There is virtually no development in eastern Bhutan and in other remote parts in the north. Funds allotted are hardly ever utilised for development for which they are intended. Royal expenditure which is disbursed by the Ministry of Finance, has reached such proportions and exceeds the budgeted amounts by such enormous margins that it has to be met with from allocations meant for development. Additional Royal visits immensely reduce the financial resources which finally make it to the districts as the expense for this too is met with from the same funds. Aid packages and grants from donor countries meant for socio-economic development are utilised to suppress the peoples’ voices, to charm and manipulate the media. Numerous print, radio, and television journalists have been speaking words scripted by Thimphu over the past few years, and the list stretches from writers for vernacular dailies of Siliguri, to high-flying correspondents of western news outlets.
Journalists who pass muster in the Royal Bhutanese Embassy in New Delhi and are given visas and provided jet passage to Paro airport, from where they are whisked up to Thimphu as royal guests and put up at the Druk Hotel or one of Government guest houses. A chauffeur-driven vehicle waits to take the reporter around, but never to the south. The red-carpet treatment can be overwhelming, as the English speaking sophistication of the senior officials and Royal Families, and the obvious importance with which they regard the journalists’ mission. One of the journalists to be taken in by Thimphu was Tarun Basu of ‘India Abroad’, a New-York based weekly, who wrote on 26 June 1992 about Indo-Bhutanese ties ("Harmony between Contrasts"), the King ("Austere Ruler who like work"), the "Wondrous Stamp Museum", and so on. The one paragraph on the southern problem says: "Operating behind the facade of a pro-democracy movement, the dissidents...had the backing of Gurkha leaders of India and Nepal who nursed visions of a pan Himalayan Nepali State.” While malleable national level journalists of New-Delhi and Calcutta are invited to Thimphu to be charmed out, Thimphu knows that only hard cash will do for the vernacular press of the Duars, Silliguri based papers that were ‘sympathetic’ to the refugees in the autumn of 1990 had made a quick turn around by January 1991. Today, they treat Thimphu with velvet gloves while hampering the democratic aspirations of the Bhutanese people.
In 1988, forty cases of Black and Red Label Scotch Whisky were distributed after the 1988 press conference announcing the multiple marriages of Father-King Jigme, recalls a high Government officials now a refugee.
The Bhutanese proclivity for giving gifts is sometimes carried to extremes. Even the Foreign Minister might agree that it was carrying things too far when a Delhi based diplomat turned up at the residence of Justice Krishna Iyer with Jam, Jelly, Books, Honey and Liquor. Krishna Iyer had made a statement on human rights in Bhutan and was planning to leave for Thimphu as part of a South Asian fact finding team. He is a former Chief Justice of India and a teetotaller.
