help
the country in the areas of foreign policy and defense,
it has never been baptized in the blood of war. There
has never been any need for a joint defense operation by
Bhutan and its giant patron, and little need for India's
assistance in foreign affairs, barring help for the tiny
kingdom to join the United Nations. Bhutan maintained
strict neutrality during the India-China War of 1962
and, to the annoyance of many in India, disarmed fleeing
Indian army personnel who entered its territory.
But last weekend the long period of peace
enjoyed by the Royal Bhutan Army came to an end, as 16
of its personnel sustained mild to critical injuries,
against six Indian insurgents killed, while flushing
them out of the dense forests astride the arterial road
connecting the kingdom with India. The insurgents, under
pressure from Indian security forces determined to free
the sensitive northeastern part of the country from a
growing rebellion that prevents development and affects
trade and commerce in the tea-producing areas of Assam
state, had made Bhutan their base of operations.
The king informed Indian Prime Minister Atal
Bihari Vajpayee of the impending operation on the night
before it started and sought logistical support from
India's Kolkata-based Eastern Command in the form of
night-vision equipment, automatic weapons, mortars and
grenades besides bulletproof jackets and jungle-warfare
equipment. About 3,000 well-equipped insurgents were
hiding in the Dooars foothills of Bhutan with their
families, and on the first day the clean-up operation on
Sunday, an estimated 50 people, including six mid-level
rebel leaders, were seriously injured or believed
killed.
As the Indian army sealed the border and
the Royal Bhutan Army continued its pressure, however,
it appeared that India was far from a solution to the
insurgency in the northeast, as some of the senior
leaders are believed by intelligence sources to have
slipped into Bangladesh or Nepal. Bhutanese sources at
the border discount the possibility of the insurgents
moving to the high mountains of northern Bhutan on the
grounds that it would be difficult for people used to
living in the plains of Assam to live in a high-altitude
environment. They would also face a food shortage in the
sparsely populated northern region.
Three
insurgent groups, all from Assam state, are believed to
be holed up in Bhutan, where they have been extracting
money from the truckers and the small business groups
trading on the main road leading to the capital, Thimpu.
The largest group belongs to the United Liberation Front
of Assam (ULFA); next comes the National Democratic
Front of Bodoland, mostly Bodo tribals; and the Kamtapur
Liberation Organization.
Indian intelligence
sources assert that Paresh Barua, the ideological head
of ULFA, took shelter in Bangladesh and was guiding the
movement from there, although Bangladesh continued to
deny the existence of Indian insurgents operating from
there. India traced telephone calls made by Barua to
Assamese newspapers from Bangladesh claiming that the
operation was being conducted inside Bhutan by Indian
soldiers dressed in Royal Bhutan Army uniforms. Both
India and Bhutan denied this and called it a totally
Bhutanese operation, with India sealing the border with
Bhutan to stop them from slipping out. A senior officer
of the Eastern Command overseeing the operation
explained that the Bhutanese operation was totally
different from the joint operation conducted more than a
decade ago by the armies of India and Myanmar against
insurgents in both countries.
While the
operation by Bhutan against insurgents troubling India
can be regarded as the first such move by any among the
South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC)
countries, Bhutan considers the clean-up operation vital
to its security, as it can't afford a link-up between
the northeastern insurgents with the Maoists of Nepal
through the northwestern "chicken neck" corridor of West
Bengal bordering Nepal, hardly 100 kilometers from its
border.
Bhutan has a major stake in removing the
insurgents from its soil, as King Jigme Singye Wangchuk
is determined to prevent any Nepal-type insurgency in
Bhutan. Educated in the best institutes in England and
the United States, the king and his family are highly
respected by the peaceful Bhutanese, and the only
incident that could be regarded as the result of a
palace intrigue was the murder of the present king's
maternal uncle, Gygme Dorje, in the early 1960s. A year
ago, the king declared Bhutan a democracy with himself
as its head and ordered a general election.
The
people of Bhutan, known as Bhotiyas, are mostly of
Tibetan origin - tall, fair and strongly built with high
cheekbones. Bhutanese are not particularly favorable to
people of Nepalese origin and the government repatriated
a large number of Nepalese illegally working in Bhutan,
which strained its relations with the neighboring
Himalayan kingdom. It has maintained a cool and reserved
relationship with China, and refrained for a long time
from sending an ambassador to Beijing in spite of being
its southern neighbor on the ground that, being a small
country, it could hardly afford to have diplomatic
relations with a large number of countries. It also
remained isolated for a long time from outside influence
until it decided recently to promote tourism and
permitted scientists to explore its unique flora.
A landlocked country with China on its north,
Nepal on the west and India on the south and east,
Bhutan depends on India for its supplies via the
Indo-Bhutan Road passing through deep forests and tea
gardens, which the insurgents tried to control. Bhutan
receives the highest bilateral annual aid from India as
well as aid from some Western and Nordic countries. It
has a population of about 2 million.
Controlled
tourism is being developed by the state-owned tourist
agency to boost the economy and earn foreign exchange
against payment in either United States dollars or pound
sterling. The tourists are mostly flown from the airport
at Bagdogra in West Bengal 100km from the famous hill
resort of Darjeeling by small Dornier aircraft operated
by Druk Air.
Bhutan's principal exports are tea,
processed fruits and orchids. It is known to have nearly
1,500 varieties of orchids, which make it a principal
research base for scientists and floriculturists.
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Dec 19, 2003
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