For this week’s Politweak, I ask you to (re-) imagine history with me and embark on a thought experiment: It is 1972. You are 16. You have lost your father to a heart condition 6,477 kilometers away in Nairobi, Kenya, where he was undergoing medical treatment. Your Apa (father) had a weak heart but the strongest wherewithal. All loss gets us in the gut, but your loss comes with ineffable socio-political vacuum, because you are now the fourth King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck. You are expected to live up to your name, the courageous lion of the elected House of Wangchuck. Only eight years ago, in 1964 your mother’s brother, first prime minister (PM) Jigme Palden Dorji was assassinated by your father’s traditionalist uncle, the first Chief of the Royal Bhutan Army, for carrying out his mandate as a young reformer while HM Jigme Dorji Wangchuck was in recovery abroad. Decades later, the PM’s grandson (who people know as the Bollywood actor) Kelly Dorji wrote, “Evil is most evil when its intent is least malicious.” Just three years before you were born, your Himalayan kingdom pursued a policy of isolation from the outside world, because for a micro-state i.e. a country with less than a million people, “Small is dangerous!” It is especially true for Bhutan, which perched precariously in our fraught subcontinent between India and China has altogether evaded colonisation, two World Wars, the Cold War and the inclusion of Mahayana Buddhist polities, like in Tibet and Sikkim, during the consolidation of Mao’s China and independent India. When you were three, Chacha Nehru rode to Thimphu on Yak-back, bringing a new era of carefully calibrated cooperation. This included the first roads built by Indian Army, at the end of which among school children the child who later became the first democratically elected PM, Jigmi Thinley would trade one of few motorcars for a trek to Kalimpong to attend the boarding school Dr Graham’s Homes. Perhaps around the same time, present PM Tshering Tobgay’s mother was helping build the first road to India. Your government subsequently sent her young man to the Harvard Kennedy School, and it paid rich dividends because Fortune is to include him in 2016’s World’s Greatest Leaders for continuing development policies that took root in your monarchical government and found full expression in the first democratic government of your successor King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck (K5) in 2008. President Kennedy observed, “The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis’. One brush stroke stands for danger, the other for opportunity.” In your transcendental crisis, as a 16-year-old monarch, lies the seeds for the opportunity that will empower all your subjects to become citizens and state-makers. Let me explain. You took a hike like any teenager would, but in your case it was a very long one. You visited every gewog (village) in your kingdom, which was a challenge, considering limited connectivity meant there was a different ethnicity in every valley. 40 years later, you’d probably be more than proud when your son K5 visits every single home, and your daughter Princess Eeuphelma and daughter-in-law Queen Jetsun play basketball regularly at the YDF, your version of the YMCA! Slam-dunk! You want to give your people what they really need. So you ask them straight up what they want from your rule. Their near-unanimous reply is, “Happiness.” To any other absolute monarch, this wisdom would be lost in political translation, for the state quite rightly cannot put a smile on everyone’s face, and there is the serious business of the national interest. Nevertheless, as heir to a king who not only formalised the Dzongkha script but also simultaneously led the march of modern education, you’re determined to transliterate your mandate to create conditions for the pursuit of happiness into a method of statecraft. Your late father not only abolished feudal indentured labour and initiated planned development, he even made it possible for the National Assembly to sack him or any subsequent king, if found unsuitable, on the vote of 2/3 of the National Assembly! All progress is cumulative, but it needs to be wholesome and holistic. Your mother, art critic, HM the Third Queen Kesang Choeden taught you by example by spearheading the restoration of ruins that populated the new capital Thimphu, which she described at first as “the most desolate valley we had ever seen.” And your home was asylum to Tibetan reincarnate lama Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche who taught you the ancient science of happiness until you were 26, at that point endangered by the oxymoronically orientalist Chinese invasion. Your jocular first cousin Dasho (Sir) Paljor ‘Benji’ Dorji would in later years found the Royal Society for the Protection of Nature, which allowed Pledge Bhutan to punch above its weight at the Paris Climate Change Conference, because as Melino put it, ‘This country isn’t just carbon neutral… It’s carbon negative!’ The reader would be tickled to know that this state-building Victorinox of a gentleman Benji is famous for announcing in ‘your’ first ever radio broadcast in 1973 that it was 8.30AM Bhutan Standard Time, an impromptu departure from 8AM Indian Standard Time that was hugely popular because it meant people could stay in bed half an hour longer! Coming back to our thought experiment, some say it was not long after you were 16 at a United Nations dinner, that as a new member, some banterous old diplomat compared his national income to yours. Your ready repartee: Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product! Gross National Happiness, as a mandate of state and method of statecraft, you have deliberated, consists of four pillars: sustainable and equitable economic development; environmental conservation; good governance; and preservation and promotion of culture. To make happiness count, you mainstream every popular and academic consideration of it into an integrated dashboard for participatory development using a superlative division of leadership: Oxfordian Dasho Karma Ura to set up the modestly named think tank Centre for Bhutan Studies and three time PM Jigmi Thinley who even in retirement in helped broker Myanmar’s spanking new diplomatic peace between Aung San Suu Kyi and General U Thein Sein. In 2008 the unthinkable happens, despite the protests of a teary-eyed population, having achieved the happiest developmental story according to the UN Under Secretary General Ajay Chhibber with “middle level development” with the highest per capita income in South Asia despite its late start, ‘you’ become the first king ever to abdicate autonomously in favour of your proactive son for the sole purpose of giving up absolute power for a democracy. For me, a child of the 1990s, Bhutan’s Dragon Kings, trump even the Lion King. However, my purpose is not to wow the reader with what seems like a fantastical prequel to how our neighbour Bhutan ‘broke the happy record’ but to convey it is possible for a few committed statesmen to realistically fix our own ‘broken happy records’. Just as happiness is a reasonable raison d’etre or ‘being human’, it is a sound raison d’état, in terms of preserving our democracies in South Asia and regulating Bodypolitiks, especially at a time when the modern state is being challenged not very far away, in Iraq and Syria and supplanted with alternate, perverse systems forced onto those who slip into acquisitive and nihilistic governance by aspirational-state actors like Daesh. This Politweak is humbly dedicated to the Royal Queen Grandmother Kesang Choeden Wangchuck, whose 86th birth anniversary it is. It is my good karma to know of you only through the eyes of your loving granddaughter, Princess Tenzin Wangmo. (To be continued) The writer is a politics and governance professional, integrated media strategist and Gross National Happiness researcher. She can be reached on Twitter @LatoyaFerns