Bhutan wrote Gross National Happiness into its constitution

Bhutan wrote into its constitution what this state still wants to measure itself by. Gross National Happiness and the forest are duties there, not travel motifs. Thimphu governs the high valley between India and China.

The kingdom has no coast. The land neighbours are India and China, and no one else. On 38,394 square kilometres live 796,682 people, most of them in the valleys, not on the heights. Thimphu is the capital in such a valley. The international airport is not there. It is at Paro, because the mountains leave the capital no open sky. Whoever arrives, arrives through a narrow valley, not across a plain.

A high valley between India and China

To the south Bhutan opens onto the Indian plains, along roads that carry the trade. To the north the country rises into the Himalaya, and the border with China runs in the high mountains. The exact line of that border is disputed. It is not an ordinary line with busy traffic. The practical outlet of the kingdom lies to the south, with India. The political position remains that of a state which, between far larger neighbours, keeps a government of its own in the valleys.

Dzongkha is the official language, the language of administration and of the monasteries, not the only language of the valleys. In the south, Nepali is also spoken. A part of the population of Nepali origin was expelled. That belongs to the political history of the kingdom, and it softens the picture of a closed mountain idyll. Thimphu governs a country that is tight toward the outside and not free of tension inside.

Forest and happiness as duty

The constitution obliges the state to create conditions in which Gross National Happiness can be pursued. That is not a score for a ranking. It is the statement that the state does not want to be measured only by the treasury and the area. The same constitution obliges it to keep at least 60 per cent of the land as forest. The forest is therefore not a backdrop to the valleys. It is a legal floor for what the mountains are supposed to remain.

A written constitution has bound the monarchy. The king remains head of state, but the kingdom has given itself rules that are meant to hold beyond the king himself: language, forest, the aim of Gross National Happiness. Between India and China that is also a form of self-assertion. A small state in the high mountains stays recognisable if it says what it does not want to sacrifice in order to look like the plains below it.

Between India and China, Bhutan made the forest a duty.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

A currency that points toward India

The ngultrum is the currency of the royal monetary authority, and it is kept level with the Indian rupee. Trade runs along the roads to the south, not through a port of its own and not across the high Chinese border. The currency says the same geography as the roads: Bhutan is politically a kingdom of its own and economically attached to India. The mountains explain the distance. They do not replace the access.

That is why Gross National Happiness is not an idyll beside the map. It is the attempt, in a valley between giants, to keep a measure of one's own, while the rupee, the road and the border say how tight the room is. The forest in the constitution is the hard part of that attempt. It can be checked. Happiness remains a duty of politics, not a substitute for the neighbours.

Bhutan is a kingdom in the high mountains that does not deny its neighbours and has still given itself a duty of its own. Thimphu measures the state by the valley, by the forest and by what the constitution calls happiness.