Baba used to ask us to look up when walking, while Aama suggested that we look at our feet now and then lest we miss a step. Growing up in Gangtok, looking up for me meant looking up to the TV Tower, at it, sometimes through it. When I lived in 6th Mile¹, the Tower grew bigger as we approached the town². As I grew older and moved to the Development Area, it rejected the general rule of thumb: what appears big when we are small looks smaller as we grow up. My movement and relocation in Gangtok metaphorically and physically mirrored my parents’ class mobility that facilitated it- we moved from near the base of the hill to somewhere around the top. The TV Tower retained its size and magnanimity.

The TV Tower, once synonymous with Gangtok’s skyline and visible from across the neighbouring hills, stood for 31 years before it was dismantled in 2024. My early memories of Gangtok are flooded with its image. It no longer exists, but it lives on.

Now, I ask, what makes a city familiar? Where do I feel I belong? How do I engage with a city that changes constantly?

These questions are large and constitute a multitude of worlds within themselves, but they stem from an individual’s experience of the city. For me, that experience has been one that shifts before one recognises, collapses before it corrects, and mutates before it accommodates.

Gangtok and the Promise of the Smart City 

In 2015, the Government of India launched the National Smart Cities Mission (SCM). After several rounds of proposals, 100 cities were selected nationwide, Gangtok being one among them. The Ministry of Urban Development offers no clear definition of a “smart city”, however, it is supposed to be based on the needs of the people. Imagining a smart city entails changes in services and infrastructure, which are related to citizens’ aspirations (Appadurai, 2004). Aspirations, however, are never neutral; they are shaped by social and cultural context, and in Sikkim’s case, by the state’s promotion of tourism and the particular narratives it has built around Sikkimese culture.

Aspirations, however, are never neutral; they are shaped by social and cultural context..

The Gangtok SCM implemented numerous projects: the 14-storey West Point Tower, with its shopping complex, hotel, and parking lot; retrofitting of Lall Bazaar; work on the Ridge Park and Tsuklakhang Palace Complex; and improvements to pedestrian walkways, roads and junctions. While none of these signals a failure of implementation, there is a lack of a comprehensive view of development in the city.

For this essay, I take infrastructure to mean components of space that impress how people experience that space (Dourish & Bell, 2007) - the shifting boundaries between the material and the immaterial, the human and the non-human. Infrastructure also reveals power dynamics that interfere with the division between public and private, state and non-state. Furthermore, one must examine the making of these infrastructures: where are the resources drawn from, and to whom are these resources distributed? What role, if any, has public participation played in the planning of Gangtok’s urbanisation? A city has a life of its own, but that very life is infused by the people who live in that space, and the life that we imagine belongs to that city is also a relationship we have with it.

A landscape built for the present can become problematic later - when the needs of labour and capital shift (Harvey, 1985). Unfortunately, the Smart City Mission for Gangtok has taken this turn. It promises a secure public future even as the meaning of "public" is being contested. Habermas's (1991) prediction of the increasing privatisation of public spaces holds here: a space that becomes less public also becomes less democratic.

The Lives of Things Walk: Looking at What Usually Goes Unnoticed

Gangtok’s popular image conjures up landmarks like monasteries, viewpoints, markets and so on. But much of its everyday life unfolds through quieter, more intimate traces. On 18th April 2026, for World Heritage Day, I designed and led a walk with Sahapedia and Gangtok’s city-curator, Abhibyanjana Rubhi Thatal, built around a deliberate critique of “heritage”, shifting attention from the tangible to the intangible. Thirty-six participants, from Gangtok and outside it, moved through various points in the city, observing objects like signboards, plants, pathways, and even overt structures like the panda statue on MG Marg, pausing to observe details often ignored. Subtle modifications to shared urban spaces reveal how people continuously negotiate and remake Gangtok. Participants explored Gangtok through these material and sensory fragments. In doing so, it opened up new ways of imagining Gangtok as an evolving archive of lived experiences, shaped by the presence, absence, and, most importantly, the memory of everyday objects.

Structured as an exploratory walk, followed by an inconclusive discussion, this experience gave rise to the following points:

a. Public Space and Everyday Negotiations

The walk commenced at Denzong Cinema Hall in Lall Bazaar. Following a short debrief, we ascended Thaado Line toward MG Marg, dispersing across the old and new stretches, on to Hospital Darah, and ended at the Development Area. These points were chosen deliberately as an attempt to trace what remains of Gangtok’s public spaces.

Several participants identified the route simply as an everyday path: one they use to reach town for recreation and leisure, or to walk to and from work. Some pushed back on it as a more “commercial” portrayal of the city, saying they’d have preferred the shortcuts or “chor baato,” through which their actual negotiation with the space happens. Attention to these shortcuts isn’t incidental: it points to what people want from the spaces they move through daily, an attention to sociality and how these spaces draw people in rather than simply being passed through (Simone, 2004).

Additionally, many cited that this route requires no entry fee, unlike the Wellness Park near Old STNM, or even parts of the Ridge Park³. The once-open-for-all but now-unsafe parking lot near Sangram Hall in the Development Area came up often too, remembered for its sunsets, and valued as a place to rest between walks, runs, or long days.

About half the participants were first-time visitors to Sikkim, and without a guide to steer them toward heritage hotspots, several described the early discomfort of having to engage with the city on their own; by the end, most said it worked better for them. It pushed them into conversations with people they might otherwise not have spoken to, toward something closer to a "local" read on the place, and toward noticing things on the route a guided tour would have skipped past. Rather than a tourist gaze that takes back only images of monasteries and mountains, participants’ engagements with everyday objects open their imaginations to how people in these cities actually live, making them more cognisant of their position and contribution as a traveller.

b. The Hyperlocal and the Borrowed

One participant, from Gujarat, photographed signages across town and noted “hyperlocal” touches, like the Tibetan lettering in front of fixtures on MG Marg, as well as a mix of more “modern” elements, pointing to digitally-made signage, alongside signs that spoke to a recent flurry of café and shopping businesses. Signage in Gangtok rarely exists in isolation; it's in constant dialogue with the signage around it, communicating as much about a business's ideals as about nostalgia or preservation.

Another participant documented dragon imagery across roughly 20 points in town, carved into gates at Lall Bazaar, Denzong Cinema Hall, and the State Bank, painted on fridge magnets and thangkas in gift shops, in tattoo shops, sprayed as graffiti across town, making way into restaurants, most notably ‘The Dragon Wok,’ flown on the Bhutanese flag on MG Marg, and cast as statues outside the Thakurbaari temple.

This opened a debate about whether the dragon is even a "Sikkimese" motif, or one borrowed from Tibetan and Chinese trade during Sikkim's founding as a Buddhist kingdom- a question beyond the scope of this article, except to say that the term "Sikkimese" itself resists a single definition (Thatal, 2023), and I'd rather it unsettle the reader's own assumptions than mine. The same is true of "hyperlocal," a term borrowed from Media Studies to describe a relationship to place: if the walk's participants weren't all locals, what counts as local - let alone hyperlocal - to them? I leave that open, along with the larger question of trade routes and cultural exchange it gestures toward.

c. How Do People Live with What Has Been (Re)built?

Public spaces are not static. Cities are not only planned from above; they are continually produced from every rung of society. One participant observed Gangtok’s staircases-witnesses to their meanderings and negotiations with the city, meeting points for friends, spaces to avoid some people, and shortcuts to get to places quickly- and how their preservation is crucial to their retaining a sense of belonging in the city.

I have a similar relationship with Gangtok’s footpaths, the cornerstone of my memory, serving as a safe perimeter to walk around Gangtok, remade tirelessly over the years into what is now an almost-continuous stretch from Ranipool to Gangtok with a few disjointed points along the way. The changes began before the SCM arrived, first with new tiles, then a wholly redesigned railing, and continued into the overhead roofs that now punctuate parts of the stretch. In theory, these roofs shelter walkers from Gangtok’s sun and its incessant rain; in practice, built for straight-falling water, they do little against the slanting rain that actually falls here. Cross ducts at strategic points remain largely absent, so pedestrians often climb over the footpath railing to cross; the foot-over bridges, at least, still do their job. The stretch, between the New Sadar Police Station and the entry to the Development Area, was built at the cost of hundreds of trees, which makes the shade-giving roofs a bitter irony: shelter from a sun made harsher by the cutting of the trees where a new shelter is built.

