One cold December evening in New Hampshire, I received an unexpected video call from Hari Adhikari, 73, a Bhutanese refugee like myself.
From his home in Colorado where he has lived for nearly six years, Adhikari’s voice carried lingering pain and love for the homeland that had betrayed him. Despite the passage of 35 years, the wounds of displacement and humiliation still felt raw.
He wanted to share his thoughts about Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City project that weighed heavily on his heart.
Gelephu, the peaceful town in Bhutan where Adhikari was born and raised, has become a global buzzword as the Bhutan government repurposes this land to build a “mindfulness mega city”.
Forced to move
Adhikari’s family had lived for generations in Gelephu, where every corner holds a memory and every breeze brings the familiar scent of home. As a two-time National Assembly member, 1977 to 1983, he was committed to serving his community and his beloved country.
Everything changed in the late 1980s when the government labeled him an outsider. Adhikari endured 18 long years as a refugee in the Khudunabari Bhutanese refugee camp in Nepal yearning for the mountains of his homeland he could no longer see.
I could relate to his pain, as my family too was forcibly displaced in 1990. We lived in a similar refugee camp in Nepal for many years before being re-settled in the United States in 2009, the same year as Adhikari.
He has lived in Colorado with his son in quiet dignity since 2019. However, as he gazes at the Rockies, his heart still yearns for the lush hills and fertile agricultural land of Gelephu, a place he can only visit in his dreams.
The ambitious project he was calling about has gained international traction, much like Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness initiative, after the displacement of nearly one-sixth of its citizens. The irony is hard to overlook.
Shielded by Western democracies due to its strategic location between India and China, Bhutan has forcibly expelled over 100,000 individuals since the late 1980s when it began to impose its “one nation, one people” ideology.
The discriminatory denationalisation policy aimed at maintaining cultural homogeneity was marked by threats, imprisonment and the seizing of property. The Bhutanese who became stateless and were stripped of their citizenship belong to the Lhotshampa community, literally, “southern people”. We are now scattered across eight Western nations through the third-country refugee resettlement programme.
Many international scholars have written about the origins of this issue. The problem began when a government census in 1988 indicated that the Nepali-speaking Lhotshampas of southern Bhutan “were threatening to become a majority”, as Kai Bird, the acclaimed biographer of physicist Robert Oppenheimer, writes in The Nation, 2012.
Bird explains that the King enacted policies to preserve Bhutan’s Drukpa cultural heritage – the culture of the Tibetan descendant migrants who practice Mahayana Buddhism and speak the Dzongkha language.
Many of the 250,000 Nepali-speakers still living in Bhutan remain stateless in their own country. The Nepali language stopped being taught in Bhutan’s schools in 1989.
Discrimination
The government of Bhutan claims that the Lhotshampas became a national security threat. The basis for this allegation is simply that this community sought to be who they are – Bhutanese who are ethnically Nepali.
Children with one foreign parent are not granted Bhutanese citizenship at birth and must wait 15 years to qualify for naturalisation.
Susan Banki, an associate professor at the University of Sydney, also details these events in her book The Ecosystem of Exile Politics: Why Proximity and Precarity Matter for Bhutan's Homeland Activists (Cornell University Press, 2024).
In late 2001 the non-profit global alliance of 385 organisations, Habitat International Coalition, sent a fact-finding team to the refugee camps and to Bhutan. Their report backed claims by Bhutanese refugees that the Royal Government of Bhutan was resettling individuals from northern Bhutan on the lands that had belonged to the Lhotshampas evicted from the south.
Bhutanese refugees are not allowed to return and be rehabilitated in their homeland. The resettled Bhutanese, now citizens of other countries, cannot even attend the funerals of their loved ones in Bhutan.
The Bhutanese Constitution recognises Buddhism as the state’s “spiritual heritage”. It provides for freedom of religion, and bans discrimination based on religious belief but the government actively prohibits freedom of religion. Christians are not allowed to register their organisations or build churches.
While the US does not have formal diplomatic relations with Bhutan, in 2023 the Department of State issued a report on International Religious Freedoms in the country. The report noted that religious groups, including Christians, could worship in private as unregistered groups but were not permitted to organise publicly, own property, raise funds, conduct outreach activities, or import literature.
A primary concern of Christian groups remains the inability to acquire burial plots and the lack of a governmental process to do so. Those living in the southern border go to India to bury their dead and the rest have made the hard choice to follow the Buddhist practice of cremation.
The UN has said nothing about the ongoing family separation, political prisoners, and statelessness. There is no diplomatic pressure or influence on the government of Bhutan to resolve this ongoing problem.
Today, Bhutan is embarking on an audacious plan to build a mega-city occupying 2.5% of its land. The planned city will be larger than Singapore.
The Gelephu Mindfulness City mega project is hailed as a symbol of progress and innovation.
