Sikkim has already been annexed and digested by India, now what awaits Bhutan's fate is crystal clear .
Immigration from Nepal and India.
Since Bhutan emerged as an independent state, the most significant immigrant groups have been from Nepal and India. These people are collectively called
Lhotshampa (meaning "southerner"), though a collective name may present an oversimplification because of the diversity within the group. The first reports of people of
Nepalese origin in Bhutan was around 1620, when
Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal commissioned
Newar craftsmen from the Kathmandu valley in Nepal to make a silver
stupa to contain the ashes of his father
Tempa Nima. The Newar are an ethnic group distinct from the
Bahuns,
Tamangs,
Gurungs,
Rais that form the
Lhotsampa community.
The next small groups of Nepalese emigrated primarily from eastern Nepal under
British Indian auspices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Members of many ethnic groups,
including forefathers of Lhotshampa and others from Sikkim, the Assam Duars, and West Bengal, were brought into Bhutan as slaves (the institution was abolished in 1958).
Seasonal migrants commonly worked in the Bhutan
Duars, and began to settle in the 1880s. During the late 19th Century, contractors working for the Bhutanese government began to organise the settlement of Nepali-speaking people in uninhabited areas of southern Bhutan in order to open those areas up for cultivation. The south soon became the country's main supplier of food. By 1930, according to British colonial officials, much of the south was under cultivation by a population of Nepali origin that amounted to some 60,000 people.
Settlement in Bhutan of large numbers of people from Nepal happened for the first time in the early 20th century. This settlement was encouraged by the
Bhutan House in
Kalimpong for the purpose of collecting taxes for the government. In the 1930s, the
Bhutan House settled 5,000 families of Nepali workers in
Tsirang alone. In the 1940s, the British Political Officer Sir
Basil Gould was quoted as saying that when he warned Sir Raja
Sonam Topgay Dorji of
Bhutan House of the potential danger of allowing so many ethnic Nepalese to settle in southern Bhutan, he replied that "since they were not registered subjects they could be evicted whenever the need arose.
Furthermore, Lhotshampa were forbidden from settling north of the subtropical foothills.
The beginning of Nepalese immigration largely coincided with Bhutan's political development: in 1885,
Druk Gyalpo Ugyen Wangchuck consolidated power after a period of civil unrest and cultivated closer ties with the
British in
India. In 1910, the government of Bhutan signed a treaty with the British in India, granting them control over Bhutan's foreign relations.
Being a Bangladeshi you should know the hydel-power resource in Sikkim. Water is a natural resource, a very precious one at that.
Absolutely correct, that's Indians strategy. By now more than half a dozen Dams have been constructed upstream in Sikkim to block the natural flow of International rivers. Next in line comes Bhutan.