The images that once existed in our minds have now been colonised by structures that do not belong here, geographically and ecologically challenging our sense of belonging in the city.

Several participants also spoke of the constant construction in Gangtok. They observed that the suggested route, which was once scenic with multiple viewpoints that offered not just aesthetics but also a respite from their daily lives, had now devolved into an urban jungle. This isn’t nostalgia so much as a changed relationship with the land: as the landscape shifts, so does the memoryscape. The images that once existed in our minds have now been colonised by structures that do not belong here, geographically and ecologically challenging our sense of belonging in the city.

Widely quoted and rightly so, change is inevitable, but only constructive and favourable when it takes into account those who experience that change. Change rooted in people’s experiences is the only kind that is palatable; otherwise, it risks becoming an unnecessary embellishment. Communities must feel responsible for change, and for one to assume that responsibility and accountability, they must be made part of the discourse around changes. Before one realises, our concerns are packed into small boxes and sold back to us as dreams and aspirations of rebuilding a place. Between windows, construction sheeting, shopfronts, labour, flags, motifs, lamp-posts, umbrellas, and posters, a city is experienced through its objects. And the removal, or worse, the dis-consideration of one’s experiences of the city from larger plans of city-planning suggests that things are being done to the city and not with it.

Concluding Thoughts: Gangtok as a Giant Construction Site 

It bears reiterating that what’s recounted here is drawn from a more extensive, and necessarily incomplete, archive of experiences. This essay is as much a critique of the SCM as an attempt to render visible the repository of memories and lived experiences that residents carry of their city. Also, how these are being reshaped in the process. Yet, this reshaping has rarely been a negotiated process. The SCM, in its execution, has largely proceeded without meaningful public deliberation, treating the city as a site to be optimised rather than a space to be collectively imagined.

Holston and Appadurai (1996) contend that citizenship relies on the notion of a community of shared intention and commensurable citizens, which assumes that this community is devoted to forming a shared life suited to the conditions of modernity. However, this also assumes that all people are similar. Here, the idea of shared culture topples over since, in the face of modernity, one realises that citizens are not commensurable. This incommensurability among citizens, then, is not merely a social or a political fact, but fundamentally also a spatial one. If citizens cannot be assumed to share a single, unified intention, then neither can the spaces they inhabit be understood as singular.

But as the walk participants’ accounts made clear, what is delivered instead is not exclusion in any overt sense, but a steady, almost imperceptible pressure to adapt, to find workarounds for what is built without them in mind.

Let's consider this space “under construction.” The objective of the SCM does not meet Massey’s (2005) description of space as ‘the sphere of coexisting heterogeneity’ influenced by the co-occurrence of multiplicity. Without multiplicity, no space really exists at all. Sikkim’s push for tourism as an engine of growth has shaped Gangtok’s image as much as the Mission has (Thatal, 2023).

Finally, the promise of infrastructure in Gangtok has been of inclusivity and convenience: spaces that would let Gangtokians become their fuller selves. But as the walk participants’ accounts made clear, what is delivered instead is not exclusion in any overt sense, but a steady, almost imperceptible pressure to adapt, to find workarounds for what is built without them in mind. This is not the inclusivity that was promised. I do not raise this to argue for keeping Gangtok as it is, or as it was, blindly challenging all development projects; the very idea of a ‘pristine’ place reeks of privilege, and anyone who has lived in one knows it means a constant negotiation between surviving and being seen. Rather, this is an attempt at recalibrating our aspirations, as a society, toward a better future for our city. Our identities are inherently attached to a place, and when a place changes faster than we can make sense of it, we lose facets of ourselves before we even recognise them. With urban redesign comes the redesign of the social fabric of the city we all share, actualised in how the everyday objects around us are transformed. Every beautification drive has a price, most often paid by the land we stand on and the air we breathe. The question was never whether development is happening, but who gets to imagine the city being built, and whether residents are made part of it, or merely informed of it after. If Gangtok is to keep becoming, it must do so with its people.

Perhaps, then, to truly see Gangtok for what it is, and not merely as the SCM envisions it, one must learn to do both: to look up, as Baba urged, and down, as Aama cautioned, holding together what is imagined and what is already underfoot.

Note:

Some of the images taken by participants of the walk can be accessed at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WTm73dvjboo4jTUaC8ZJMnIWmtz1jG7I?usp=sharing

All images have been uploaded by the makers with prior consent sought and the use of the images made aware. Do not use these images without consent, and without rightfully crediting the makers.

¹ A relatively busy, centrally located neighbourhood along the NH-10

²Gangtok Bazaar 

³ Vis-a-vis the Orchidarium

Bibliography: (217 words)

1. About the mission | Smartcities. (n.d.). Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India. Retrieved July 1, 2026, from https://smartcities.gov.in/about-the-mission
2. Anand, N., Gupta, A., & Appel, H. (Eds). (2018). The Promise of Infrastructure. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12101q3
3. Appadurai, A. (2004). The capacity to aspire: culture and the terms of recognition. In V. Rao & M. Walton (Eds.), Culture and Public Action. Stanford University Press.
4. Dourish, P., & Bell, G. (2007). The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space. Environment and Planning B Planning and Design, 34(3), 414–430. https://doi.org/10.1068/b32035t
5. Gangtok Smart City Development Limited. (n.d.). Gangtok Smart City Development Limited. Retrieved July 1, 2026, from https://smartcitygangtok.com/
6. Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT Press (MA).
7. Harvey, D. (1985). The urbanization of capital. Johns Hopkins University Press.
8. Holston, J., & Appadurai, A. (1998). Cities and citizenship. Public Culture, 8, 187–204. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw70j
9. Massey, D. (2005). For space. SAGE Publications Limited.
10. Simone, A. (2004). People as infrastructure: Intersecting fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture, 16(3), 407–429. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-407
11. Thatal, A. (2023). Café Culture: Exploring the roles of cafés in cultural production among the urban middle class in Gangtok, Sikkim. [MA Thesis]. Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

Museums play a vital role in safeguarding and interpreting cultural heritage. Through museum collections, people gain insight into the objects used in everyday life, the artistic expressions of different periods, and the technological and cultural developments that have shaped human civilization. By preserving and displaying these collections, museums bridge the past and the present, allowing people to better understand how history continues to influence contemporary society.

Museums play a vital role in safeguarding and interpreting cultural heritage.

The long-term preservation of museum collections depends on effective conservation practices. In the context of museums, conservation refers to all measures and actions undertaken to safeguard cultural heritage. The conservation process is generally divided into three complementary approaches: preventive conservation, remedial conservation, and restoration. While remedial conservation and restoration involve direct treatment of damaged objects, preventive conservation focuses on avoiding or minimizing deterioration before it occurs. Its primary objective is to preserve an object's current condition, minimize the rate of deterioration, and reduce the need for costly and often irreversible restoration treatments. Preventive conservation, therefore, emphasizes creating and maintaining suitable environmental conditions rather than directly altering the object itself. By managing the environment surrounding museum collections, it is possible to significantly extend their lifespan while preserving their authenticity and integrity.

All cultural objects inevitably undergo deterioration over time. However, the rate and extent of deterioration are greatly influenced by external environmental and human factors, collectively known as the agents of deterioration. These agents represent the primary risks to museum collections and include physical forces, theft and vandalism, fire, water, pests, pollutants, light, incorrect temperature, incorrect relative humidity, and dissociation - the loss of information or separation of objects from their documentation. Understanding these risks is fundamental to the preventive conservation process because it enables museums to identify potential threats and take  appropriate measures before irreversible damage occurs.

An essential aspect of preventive conservation is understanding the materials from which objects are made. Different materials respond differently to environmental conditions and, therefore, require different methods of care. Museum objects are broadly classified into organic and inorganic materials. Organic materials, such as wood, paper, leather, textiles, bone, and ivory, originate from living organisms and are generally more susceptible to fluctuations in temperature, humidity, biological attack, and light exposure. In contrast, inorganic materials, including stone, ceramics, glass, and metals require different conservation strategies. Correctly identifying an object's material composition allows conservators to predict its vulnerabilities and develop appropriate preventive measures.

