The dragon bites its tail – Part II
FROM THE ARCHIVES: A longform piece on Bhutan’s Lhotshampa question [1992]. A Lotshampa refugee at a camp in Jhapa District of eastern Nepal showing his Bhutanese passport.
Photo: Alemaugil / Wikimedia Common
(This article was first published in our July-August 1992 print issue. Also read Part I and Part III of the reportage.)
No more a backwater
Bhutan was still an economic backwater at the end of the 1940s. The economic, cultural and social interaction and sustenance was almost exclusively with the north. The forested southern hills, the malarial jungles of the Duars and, beyond, the India of the British Empire, held little charm to the pastoralists of high valleys.