Daily Times

My first ‘conversation’ on Gross National Happiness (GNH) was a yelling match at age 13 with Zimbiri, my Bhutanese dorm mate at Kodaikanal International School. Then a budding Marxist, my little heart lit up with fury at the historical hurt of Queen Marie-Thérèse recommending the starving peasantry eat cake in lieu of bread, and King Louis XV living on the fat of France fully knowing a flood of blood would follow his extravagance. I refused to believe monarchy in any way, shape or form could be good, and insisted GNH had to be another tradition’s ‘opium of the people’. A small mercy it was I did not know my equally charged friend was the niece of the same king we were both so unceremoniously shouting about, because the political would have gotten personal very quickly.

To be fair, it was 2004. We shared one desktop between 16 in a stone house called Edmonstone, which reverberated with Weezer, Green Day, tuneless wake-up songs, threats over toilet-hogging and screeching of the occasional cheeky monkey who found his way in. It was only the year before Druk Gyalpo (Dragon King) Jigme Singye Wangchuck (K4) led his troops in battle in Operation All Clear to flush Indian militant secessionists from Bhutan’s forests, courage that would cement Bhutan’s position as India’s most dependable neighbour, in stark contrast to the implausible deniability Pakistan maintains over Clifton’s worst kept secret, Mr Dawood Ibrahim. Dawood masterminded the 1993 Bombay blasts, which indiscriminately killed the father of my ex-roommate and closest friend, Varsha, when she was less than a year old. 2004, a year before K4 announced his abdication in favour of K5, King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, and unveiled the constitution that mainstreamed GNH and also retired all future successors at 65, K5 would have only three years to coax his unwilling people into the first entirely unilateral democratic transition by an absolute monarch in history. Even the mock election revealed their reluctance, as the Yellow Dragon, colour of the monarchy, triumphed. Bhutan’s People’s Democratic Party, PDP, secured only two seats while the Druk Phuensem Tshogpa, DPT or Peace and Prosperity Party, won 47. Third time prime minister Jigme Thinley urged party workers to mute their celebrations as he felt those who voted for other parties were still in mourning, and it was time for reconciliation and consensus-building.

We, in Kodai, were not all paying attention. As the club president of Amnesty International, I had just gotten us into trouble with the then Chinese ambassador to India over my ‘Free Tibet Campaign’. It was because on a hill station with a sizeable Tibetan refugee community, we proved very resourceful in learning the names of hitherto unpublished political prisoners. The ambassador sent the Dindigul district superintendent of police to investigate, and my seasoned activist supervisor Joe Roos struck the names of Tibetan students off the list. It was initially because China regulated Tibetan Buddhism into a distorted, statist cultural museum that I developed an interest in GNH, and Bhutan as the last remaining country where two strains of Tibetan Buddhism were practised.

In 2011, I won a Warwick University Lord Rootes Fellowship to study GNH’s international applicability. I mustered the courage to ask Prime Minister Thinley for an interview at a conference he held with Jeffery Sachs that I was invited to by the economic ministry employee, Sonam Dorji, who I met on my first night while singing Metallica songs on Guitar Hero.

As a rookie researcher, I had enough fire in my belly to ask the honourable prime minister extremely controversial questions but not enough experience to get my video camera working or limit the number of questions to less than 46! You can imagine my mortification turn to surprise when the prime minister himself got down on his knees and got to the tricky business of getting my camera rolling. He answered every question with candidness and deep consideration until his next appointment, and graciously gave me another audience to get through the remainder. It took me 45 days to get through interviews with the present Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay (as opposition leader) and secretaries and ministers of the foreign, environmental, economic, home and culture ministries, Gross National Happiness Commission Secretary, Dasho Karma Tshiteem, and several formal and informal interviews with UN missions and civil society to realise GNH was not only the mandate of state, but also a bonafide method of statecraft.

GNH originates in laws laid down in 1629 by Bhutan’s founder Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, stating that promotion of citizens’ happiness was the only reason for the state’s existence. A grass root aspiration, K4 politically conceptualised it to mean the upkeep of four pillars: sustainable and equitable development, environmental conservation, good governance, and preservation and promotion of culture.

GNH inspires an inclusive, unpretentious political culture, whereby even UNICEF’s Mission Head Gepke Hingst hiked far to immunise four yak herders’ children. It also enabled the youngest democracy to revolutionise the practice of democracy itself under Prime Minister Thinley in 2008 by using the Gross National Happiness Policy Screening Tool (GNH PST) to quantifiably accept, reformulate or reject policy proposed in the cabinet or by participatory district-level development plans. The GNH PST consists of ministry-specific questionnaires that rank policy initiatives as GNH positive, GNH negative or GNH neutral, based on how government interventions satisfy quantitative and qualitative GNH metrics and measurements. Questionnaires are made up of approximately 26 key variables prioritised in citizens’ surveys against which the policy is evaluated, which distill GNH’s four pillars into observable areas of impact to benchmark their progress towards GNH. For instance, these may include security, equitable growth, proximity to nature/spiritual sites, family cohesiveness, access to education, recreation and health.

GNH streamlines democratic governance like never before by bringing together the prime minister and cabinet secretary with secretaries of 10 key ministries and Environmental Commission in the Gross National Happiness Commission (GNHC). GNHC acts like a round table to bring different ministries together, armed with ministry specific GNH PST questionnaires to prevent ministries’ underlying competing bureaucracies from working at cross purposes to capture scarce budgetary allocations at the cost of the national interest. It is Bhutan’s fifth king and Prime Minister Thinley that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ought to thank for the ingenious merging of the functions of the Planning Commission and Committee of Secretaries into the locus of governance called the Gross National Happiness Commission in Bhutan, and the National Institution for Transforming India (Niti Ayog) seven years later in 2015.

Recognising the power of GNH in augmenting development, security and revolutionising the democratic process, the UN recognised ‘happiness’ as the 9th Millennium Development Goal, and invited the Kingdom of Bhutan to spearhead the formation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2015. I was also invited by the Permanent Mission of Bhutan to the UN led by Dasho Lhatu Wangchuk, UNDP and UN Academic Impact to present my GNH-inspired framework called “The Broken Happy Record” whereby policy-recommendations could be crowdsourced from youth especially at all levels of governance by multilateral organisations to make for a Sustainable Development Process to complement the Sustainable Development Goals. My process would use SDGs, GNH metrics, conventional developmental indicators and considerations of systemic liberty as sieves to formulate workable policy recommendations and bring us closer to the equitable and sovereignty-centric global governance we so desperately require to meet shared global challenges as diverse as terrorism and climate change with holistic and wholesome multilevel engagement. However, Bhutan’s successful handover of power to the second democratic government and personal tragedy have meant I’ve had to postpone the implementation of The Broken Happy Record until the present time. I seek the collaboration of everyone reading Politweak to make it a reality.

South Asia’s political cultures express PTSD on a subcontinental scale, be it the numbness of our political elite to the problems and aspirations of the laymen they represent, our readiness to war or to turn that violence on our own people. It is difficult to imagine legislating for happiness, yet all development is neutered and every social contract nullified unless Gross National Happiness is the objective.

(Concluded)

The writer is a politics and governance professional, integrated media strategist and Gross National Happiness researcher. She can be reached on Twitter @LatoyaFerns