An essential aspect of preventive conservation is understanding the materials from which objects are made. Different materials respond differently to environmental conditions and, therefore, require different methods of care.

Preventive conservation is fundamentally a process of risk management, aiming to minimize the impact of the agents of deterioration before significant damage occurs. A widely accepted approach involves five progressive levels of risk management: avoid, block, detect, respond, and recover. These levels are arranged from the least to the most interventive, emphasizing that preventing damage is always preferable to treating its consequences. For example, the risk of fire can first be avoided by prohibiting smoking within museum buildings, blocked through the installation of fire-resistant doors and firefighting equipment, using smoke and heat detectors, responded to through well-planned emergency procedures, and, only as a last resort, recovered through conservation treatment after damage has occurred. Applying these principles to all agents of deterioration forms the foundation of preventive conservation, enabling museums to protect their collections in a systematic, sustainable, and cost-effective manner. 

The key measures of preventive conservation are monitoring the temperature, relative humidity and pollutants of the environment surrounding the artifact. The documentation of objects, proper handling, maintenance like dusting and cleaning, re-organization of the collection,  archival housing, integrated pest management, emergency preparedness and response; handling procedures and treating hazardous materials are important aspects of preventive conservation. 

Why is Preventive Conservation important in  Sikkim? 

Preventive Conservation preserves our cultural identity and heritage, protecting it from deterioration, restoring and stabilizing damaged artworks, and is an important process that ensures the long-term survival of cultural treasures. Sikkim has rare items like indigenous artifacts of different communities. Many items are irreplaceable, such as religious manuscripts,  thangkas, religious musical instruments, daily equipment, material culture and other indigenous objects. Some of these objects are no longer in use and are no longer produced. 

The problems faced in Sikkim are monsoon humidity, mold growth, pests, soot, high seismic and fire risk which threaten and damage to the collection. The people of Sikkim can use preventive conservation to care for their objects of cultural heritage by using simple steps like dry cleaning, maintaining them from time to time, documenting their objects, and protecting them from pests.  Well-preserved monasteries, museums, and heritage sites attract visitors and provide educational opportunities, contributing to the state's economy and cultural awareness. 

Sikkim is home to ancient monasteries, manuscripts, thangka paintings, sculptures, and traditional artifacts that are vulnerable to deterioration due to the region's humid climate, heavy rainfall, and changing temperatures. Preventive conservation involves maintaining proper storage conditions, controlling humidity, ensuring good ventilation, and regular cleaning and monitoring the collections to prevent damage from mold, insects and rodents. It also includes disaster preparedness measures to reduce the impact of earthquakes, floods, and landslides, which are common in the region. Preventive conservation is more cost-effective than restoration. 

Preventive Conservation practised in Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, Gangtok, Sikkim 

One of the important museums in Sikkim is the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology. It has a collection of old thangka paintings, sculptures, scriptures, coins amongst many historical artifacts. They are from the state as well as from the neighbouring countries like Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan. Preventive conservation is also used in the museum by regulating the relative humidity and temperature and monitoring. A dehumidifier is installed in the museum and is used on some days. The racks are placed  above one foot away from the ground.  Some of the boxes that have manuscripts have bags of natural herbs like clove to keep pests away. The thangkas are kept away from natural light as light  damages the paintings. The collection of the museum is well maintained and preserved. 

Conservation Workshops in Sikkim State Museum and Archives

The Sikkim State Museum and Archives has been conducting workshops in conservation in collaboration with conservation institutes like The National Research Laboratory for Conservation of Cultural Property (NRLC), Tata Trusts Art Conservation Initiative and Himalayan Institute for Heritage and Art Conservation (HIMSHACO). 

Recently, Tata Trusts Art Conservation Initiative, in partnership with the Kolkata Institute of Art Conservation and the Sikkim State Archives, the Government of Sikkim conducted a three month training workshop, between October 2024 to January 2025, in the Preventive Conservation of Cultural Material Heritage and Architectural Decorations. The workshop gave training to the staff of museums, scholars and various monks from different monasteries.

RE-ORG Method

Reorganisation also known as re-org method is a part of preventive conservation which is a step-by-step approach to help those who work with cultural and heritage collections to reorganize their current storage rooms, with the use of existing resources.

Reorganization of Reserve Storage of Sikkim State Archives

Prior to the reorg, the storage area had several issues that were harmful for the objects of cultural heritage and the overall condition of the space. It was in a state of significant disrepair. The combination of fungal and pest infestations, high humidity, improper storage practices, and lack of maintenance presented serious risks to the collection. Immediate action was necessary to restore the space, preserve the objects, and establish an organized, well maintained environment for the proper care of the collection.

Improvements Following the Reorganization of the Storage Area

All objects were thoroughly cleaned, packaged, and stored with appropriate support to prevent physical damage. The relative humidity was reduced from 90% to 60% following the installation of an exhaust fan. The storage is now organized in a way that allows objects to be easily accessed and identified.  The fungus and pest-infested wall has been disinfected, eliminating the source of contamination and ensuring a healthier storage environment. No objects are stored on the floor anymore. The storage room now looks clean and well-maintained. The storage area has been optimized for space, making more efficient use of available storage capacity. This has not only improved accessibility but also allowed for future addition of new items. Both temperature and relative humidity are now monitored daily to maintain optimal conditions for the collection. The re-org of the Reserve Storage Area of Sikkim State Archives and Museum has successfully transformed the storage area into a well-maintained, organized, and secure environment for the objects. 

Exhibition and Awareness

An exhibition on the workshop highlighted the preventive conservation steps taken during the training course creating awareness about the importance of preventive conservation. 

Reflections on the Training

In a region like Sikkim, which is rich in culture and tradition, material heritage plays a vital role in shaping our identity and preserving our history. This training course highlighted the importance of preventive conservation in protecting our cultural material heritage. We were introduced to the value of our heritage, the significance of documentation, and the various agents of deterioration that threaten our artifacts and its mitigation with disaster risk preparedness. More importantly, we learned practical measures to combat these threats.

The course equipped us with knowledge and skill to implement effective preventive conservation practices. Simple steps, such as dry cleaning, packaging, reorganizing, and environmental control, have contributed to the preservation of the artifacts of the State State Museum and Archives in Sikkim. Through the training programme we learned the basics of science, the history of Sikkim, environmental studies, preventive conservation of paper, photographic materials and textiles. We learnt the basics of photography and photographic documentation, handling of objects of the museum, the re-org process, disaster and risk preparedness, assessment, management and the setting up of an exhibition. We had field visits to the Directorate of Handicraft and Handlooms,  the Botanical Survey of India, Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, Enchey Monastery and Tsuklhakhang Royal Palace Monastery which deepened our knowledge and understanding of our heritage. At the end of the training, we all worked together as a team to reorganize the Reserve Storage at the Sikkim State Museum. The training ended with presentations and reflections from the participants and curating an exhibition to create awareness amongst the people of Sikkim. 

Preventive Conservation Strategies for Sikkim 

Preventive conservation strategies in Sikkim should combine scientific conservation methods with indigenous knowledge and active community participation to ensure the long-term preservation of the state's cultural heritage. Maintaining stable environmental conditions through proper ventilation, humidity control, and suitable storage materials is essential, particularly for manuscripts, textiles, paintings, and wooden artifacts that are highly vulnerable to Sikkim's humid climate and prolonged monsoon season. Low-cost preventive measures such as improved ventilation systems, dehumidifiers, exhaust fans, moisture absorbing materials like silica gel, regular monitoring of temperature and relative humidity, and seasonal maintenance schedules, including occasional sun-drying of objects when appropriate, can effectively reduce mold growth and moisture-related deterioration. Regular cleaning, integrated pest management, and periodic condition assessments further help prevent damage from insects, rodents, fungi, and other biological agents.

An important aspect of preventive conservation in Sikkim is the integration of indigenous and traditional knowledge systems with modern conservation practices. Traditional communities have long developed effective methods for preserving sacred objects, textiles, manuscripts, and religious artifacts despite challenging climatic conditions. These practices, including seasonal maintenance rituals and traditional methods of handling sacred objects, have been passed down through generations and continue to play a significant role in heritage preservation. Encouraging culturally rooted conservation practices while incorporating scientific approaches recommended by conservation professionals provide a balanced and sustainable strategy.