In October 2024, King Wangchuck of Bhutan, appointed Mun Leong Lew as CEO to lead the mega-city project. “The city is set to be an economic hub for Bhutan,” proclaimed Wangchuck on the occasion of Bhutan’s 166th National Day in December.
For Adhikari and tens of thousands of others uprooted from Gelephu, this was a reminder of their loss, displacement, and humiliation. He and his family once owned the thriving three-story Ashok Hotel, a significant landmark in Gelephu, next to the Losal Cinema Hall. They did not sell it but were forced out of the country, leaving everything behind, including 14 acres of fertile farmland in Surrey, a town in Gelephu municipality, a busy grocery store, and three homes.
The hotel, filled with memories, still stands today but Adhikari has no idea who the current owner is.
In total, the government of Bhutan seized nearly 16 acres of land within the Gelephu municipality in 1990.
“I even had a car and a pickup truck,” Adhikari said. “Everything we had was the result of hard work – each piece of land, every building, and all of our vehicles were built from the ground up through sheer effort.”
But all of it – his life’s work, the dreams he had built for his family – was taken away in an instant when Sub Divisional Officer Harka Bahadur Gurung, who also happens to be of Nepali origin, along with the local army and police chief, arrived with three vehicles full of armed officers. This is how the government turned its own people against each other. These officers also escorted my family to the Indo-Bhutan border in 1990.
“We received no compensation,” he said quietly.
Despite appearing far-sighted, the Gelephu Mega City project reveals painful memories of systemic human rights violations and an ongoing failure by the Royal Government of Bhutan to uphold international norms and principles. As Bhutan pursues its vision of modernity, it must face an uncomfortable truth: genuine progress cannot thrive atop the unresolved suffering of displaced citizens.
Minimal compensation
Shiva Lal Adhikari is another former Bhutanese refugee from Gelephu. He too was forcibly expelled from Bhutan in the early 1990s and now lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But unlike Hari Adhikari, he is among those who received some compensation – 7,000 Ngultrum or $80 – for his land and home.
He told me about the profound sense of betrayal he felt when the census team divided his family into separate, dehumanising categories. His mother was classified as F1, labeled a “genuine Bhutanese”. He and his siblings were placed in F5, which signifies the children of a “non-national man married to a Bhutanese woman”. His father was categorised as F2, a “returned migrant” – someone who left Bhutan and returned.
The arbitrary divisions cut deep, reducing the shared bond of his family to cold bureaucratic labels, serving as a reminder of the systemic forces conspiring to strip away their dignity and sense of belonging.
“My parents and grandparents were born in Bhutan. My family never wanted to leave the only home we knew, the life we worked so hard to build,” Shiva told me. “But the army came to our house almost every day, harassing us and threatening us. They left us no choice but to flee.”
“We accepted that meagre compensation under duress and left our country.”
The expropriation of these disputed lands without resolving the conflict contravenes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a foundational document that protects the rights to nationality, property, and freedom of movement.These rights are denied to the displaced Lhotshampa people.
Their displacement also violates the Pinheiro Principles which assert the right of displaced persons to reclaim their property or receive adequate compensation. The situation further violates Customary International Law. The systematic targeting of Lhotshampa communities can also be considered as ethnic cleansing.
Bhutan’s failure to address these issues undermines its credibility on the global stage.
The Gelephu Mindfulness City tests Bhutan’s commitment to justice, equality, and human dignity. It also offers Bhutan a chance to rewrite this painful narrative, not by erasing the past but by addressing it with sincerity, justice, and compassion.
By addressing the grievances of its displaced citizens, Bhutan can set an example for the world, demonstrating that progress and morality are not mutually exclusive. If Bhutan truly seeks to embody the principles of mindfulness and happiness, it must look beyond the surface of its development projects and confront the painful truths of its past.
The story of Hari Adhikari and countless exiled Bhutanese reveals a heartbreaking truth: Progress cannot erase the wounds and humiliation of displacement and development cannot mask the pain of dispossession.
For those who called Gelephu home, the land embodies their identity and sense of belonging. Justice for the exiled Bhutanese is a moral imperative and the foundation for a harmonious and mindful future.
A rightful closure to this prolonged pain and ongoing division is needed. Only by addressing the grievances of its displaced citizens can Bhutan genuinely embody the values of mindfulness and happiness that it so proudly projects to the world.
Suraj Budathoki is a doctoral student at Saybrook University, California, exploring approaches to transforming societies in conflict into harmonious and peaceful communities. He has a BA in Political Science from Southern New Hampshire University and an MA in International Relations from Norwich University. In 2022, he co-founded the nonprofit Peace Initiative Bhutan, fostering positive peace and reconciliation in Bhutan and its diaspora. He aims to spend his life in peace-building work.
