Nation Building

From Jay, on teaching aspiring lawyers:

I think many of our previous writings have included bits and pieces of what I am about to write here, but I wanted to put it all together into a picture that is starting to come into focus for me and my work. The longer we are here the more complex our take on things, and the more challenging it is to blog about it. We haven’t spent much time blogging about the Big Picture here, but it is always on our minds as we teach young, very smart, enthusiastic students, who listen to tales about social change movements in the US and elsewhere, and consider what that all means to them here in Bhutan, a place that is still scrambling to catch up to the rest of the world. Our students are all very smart, but the country has been very isolated for centuries.

 

First, a little bit of background. 

 

Bhutan is small—maybe around 180 miles east to west, and 90 miles from the north border with China to the southern border with several Indian states. Geographically, it is roughly a series of deep north-to-south valleys, separated by high mountain passes. So it has historically been very isolated, but these various micro-regions have themselves been very isolated too. The country was never colonized by outside powers, but the many valleys were often in conflict with each other for centuries.

 

The country’s form of Buddhism goes back to the 7^th century, with the influx of Buddhist masters from Tibet, many who migrated to avoid factional conflict in that country. Prior to the introduction of Buddhism, many of these micro regions in Bhutan practiced the animist Bon religion, elements of which were subsumed into later centuries of Buddhist practice. Bhutanese Buddhists still maintain a reverence for many deities, both “wrathful” and “protective”, that existed in Bonism before Buddhism grew to be the dominant religion.

Guru Rinpoche is probably the most important historical and religious figure in Bhutan, and is credited by most to have first introduced Buddhism to Bhutan in 746. He was (and is) considered by the Bhutanese to have been the second Buddha, and to have manifested in eight different forms during his time in Bhutan, as he conquered and tamed various evil deities throughout Bhutan. Everyone knows the stories of Guru Rinpoche, and the landscape is full of places he is said to have visited or sheltered. Most temples (Lhakhangs) have at least one statue of Guru Rinpoche, in one or more of his various manifestations.

Bhutan remained a fragmented patchwork of regional local chiefs until the Buddhist master Ngawang Namgyal came to Bhutan, traveling and teaching throughout the Western part of the country in the early 1600’s, and began to consolidate power and unify many regions. He was challenged by a number of rival Buddhist lineages in Bhutan who were supported by Tibet, but he ultimately overcame this challenge, and in 1639 was recognized by the then king of Tibet as the supreme authority of Bhutan. 

 

He and subsequent spiritual leaders built a series of dzongs, which were initially fortresses for each valley or region, but in later years came to house both the monastic body for the region and the administrative body for regional governance. Dzongs throughout Bhutan are still icons of the physical landscape, as well as continuing to house various regional governments.  The Paro Dzong, for example, which is across the river from our first house here (and we have posted many photos of), still houses the monk body and the government offices for the Paro Dzongkhag (state).

These regions remained politically separate and frequently in conflict with each other, until the early 20^th century, when the leader Ugyen Wangchuk emerged as the most powerful and charismatic of all leaders throughout the county. He was unanimously named by various regional leaders as the First King (Druk Gyalpo) in 1907, initiating the current monarchy.

This description is far more simplistic than it should be, but I am not writing a book here. It skips the various attempts of outside powers, such as Tibet, India and the British to absorb Bhutan, either through force or politics, all of which failed over the centuries. In the end, metaphorically and physically, Bhutan has been an isolated, walled-in country throughout its entire history, with a unique culture that is not close to replicated anywhere else. Isolation and distrust of the outsider has, I think, been a major component of its culture up to the present day. 

 

Our school’s formal name is Jigme Singye Wanchuk School of Law, named after the Fourth King, who became the king at age 16 when his father the Third King died. The Fourth King eventually married four sisters, on the same day, and had a number of children. The eldest son became the Fifth King when his father, after setting in motion a series of political moves towards democracy, abdicated the throne to his eldest son with instructions to complete the transition to a constitutional monarchy. 

 

The process of modernization that the Fourth King started included joining the United Nations in 1971, and building the infrastructure to have free public education and healthcare throughout the country in the 1960s. There were few roads until the 60s and 70s. There were no tourists until the 1970s. Television and the internet were not introduced until 1999. Now even remote villages in the east have 100% electricity and cell phone coverage, free education, potable water, but this current generation is only half a generation away, really, from a far different time. 

 

Democratization began in the 1990’s with the process of writing a constitution, which was adopted in 2008, after which the Fifth King was tasked with completing the transition to a constitutional monarchy. This has essentially been a benevolent monarchy, going back to the early 20^th century, but a monarchy is still a monarchy. 

 

The Fifth King and his siblings were all educated in the US from high school through professional school; his sister the Princess went to Stanford undergrad, law school at Harvard, and is now the President of the law school and the president of the bar association. 

 

Up until the establishment of JSW School of Law, there was no law school in the country, and the limited number of lawyers in the country were educated abroad, mostly in India. JSW has now graduated two classes of approximately 20 each, into a bar association that numbers maybe 160 lawyers, with only about 80 considered active.

 

I am teaching a class on Advanced Issues in Criminal Justice this semester, and last semester taught the then-required class of Law, Religion and Culture. JSW’s curriculum is a five-year undergrad professional law degree program, and half of my current class are fifth year students, the other half are fourth years. Each entering class is about 20 to 25 students, drawn from all over the country, ranging from children of educated professionals from the capital of Thimphu to kids from the far east in remote villages, where promising smart kids are shipped off to boarding schools far away from their villages. They compete for slots, and if admitted, have free room, board, tuition and a laptop. 

 

In the school's Moot Court room, after the moot court competition. The team that will go on to the international competition in Washington D.C. next spring was chosen that afternoon after oral arguments

Though these students are Bhutan’s homegrown lawyers, there is a limit to the effectiveness of the education they are getting, because there are so few lawyers in the country, and the tradition of a rule of law is so new and undeveloped.

 

Bhutan has a great start at a democracy, but laws and constitutions don’t make democracy happen - it has to happen on the ground in the day-to-day workings of the courts and the practice of law. They do not have a death penalty, thankfully, but I suspect that trials bear little resemblance to what a trial should be. No juries. And though the constitution theoretically guarantees the right to counsel for the poor, there is no real right to court appointed counsel. So it is not such a happy place if you want a public defender. A colleague and I are tasked with helping the government’s Legal Aid Center (which also reports to the Princess) establish a system of pro bono attorneys to take court appointed cases, but what they are accomplishing so far is a drop in the bucket.

 

These students understand this and are engaged with my encouragement to build a rights-based system of rule of law. When they hit the professional world, though, they will still be a minority amongst the old guard that doesn’t necessarily want to hear about the existing fallible system, nor have the professional skills to grow a new rules-based order. Bhutan has done a terrific job of marketing itself as a Buddhist country focused on Gross National Happiness, and unique because of it, but that doesn’t always play out in reality. We are constantly trying to understand where our students go from here, what jobs await them in Bhutan, or whether they will even stay. 

 

 Jay with last semester's class

I continue to emphasize the lifelong, generations-long work of social justice through law. Clearly we not done by any means in the US, and are actually in real danger of going backward, but in Bhutan they are indeed just barely beginning. The Rule of Law is not growing out of Buddhist spiritual practice and talk of GNH; the students are the architects of Bhutan’s Rule of Law in the future.

We don't know what the future of this country will be, whether it continues to grow forward or retreats to an earlier time that may seem easier. But we have hopes.