Community-based conservation is another key approach to preserving Sikkim's heritage. Monks, caretakers, local artisans, and surrounding communities serve as the living custodians of monasteries, temples, and other heritage sites. Their active participation in decision-making and preservation practices makes conservation more effective because they possess intimate knowledge of the collections, their materials, ritual significance, and traditional methods of care. Collaboration between conservation professionals, research institutions, conservation laboratories, and monastic communities can further strengthen preservation efforts. While conservation experts contribute scientific knowledge, technical guidance, and appropriate conservation methods, local communities provide valuable insights into traditional care practices, seasonal environmental changes, material use, and religious customs, all of which are essential for developing culturally sensitive conservation plans.

Capacity building is equally important for the sustainable preservation of heritage.

Specialized training programmes should be conducted for monks, museum staff, caretakers, artisans, and local communities to enhance their knowledge of preventive conservation techniques, proper handling methods, environmental monitoring, emergency preparedness, and documentation practices. Public awareness programmes highlighting the importance of cultural heritage and preventive conservation should also be encouraged to foster greater community responsibility for heritage preservation.

Digital preservation initiatives provide an additional safeguard for Sikkim's cultural heritage. Photographic documentation, digital cataloguing of collections, detailed documentation of murals, sculptures, manuscripts, and architectural features, as well as recording oral histories and traditional knowledge, create permanent records that can support research, restoration, and recovery in the event of disasters, theft, or material loss.

Disaster preparedness should form an integral component of preventive conservation in Sikkim, particularly because the state is highly vulnerable to earthquakes, landslides, floods, and fires. Many monasteries and heritage structures in the Himalayan region have suffered significant losses due to such disasters. Comprehensive documentation of collections before disasters occur is therefore essential. Heritage buildings should be regularly inspected and maintained to ensure their structural stability, while electrical systems should be checked frequently to prevent short circuits. Care should also be taken with the use of open lamps and candles inside monasteries and heritage buildings. Fire extinguishers, sand buckets, and other basic firefighting equipment should be readily available in museums, monasteries, and other heritage sites, and staff should receive training in emergency response procedures. Developing disaster preparedness and emergency response plans, together with proper maintenance of heritage buildings and secure storage and display systems, will greatly enhance the long-term protection of Sikkim's cultural heritage.

Bibliography 

• https://www.sikkim.gov.in/departments/forest-environment-and-wildlife-department/biodiversity 
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/vacuum-sealing
• ICCROM
• RE-ORG: A Method to Reorganize Museum Storage, ICCROM
• https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-art-reduces-stress-major-scientific-study 
• https://www.fieldmuseum.org/science/research/area/conserving-collections/preventive-conservation
• https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/agents-deterioration.html
• Preventive Conservation for Museums International Museum Academy Myanmar https://www.britishcouncil.org.mm/sites/default/files/toolkit_preventive_conservation_for_museums_final_web_english_372020.pdf
• https://www.unesco.org/en/query-list/c/cultural-heritage

This timeless Nepali proverb reminds us that genuine effort alone yields genuine rewards. Few livelihoods embody this wisdom more beautifully than beekeeping.

Across the Himalayan foothills, generations of beekeepers have worked in rhythm with nature's calendar, observing flowering cycles, reading weather patterns and nurturing bee colonies through changing seasons. Their relationship with bees is built not on domination but on cooperation. The harvest is more than honey; it is sustenance, healing, culture and memory. Each drop carries the taste of wildflowers, forest edges, village gardens, and the landscapes that sustain both pollinators and people.

Their relationship with bees is built not on domination but on cooperation.

In the tea-growing hills of Darjeeling, this enduring practice continues to buzz quietly beneath the shadows of sprawling tea estates. Here, amidst one of the world's most celebrated tea landscapes, a community of beekeepers is demonstrating how traditional knowledge, scientific innovation and conservation can come together to create a more resilient future.

A Livelihood Hidden in Plain Sight

The tea landscapes of Kurseong, Mirik and Darjeeling are often associated with mist-covered slopes, often shrouded with exotics like Camellia sinensis (tea plant) and Cryptomeria japonica (Dhuppi). Yet beneath this familiar story lies another one; that of beekeepers tending colonies of the indigenous Asian / Indian honeybee, Apis cerana indica.

Today, this story is becoming increasingly important. Darjeeling's tea industry, long the economic backbone of the hills, faces multiple challenges including but not limited to fluctuating global markets and climate variability. For thousands of tea garden workers and their families, these pressures translate into uncertain livelihoods and limited opportunities for income enhancement.

In this context, diversified livelihoods are no longer merely desirable; they are essential. Beekeeping offers one such opportunity. It requires relatively little land, modest investment and can be integrated seamlessly into the tea landscape without competing for productive space.

Unlike many agricultural enterprises, beekeeping requires remarkably little space.

A recent baseline assessment conducted among beekeepers from Ambootia Tea Estate, Makaibari Tea Estate and neighbouring villages revealed that beekeeping serves as an important supplementary livelihood for many households. Most participants were tea workers or depended on casual daily wage labour for their primary income. For these families, beekeeping offers an opportunity to diversify livelihoods without requiring large landholdings or substantial investments.

Unlike many agricultural enterprises, beekeeping requires remarkably little space. A few hives tucked beside a home or near a kitchen garden can produce valuable honey while simultaneously supporting pollination across the landscape.

The assessment also revealed that the average beekeeper manages only a small number of colonies. While some households maintain larger apiaries, most operate just one or two hives. This reflects the reality that beekeeping in the region remains largely small-scale and household-based, often integrated with other livelihood activities rather than functioning as a standalone enterprise.

Guardians of Indigenous Bees

The star of this story is not merely honey, but the bee itself.

The indigenous Apis cerana, commonly known as the Asian honeybee or Indian honeybee, has co-evolved with Himalayan ecosystems for centuries. Unlike imported honeybee species that are often promoted in commercial apiculture, Apis cerana is adapted to local climatic conditions, seasonal fluctuations and native flowering plants.

The indigenous Apis cerana, commonly known as the Asian honeybee or Indian honeybee, has co-evolved with Himalayan ecosystems for centuries.

Traditional beekeepers have long understood these relationships. Their knowledge encompasses where bees forage, which plants flower in different seasons, how colonies behave before swarming and when honey can be harvested without compromising colony survival.

Today, this knowledge remains invaluable. Yet modern challenges; including habitat simplification, declining floral diversity, changing weather patterns, and chemical use in horticulture and floriculture require additional skills and support.

This is where scientific apiculture enters the picture.

WWF-India has been supporting beekeepers across the Darjeeling tea landscape through a combination of training, supporting and monitoring. Since 2024, more than ninety beekeepers from Ambootia Tea Estate, Makaibari Tea Estate and neighbouring villages have been trained in scientific apiculture and improved colony management.

WWF-India has been supporting beekeepers across the Darjeeling tea landscape through a combination of training, supporting and monitoring.

The support extends beyond training alone. Beekeepers have been provided with ISI-standard bee boxes, protective equipment such as bee veils and gloves and access to community-owned honey extractors that enable hygienic and efficient post-harvest processing. WWF-India is also working closely with beekeepers to co-develop standard operating procedures (SOPs) for honey production, extraction, handling and storage. These measures aim to improve quality, consistency and traceability, much critical for establishing a premium community-owned honey enterprise.

Importantly, the objective is not to replace traditional wisdom. Rather, it is to combine generations of local knowledge with scientific understanding to create more resilient and productive beekeeping systems.

Tradition meets Innovation

For generations, many Himalayan beekeepers maintained colonies in traditional log hives crafted from hollowed tree trunks. These hives remain culturally significant and have played an important role in conserving indigenous bees.

However, modern frame hives such as the Newton Hive and adapted Langstroth-type systems offer several advantages. Unlike traditional log hives, frame hives allow individual combs to be inspected without disturbing the entire colony. This enables beekeepers to monitor colony health, detect disease or pest problems early and undertake timely management interventions.

Unlike traditional log hives, frame hives allow individual combs to be inspected without disturbing the entire colony.

Frame hives also facilitate non-destructive honey harvesting. Honey can be extracted from selected frames, without damaging the comb and allowing colonies to retain adequate food reserves. This reduces stress on the bees and supports stronger colony survival. Research from comparable Himalayan landscapes like Bhutan has shown that Apis cerana colonies managed in modern frame hives can produce higher honey yields than those maintained in traditional hives under similar conditions.

