Bhutan

Bhutan is the last surviving Vajrayana Buddhist state, and its political form was designed by a lama. Ngawang Namgyal, a Drukpa Kagyu hierarch who fled a succession dispute in Tibet in 1616, unified the valleys, repelled repeated Tibetan invasions and established the chhoesi system, a dual order in which a spiritual ruler and a temporal administrator governed together. The dzongs he built, fortress monasteries that still house both the monk body and the district administration of each region, remain the physical expression of that arrangement.

Bhutanese Buddhism traces further back to Guru Rinpoche, Padmasambhava, whose visits in the eighth century are the founding events of the country's sacred geography; the monastery at Taktsang, the Tiger's Nest, clings to a cliff above the Paro valley at the site where he is said to have meditated. The state adopted Gross National Happiness as its development framework in preference to output measures, an explicitly Buddhist reordering of what a government is for, and it has been criticised as unfalsifiable and admired as a serious attempt to say so. Monarchy was established in 1907 and voluntarily converted itself into a constitutional democracy in 2008, at the initiative of the king rather than of any movement demanding it.

The 2008 constitution names Buddhism the spiritual heritage of Bhutan and makes the king the protector of all religions, a formula that establishes a culture without quite establishing a church. The Central Monastic Body is funded by the state and its head, the Je Khenpo, is second only to the king in precedence; five monastic representatives sit on the body that can remove a monarch. At the same time the constitution prohibits inducement to conversion, and no Christian denomination has been granted registration, so Christian worship takes place in homes without legal standing and the dead cannot be buried according to Christian rite.

The harder history concerns the Lhotshampa, Nepali speaking and largely Hindu communities settled in the southern lowlands from the late nineteenth century. Citizenship laws of 1985, a census that required documentary proof of residence in 1958, and a driglam namzha code imposing northern Bhutanese dress and custom produced protests and then expulsions: between 1990 and 1993 roughly one sixth of the country's population left or was forced out, and more than a hundred thousand people spent up to two decades in camps in eastern Nepal before third country resettlement began in 2007. Bhutan has accepted almost none of them back, and the episode is largely absent from the account the state gives of itself.