Bhutan

Bhutan A small buffer state in the eastern Himalayas between India and China. Under the patronage of British India since 1774, British control over its foreign and to some extent also its domestic politics passed over to India after independence in 1949. Apart from its relations with India, it remained in isolation, preserving its social and economic traditions against economic change. Hence, despite some constitutional reform in 1968, in practice it continued to be ruled by a theocratic elite of monks belonging to the Lamaist monastic tradition and a king (Maharaja), Jigme Singhye Wangchuck, from 1972. One of the poorest countries in the world, its backward agriculture, which employs 90 per cent of the country's working population, remains characterized by subsistence farming. In the 1990s, social tensions emerged with the growth of a community of Nepalese origin, which demanded equal political, social, and economic rights. In the late 1990s, the ruling elite's policies of discrimination against the Nepalese minority were slightly relaxed, not least through a royal amnesty in 1997. Yet the position of over 100,000 Buthan-Nepalese refugees languishing in refugee camps on the Nepalese side of the border since 1992 remained unresolved for over a decade.

Buddhism