For many beekeepers in Darjeeling, the transition is therefore not a departure from tradition but an evolution of it. The bees remain the same, the ecological knowledge remains relevant and the relationship between beekeeper and colony endures. What changes are the tools that help keepers care for their colonies more effectively and harvest honey more sustainably.

Honey with a Story

For consumers, honey is often just another product on a shelf. For Himalayan beekeepers, however, honey is the reflection of a place.

The multifloral honey produced in Darjeeling's tea landscapes carries the signature of a diverse ecological mosaic; tea gardens, homestead gardens, forest edges, wild shrubs, flowering trees and native understory plants. Each flowering season contributes to the flavour, aroma and character of the harvest.

Each flowering season contributes to the flavour, aroma and character of the harvest.

Most beekeepers in the region harvest honey twice a year, during the spring and autumn flowering seasons. Their honey is typically sold directly within villages, neighbouring communities or local markets. Some producers travel to nearby towns such as Kurseong, Sonada and Sittong to find buyers.

Despite the high quality and unique origin of their product, many beekeepers receive relatively modest returns. The baseline assessment found that honey is commonly sold without branding, labelling or formal market positioning. As a result, producers often capture only a fraction of the value that consumers are willing to pay for premium indigenous bee honey.

This gap presents both a challenge and an opportunity.

Around the world, consumers are increasingly seeking products that are authentic, traceable, minimally processed and environmentally responsible. Darjeeling's Apis cerana honey possesses all of these qualities naturally. With appropriate quality assurance, branding and market access, community producers have the potential to capture greater value from their harvests while retaining ownership of the enterprise.

Pollinators and Landscapes

The future of beekeeping depends on far more than hive management.

Healthy bee populations require healthy landscapes. Pollinators need continuous access to nectar and pollen sources throughout the year. In landscapes dominated by monoculture plantations, this requirement can become a significant challenge.

Healthy bee populations require healthy landscapes. Pollinators need continuous access to nectar and pollen sources throughout the year.

Recognising this reality, the emerging vision for Darjeeling's honey enterprise should extend beyond production alone and seek to strengthen the ecological foundations that make honey production possible in the first place.

Reduced reliance on chemical herbicides and pesticides can create safer environments for bees while improving broader ecosystem health.

Native flowering trees, shrubs and herbs can help provide forage across seasons. Homesteads, community lands and farm boundaries can become important pollinator habitats. Reduced reliance on chemical herbicides and pesticides can create safer environments for bees while improving broader ecosystem health.

In this sense, every hive becomes more than a source of honey. It becomes an indicator of ecological wellbeing.

When pollinator populations thrive, it suggests that flowering resources remain abundant, landscapes retain diversity, and communities continue to maintain connections with their natural surroundings. When bee populations decline, they often signal deeper ecological challenges that require attention.

The Keepers of the Buzz

Perhaps the most important lesson emerging from the tea landscapes of Darjeeling is that conservation and livelihoods need not be competing priorities.

The beekeepers of Ambootia, Makaibari and neighbouring villages are demonstrating that economic opportunity can be aligned with ecological stewardship. By linking income generation to the health of pollinator populations, communities gain a direct stake in maintaining biodiversity and restoring habitats.

The beekeepers of Ambootia, Makaibari and neighbouring villages are demonstrating that economic opportunity can be aligned with ecological stewardship.

The success of this approach depends not only on bees but on people ‘the keepers’ who monitor colonies, share knowledge, observe flowering cycles and continue traditions that have endured across generations.

Their work often goes unnoticed. Yet every thriving colony, every successful harvest and every spoonful of honey tells a story of patience, care, and coexistence.

In the hills, honey has never been only about production. It is about sustaining relationships between people and pollinators, forests and farms, tradition and innovation.

As the buzz of Apis cerana continues across the tea landscapes of Darjeeling, it carries with it a hopeful message: that resilient livelihoods and thriving ecosystems can grow together, one hive at a time.

The future of these landscapes may well depend on preserving these sweet connections between the pollinators and their keepers.

Abstract

This is the second of a two-part article revisiting the Lhotshampa crisis. Part I traced the historical formation of the Lhotshampa community in southern Bhutan, its administrative unmaking through the 1985 Citizenship Act and the 1988-89 census, the testimonial archive through which the crisis has most often been narrated, and its place within a wider South Asian pattern of exclusionary citizenship politics. Part II picks up where that account left off, examining why fifteen rounds of bilateral verification between Bhutan and Nepal failed to produce a single repatriation; why the third-country resettlement of more than 113,000 refugees between 2007 and 2016, though a considerable humanitarian achievement, has been widely misread as a resolution of the underlying citizenship dispute rather than its geographic redistribution; and why that dispute reopened, with unusual clarity, in 2025-2026, when the United States began deporting Bhutanese-born refugees whom Bhutan itself refused to receive. A final section examines the continued detention, and in one recent case the death in custody, of Bhutan's remaining political prisoners, before closing with a modest, jointly directed recommendation for the institutions that oversaw resettlement as a supposedly durable solution.

Failed Repatriation and the Politics of Verification

For more than a decade after the camps in eastern Nepal filled in the early 1990s, repatriation - not resettlement-was the explicit and overwhelmingly preferred objective of both the refugees themselves and the government of Nepal, which lacks any domestic legal framework for refugee protection and is not a signatory to either the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol (Neikirk & Nickson 2024). Bhutan and Nepal conducted some fifteen rounds of bilateral negotiations over this period without producing a single repatriation (Human Rights Watch 2007). The most consequential of these negotiations, a Joint Verification Team established in 2001, spent roughly two years assessing the case files of refugees in a single camp, Khudunabari, sorting them into seven categories ranging from bona fide Bhutanese citizens forcibly evicted through several intermediate classifications to non-Bhutanese (Human Rights Watch 2007; Neikirk & Nickson 2024). In 2003, Bhutan announced that roughly 75 percent of those reviewed were found to have a legitimate claim to Bhutanese origin (Neikirk & Nickson 2024), a finding that, on its face, substantially undercuts the government's broader public position that the great majority of camp residents were not genuine citizens, and that ought to have provided a workable basis for at least a phased repatriation.

Bhutan and Nepal conducted some fifteen rounds of bilateral negotiations over this period without producing a single repatriation (Human Rights Watch 2007).

No repatriation followed. The reasons are best understood as a convergence of incentive failures rather than a single act of bad faith. For Bhutan, the political costs of admitting a precedent-setting return of even a partial refugee population-implicitly conceding the citizenship claims the state had spent the preceding decade denying-were substantial, particularly given the absence of any external mechanism capable of compelling compliance: Bhutan is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, or the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, and the international legal venues theoretically available-the International Court of Justice, which requires state consent to jurisdiction, and the International Criminal Court, whose jurisdiction in any case postdates the relevant events-offered the refugees no practical avenue of legal compulsion (Neikirk & Nickson 2024). For Nepal, hosting the camps for over a decade while declining to grant local integration created its own perverse incentive to treat resettlement, rather than repatriation, as the path of least resistance once it became available. For the wider international community, sustained diplomatic pressure on Bhutan-a small, strategically unthreatening, and reputationally cooperative state-never developed the urgency that comparable refugee-producing crises elsewhere generated, a disparity that refugee advocacy organizations have explicitly noted in their own policy submissions (Neikirk & Nickson 2024).

It would be a mistake to read this account as suggesting that verification and resettlement were morally equivalent paths, chosen with equal legitimacy by all parties. The shift from repatriation to resettlement as the international community's preferred "durable solution," formalized once UNHCR and the IOM began coordinated third-country resettlement in 2007, represented in practice an acceptance that the underlying citizenship dispute would not be resolved-only that its humanitarian consequences could be managed by relocating the people affected by it elsewhere. Whether that managed displacement should be understood as a genuine solution to the crisis, or merely as its geographic redistribution, is the question taken up in the following section.

Resettlement as Solution? The Politics of a "Successful" Humanitarian Programme

Between November 2007 and 2016, the coordinated resettlement of Bhutanese refugees from the camps of eastern Nepal became, by volume, one of the largest refugee resettlement operations the UNHCR and IOM had ever undertaken, eventually relocating more than 113,000 people to eight countries- the United States receiving the largest share, followed by Canada, Australia, and several European states (International Organization for Migration 2015; Sikkim Express 2025). By any conventional humanitarian metric, the programme was a substantial success: families who had spent fifteen to twenty years in bamboo-and-thatch camp housing, dependent on rationed food and without secure legal status, gained citizenship pathways, education, and employment in stable democracies. It is for this reason that most general-audience accounts of the Lhotshampa crisis written in the past decade treat resettlement as its effective conclusion.

The most rigorous recent fieldwork on the programme's reception among the refugees themselves complicates this conclusion considerably. Neikirk and Nickson's (2024) decade-long ethnographic study of Bhutanese refugees in Nepal and Australia found that a meaningful share of the population, particularly older refugees who had spent the most active years of their lives advocating for return, did not experience resettlement as a justice outcome at all, but rather as an alternative to one: durable and materially beneficial, but categorically different from the repatriation and citizenship restoration they had originally sought. Some refugees interviewed for that study described declining resettlement specifically because accepting it felt, to them, like forfeiting a claim to Bhutanese nationality that they considered more important than the material improvements resettlement offered; others who did resettle described the programme less as a right they had been legally empowered to pursue than as something closer to a lottery, granted for good conduct in the camps rather than secured through their own decades of advocacy (Neikirk & Nickson 2024). This is not a criticism of the resettlement programme's humanitarian value, which by any measure was considerable, but it is a necessary corrective to the assumption, common in retrospective journalism, that resettlement and justice were synonymous, or that the underlying citizenship dispute was resolved simply because most of its victims were no longer physically present in the camps where it had been most visible.

It is for this reason that most general-audience accounts of the Lhotshampa crisis written in the past decade treat resettlement as its effective conclusion.

That assumption also obscures who, precisely, resettlement left behind. By the time UNHCR formally ended direct camp assistance in 2016, an estimated 6,500 to 7,000 refugees- disproportionately elderly or medically infirm, and in many cases reluctant to leave family graves, ancestral claims, or simply the remaining hope of return-remained in two consolidated camps, Beldangi and Sanischare, in Nepal's Jhapa and Morang districts (Sikkim Express 2025; Neikirk & Nickson 2024). Without UNHCR's direct support, this residual population has been left dependent on informal and frequently exploitative labour, lacking the legal status that would allow either local integration in Nepal, which the Nepali government has consistently declined to extend, citing its own non-signatory status under international refugee law, or any renewed claim on Bhutan (Sikkim Express 2025). Their situation is, in the strict legal sense, indistinguishable from the situation of every Lhotshampa refugee in the early 1990s: stateless, without a recognized claim on any government, dependent entirely on the residual goodwill of a host state under no binding obligation to provide for them. The resettlement programme did not so much resolve this condition as reduce, by more than ninety percent, the number of people experiencing it- an achievement worth honouring without mistaking it for a closed case.

The Second Exile: U.S. Deportations and the Reopening of Statelessness, 2025–2026

The clearest evidence that the Lhotshampa crisis was never definitively closed by resettlement emerged not from Bhutan or Nepal but from an unrelated shift in United States immigration enforcement policy. Beginning in March 2025, U.S. immigration authorities deported a number of Bhutanese-born refugees-individuals who had been lawfully resettled in the United States under the UNHCR-coordinated programme nearly two decades earlier, most following criminal convictions for which they had already served their sentences-to Bhutan, treating them, for deportation purposes, as Bhutanese nationals (Kathmandu Post, 11 April 2025). Until that point, U.S. immigration enforcement records showed no completed deportations to Bhutan in years, precisely because the Bhutanese government had consistently declined to accept the return of people it did not recognize as its citizens. What changed in 2025 was not Bhutan's underlying position on the refugees' citizenship, which it has never altered, but the diplomatic leverage the U.S. government was willing and able to exert to compel a small number of third countries to accept deportees they had previously refused.

The clearest evidence that the Lhotshampa crisis was never definitively closed by resettlement emerged not from Bhutan or Nepal but from an unrelated shift in United States immigration enforcement policy.

The result was a sequence that exposes, with unusual clarity, the structural fragility of "durable solutions" achieved through resettlement rather than through resolution of the underlying citizenship dispute. At least eighteen individuals were deported from the United States to Bhutan in this period; Bhutanese authorities, on arrival, confiscated their travel documents, declined to register them as citizens, and transported a number of them to the Bhutan-India border, from where they crossed into India and ultimately into Nepal-the only country among the three with which they retained any prior residential connection, however informal (Kathmandu Post, 11 April 2025). Having entered Nepal without valid documentation, several of the deportees- including Ashok Gurung, Roshan Tamang, Ashish Subedi, and Sandeep Darji-were arrested by Nepali immigration authorities at or near the Beldangi camp on charges of illegal entry (Kathmandu Post, 17 April 2025). Nepal, as noted in Part I, is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and has no domestic refugee law; its government initially moved toward deportation or prosecution before a habeas corpus petition reached the Supreme Court.

The court's intervention, in a pair of orders issued in April 2025, is itself an instructive episode in regional jurisprudence on statelessness. An interim order by Justice Hari Prasad Phuyal on 17 April halted the deportations, citing Nepal's obligations under the Convention Against Torture and the customary international law principle of non-refoulement-obligations the court applied despite Nepal's non-membership in the refugee-specific conventions that would more directly govern the case (Kathmandu Post, 17 April 2025). A subsequent joint-bench ruling on 24 April, by Justices Bal Krishna Dhakal and Nitya Nanda Pandey, partially granted the petition, ordering that the individuals be transferred to their original refugee camps rather than held in immigration detention, while directing further investigation into their status. The practical effect of these rulings was neither repatriation, nor resettlement, nor formal recognition of any citizenship-merely a judicially supervised return to precisely the same stateless, camp-bound condition from which these individuals' families had been "durably" resettled nearly twenty years earlier.

It is worth being precise about what this episode does and does not demonstrate. It does not establish that the U.S. resettlement programme was poorly designed, or that resettlement as a policy instrument is inherently unstable; the great majority of resettled Bhutanese refugees, including the deportees' own extended families in most reported cases, remain settled and have in many instances acquired the citizenship of their resettlement country, which would ordinarily extinguish any renewed risk of statelessness. What it demonstrates is narrower but, we think, more analytically important: that for individuals whose legal personhood originates in a contested or denied national citizenship, the protection conferred by a "durable solution" achieved through a third country's domestic policy remains contingent on that country's continued willingness to extend it. When a resettlement country's own immigration enforcement priorities shift, as occurred in the United States after 2025, a person whose original statelessness was never formally resolved-merely relocated and overwritten by a second country's legal status-can find that underlying condition reactivated with very little warning and no remaining recourse to the country that first dispossessed them. Bhutan's refusal to accept its own former citizens in 2025, more than three decades after denaturalizing them, is among the clearest possible confirmations that the citizenship dispute at the heart of this crisis was never actually settled by anyone's resettlement, court order, or verification exercise; it simply went, for most of two decades, unobserved by an international community that had moved on to describing the matter in the past tense.

Political Imprisonment and the Persistence of the Past

A second, longer-running indication that the crisis remains open is the continued detention of Bhutanese political prisoners, almost all of them Lhotshampa, whose cases originate in the same period of unrest described in Part I. According to Human Rights Watch's most recent published accounting, at least thirty individuals remained imprisoned as of mid-2026 under sentences connected to the late-1980s and 1990s protests or to a smaller cohort arrested in 2008 for advocating refugees' right of return; most are serving life sentences with no possibility of parole, a sentencing structure under Bhutanese law that permits release only through a royal prerogative of clemency known as kidu (Human Rights Watch 2026). Several of the longest-held prisoners, among them seven former Royal Bhutan Army soldiers accused of joining pro-democracy demonstrations while in service, have been held since 1990 at Rabuna, a remote military facility that former detainees and human rights monitors have repeatedly described as marked by severe isolation and minimal medical provision (Human Rights Watch 2026).

According to Human Rights Watch's most recent published accounting, at least thirty individuals remained imprisoned as of mid-2026...

The death in custody of Sha Bahadur Gurung, a 65-year-old former soldier who had been imprisoned for thirty-five years on charges connected to a single demonstration he was alleged to have attended in 1990, drew international attention to these conditions in a way that years of slower advocacy had not. Gurung died at Chamjang (Chemgang) Central Prison near Thimphu on 15 December 2025; his family and Nepal-based human rights organizations reported that he was found unconscious that morning after years of what they describe as untreated chronic illness and inadequate medical response, and called for an independent investigation into the circumstances of his death (Amnesty International Nepal 2026; Human Rights Watch 2026). Notably, Rizal had already observed in his own memoir that Chemgang Central Prison had a longstanding reputation as a "death camp," its construction and operation marked by the torture and deaths of several Lhotshampa detainees (Rizal 2009: 49).

A joint communication from six United Nations human rights experts in 2025 had already raised concern, prior to Gurung's death, that Bhutan's political prisoners faced inadequate food, heating, and medical care, warning that this neglect may have contributed to the death of two detainees even before Gurung's case (Human Rights Watch 2026). The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention separately found, in opinions issued across 2025 and 2026, that the continued detention of several of these prisoners violated international legal standards on multiple grounds (Human Rights Watch 2026).

Set against this record, two developments complicate any reading of the situation as simply static or worsening. First, Bhutan's own democratic transition, formalized between 2007 and 2008, has not been entirely without consequence for the political prisoner question, even if its effects have been slow and partial: the country now has a constitutionally guaranteed, if so far rarely exercised, judicial avenue for rights claims, and successive governments have engaged, however reluctantly, with the European Union and UN human rights mechanisms that have raised these cases rather than dismissing them outright (Neikirk & Nickson 2024; Human Rights Watch 2026). Second, and more concretely, two of the remaining political prisoners- Chatur Man Tamang and Hasta Bahadur Rai, both arrested in 2008-were released by the Bhutanese government on 1 June 2026, shortly after the UN Working Group's opinion on their case was finalized (Human Rights Watch 2026). Human Rights Watch, in welcoming the release, was careful to describe it as a step in the right direction rather than a resolution, noting that at least twenty-eight prisoners remained and calling for their release in turn.

These releases do not erase the preceding thirty-five years, nor do they answer the calls from Amnesty International and Nepali rights groups for an independent inquiry into Gurung's death. But they are worth recording as evidence that the situation is not frozen: Bhutan has, under sustained but modest external pressure, taken at least incremental steps that a purely static narrative of unyielding repression would not predict. A balanced account of this dimension of the crisis - one that neither minimizes thirty-five years of imprisonment without parole nor forecloses the possibility of further, similarly incremental change - seems to us the most honest way of representing where matters currently stand.

Conclusion: Toward an Unfinished Reckoning

Part I of this article began by noting that Bhutan's international reputation and its citizenship record rarely appear in the same sentence, and across both parts we have tried to bring them into the same frame without collapsing one into the other. Gross National Happiness is not a fiction invented to disguise the Lhotshampa crisis, any more than the Lhotshampa crisis is the only fact worth knowing about Bhutan; both are true of the same small kingdom, and a serious account of either has to make room for the other.

What we hope these two parts have added to an already considerable body of writing is less a new moral verdict-readers will reach their own conclusions about where responsibility lies among the Bhutanese state, the government of Nepal, and an international community that for thirty years found bilateral talks, and then resettlement, easier than sustained pressure for repatriation-than a corrected sense of the crisis's shape in time. It is not a closed historical episode with a beginning in 1985 and an end in 2016, bracketed by legislation on one side and a resettlement programme on the other. It is better understood as a status: a category of contested or denied nationality that, once created, does not expire merely because most of the people who held it have since acquired a different, more secure status elsewhere. That status was reactivated in 2025 by a change in U.S. immigration enforcement that had nothing to do with Bhutan or Nepal, and it persists, in a different register, in the cells of Chemgang and Rabuna prisons, where men arrested as young soldiers in 1990 have grown old and, in at least one recent case, died.

Gross National Happiness is not a fiction invented to disguise the Lhotshampa crisis, any more than the Lhotshampa crisis is the only fact worth knowing about Bhutan; both are true of the same small kingdom, and a serious account of either has to make room for the other.

If there is a single recommendation this history supports, it is a modest one: that the institutions which oversaw resettlement as a "durable solution"-UNHCR, the IOM, the eight resettlement governments, and Bhutan and Nepal themselves - revisit, explicitly and jointly, what protection remains owed to people whose underlying statelessness was never resolved, merely relocated. This would include, at minimum, a clear bilateral or multilateral understanding about the status of resettled refugees who are later subject to removal proceedings in their country of resettlement, and continued, undiminished attention - diplomatic, not merely humanitarian - to both the residual camp population in Nepal and the remaining political prisoners in Bhutan. None of this requires treating Bhutan as an outlier among nations, or pretending its broader achievements do not exist. It requires only treating its unfinished citizenship question with the same seriousness that the kingdom has, for thirty years, successfully persuaded the world to extend to everything else about it.

References

Amnesty International Nepal. (2026, January 16). Mysterious death of prisoner Sha Bahadur Gurung must be independently investigated and accountability ensured. Amnesty International Nepal.

Human Rights Watch. (2007, February 14). Stateless refugee children from Bhutan living in Nepal. Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch. (2026, June 10). Bhutan: 2 political prisoners freed, but 28 remain. Human Rights Watch.

International Organization for Migration. (2015, November 19). Resettlement of refugees from Bhutan tops 100,000. IOM.

Kathmandu Post. (2025, April 11). As Bhutan disowns, Nepal in a fix over 4 US-deported refugees.

Kathmandu Post. (2025, April 17). Supreme Court stays deportation of four Bhutanese refugees.

Neikirk, A., & Nickson, R. (2024). Transitions without justice: Bhutanese refugees in Nepal. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 18(2), 267–280.

Rizal, T. N. (2009). Torture Killing Me Softly: Bhutan Through the Eyes of a Mind-Control Victim.

Sikkim Express. (2025, February 28). The uncertain future of Bhutanese refugees left behind in Nepal.

The Peruvian native tree was smuggled across malaria-plagued British colonies in search of  suitable location for the production of quinine. In the Eastern Himalayan foothills of Mungpoo, it took its deepest  root.

In 1862, under the direction of Dr. Thomas Anderson, a Scottish botanist and Superintendent of the Royal Botanic Garden Calcutta, cinchona flourished. The subtropical climate and sub-alpine hilly altitude (1200-6170 ft asl) of Mungpoo provided ideal conditions for the quinine-yielding Cinchona trees that were native to the Andes, South America. The success encompassed the hills of Munsong-1901, Rongo-1938 and Latpanchar-1943. The plantation provided British colonies with an economically vital steady supply of the anti-malarial drug. 

The land that hosted the plantation was a land plowed by geopolitical drills. It shaped the demography and ecological footprints of the landscape even before the colonial expansion could sow the seeds.

The land that hosted the plantation was a land plowed by geopolitical drills. It shaped the demography and ecological footprints of the landscape even before the colonial expansion could sow the seeds. The land that would later become plantations was once within the jurisdiction of the Chogyal who ruled the Kingdom of Sikkim. In 1718, the east of Teesta River including Munsong and Rongo was annexed by the Kingdom of Bhutan. Decades later, Mungpoo and Latpanchar too changed hands in 1780, the western stretches of Teesta River fell into the expanding Gorkha Kingdom of  Nepal.  

It was only after the Anglo-Gorkha War (1814-1816) and the subsequent Treaty of Sugauli (March 4, 1816),  the Darjeeling hills were ceded to British India, paving the way for the establishment of plantation. Furthermore, its expansion was further encouraged by the Treaty of  Sinchula (November 11, 1865) following the Anglo-Bhutan War (1864-1865). 

The colonial enterprise needed hundreds of hands to extract the bitter quinine. Soon, labourers were brought from the Kingdom of Nepal and the Kingdom of Sikkim under the Sardari system.

The colonial enterprise needed hundreds of hands to extract the bitter quinine. Soon, labourers were brought from the Kingdom of Nepal and the Kingdom of Sikkim under the Sardari system. The trusted workers, given the title of Sardars, were sent back home to fetch family and convince community members to work in the plantations. As the result of this, the communities are still predominantly engaged in the plantation. The Sardars earned a monthly commission of one anna for every hand that laboured the land.  

Like the cinchonas, the people who worked the land too were uprooted and planted.

The nature of their work was cyclic, the rhythm of “Badla”. An acre of land in exchange for a lineage of continuous toil. With time both the cinchona and the people adapted, leading to a seamless naturalization in the region. This influx of migratory kin not only carved the plantation with their toil but also created a tight-knit community still seen in Mungpoo today. 

They perished as nameless, numbered labourers but imprints of their footprints remained on the roads, factories, and settlements of Mungpoo. Their individual histories often remain quieter than the ruins they left behind. 

Mungpoo today lies in West Bengal, India. It is administered by The Directorate of Cinchona and other Medicinal Plants under the Department of Food Processing Industries and Horticulture, Gorkhaland Territorial Administration. But it was not always so. Mungpoo was originally under the Department of Commerce and Industries until 2006. 

1934 onwards, German synthetic alternatives like chloroquine and hydroxychoroquine entered the market. Hence the demand plummeted for the labour-derived, labour-intensive organic quinine. The World Wars also aided in the demise of the colossal colonial endeavour. Factories slowed and many structures were left to decay beneath the moss and monsoon rain.

This departmental shift marked the end of the era. The era of the grand colonial pharmaceutical history. A prudent pivot, a stark pivot, towards survival. Survival through diversification. 

Rubber. Cardamom. Kiwi. 

Lemongrass. Strawberry.  

This departmental shift also washed away the bleak traces of those nameless, numbered pioneers who woke up at 4 am, reached Ganti Ghar at 6 am and toiled on the land till 4 pm. Reminders of community, livelihood, and belonging erased - year by year. 

Today, these crumbling monuments of industrial decay serve as landmarks. Like landmarks that anchor memory and magnetic fields for the migratory birds returning innately. 

Season after season.  

The hills too have migrations. 

A syndicate seat. A train ticket. 

A flight overseas. 

Migrating- in search of Mughlan 

An oasis.

Fleeing economically parched hills. 

Stunted academic seeds. 

Healthcare, crumbling 

But like birds they return innately. 

Season after season- 

For festivals.  

For funerals.  

For home. 

For returning residents, Chamra Godam A lady-

Elegant. Poised. 

Wrapped rust-red. 

Where cinchona bark was laid to weather for quinine. Stood as a landmark in our emotional map.  

A glimpse from the car meant: “I am home.”

The Godam was like the Cinchona plantation-

weathering, but still standing.  

Like a mother awaiting her returning kin. 

The Godam was unlike the Indian monuments of tourism.  

But she was ours. 

 Our history.  

 Our heritage.  

 Our sense of belonging.

Today, on the 11th of May 2026, the Chamra Godam is being dismantled piece by piece. 

Today, do these crumbling monuments of industrial decay matter? It matters profoundly-to the local  plantation workers and their descendants. To them, these ruins represent not just a lost era of global significance, but also their generational heritage and cultural identity. A tangible proof against the recurring identity scrutiny.  

This history forms the foundation of their ongoing quest for World Heritage recognition, supported  by Kalimpong Krishak Kalyan Sangstha, which notes that the plantation actually precedes the iconic Darjeeling Toy Train (1881). Our antique factory machineries could be turned into a  museum.  

Alas!

From earth she came. To earth she departed. 

Among her ruins, I sat-

in silence-

Stillness.

Structures without spectacles are rarely deemed worth preserving. 

What remains now is the plein air painting from the sunny morning of 16th September, 2024.

REFERENCES: 

1. Antique machines of Mungpoo Cinchona Plantation. (2018, April 2). Get Bengal. 2. Chowdhury, K. D. (2022). Cinchona in Darjeeling: A Colonial Overview. Innovation The Research  Concept, 7(1).  

3. Middleton, T. (2021). Becoming-After: The lives and politics of quinine’s remains. Cultural  Anthropology, 36(2), 282-311. https://doi.org/10.14506.2.05 

4. Middleton, T. (2024). Quinine’s remains: Empire’s Medicine and the life thereafter. University of  California Press. https://doi.org/10.155/liminos.187 

5. Pradhan, U.M. (2020, October 8). Hydroxychloroquine and our cinchona. The Darjeeling  Chronicle.  

6. Rai, G. (2024). The changing narratives of Indian Gorkhas. Education India Journal: A Quarterly  Refereed Journal of Dialogues on Education, 10(2), 574-586. 

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Abstract

This is the first of a two-part article revisiting the Lhotshampa crisis: the expulsion of an estimated 100,000 ethnic Nepali citizens of Bhutan between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Much of the existing literature, journalistic and scholarly alike, narrates this crisis as a closed historical episode. Part I argues instead that the crisis originates in a specific and traceable administrative sequence rather than a spontaneous ethnic conflict. Drawing on historical and legal scholarship together with testimonial and comparative evidence, this part traces the crisis across three registers: the history of invited migration and formal integration that preceded it; the 1985 Citizenship Act and the 1988–89 census through which a settled population was retroactively reclassified as stateless; and the contested archive of personal testimony, corroborated by international monitors, through which the crisis has most often reached outside audiences. A concluding section situates Bhutan's citizenship politics within a wider South Asian pattern of 'suspect citizenship' directed at transborder and linguistically distinct minorities, from Nepal's own Madhesi population to India's Gorkha diaspora. Part II, published separately, examines the failed bilateral verification process between Bhutan and Nepal, the resettlement programme that followed it, and the crisis's unresolved and actively reopening present, including the 2025-2026 U.S. deportations of resettled refugees and the continued detention of Bhutanese political prisoners.

Introduction: Beyond the Brand

For much of the past three decades, the Kingdom of Bhutan has occupied an unusually favourable place in the global imagination. Its policy of Gross National Happiness (GNH), formally adopted as a development framework and elevated, particularly after 2008, into the organizing rhetoric of the state (Munro 2016), has made Bhutan a recurring reference point in conversations about alternative models of progress, environmental stewardship, and cultural preservation. This reputation is not undeserved: Bhutan's record on forest cover, its constitutional commitment to carbon neutrality, and its careful management of tourism are real and frequently studied achievements. The difficulty is not that this image is false, but that it is partial, and the part it omits-a forty-year history of contested citizenship, expulsion, and unresolved statelessness affecting the kingdom's ethnic Nepali minority, known as the Lhotshampa, or "southerners"- rarely enters the same conversation.

This article is the product of a collaboration between two writers with different relationships to that omission: one of us works within an academic institution and approaches the subject through the comparative literature on citizenship, statelessness, and South Asian state-making; the other writes from within the cultural and geographic borderlands of the Eastern Himalaya, where the Lhotshampa diaspora is not an abstraction but a set of neighbours, sources, and family histories. What is in question is whether the specific legal and administrative mechanisms used to unmake that population's citizenship between 1985 and the early 1990s, and the way their consequences have been managed, or left unmanaged, in the decades since, can be examined without either flattening Bhutan into a caricature of repression or allowing the GNH brand to function, in Michael Hutt's (2003) phrase, as a shield against scrutiny.

Much existing writing on the Lhotshampa crisis falls into one of two modes. The first is descriptive history, anchored in Hutt's (2003) indispensable Unbecoming Citizens and a handful of subsequent monographs, which narrates the expulsion and its causes but largely concludes its account around the turn of the millennium, when the refugee camps in eastern Nepal were at their largest. The second is advocacy journalism, which periodically rediscovers the crisis, often through human-interest profiles of individual refugees, without situating it within the legal architecture of statelessness or following its more recent developments. Neither mode has fully absorbed what we consider the most analytically interesting fact about this case: that the crisis did not end with the resettlement of more than 100,000 refugees to third countries between 2007 and 2016. It was, instead, displaced again: first into a residual population of several thousand elderly and infirm refugees left behind in two consolidated camps in Nepal, and then, in 2025, into a wholly new register, when the United States began deporting Bhutanese-born refugees whom Bhutan itself refused to receive, producing a small but legally significant cohort of people rendered stateless for a second time, nearly two decades after the international community had declared their situation durably solved.

This first part of the article establishes the historical and legal foundations of that claim. We begin with the historical formation of the Lhotshampa community and its administrative unmaking through citizenship law and census; we then turn to the contested archive of personal testimony through which the crisis has most often reached outside audiences, and to the regional pattern of "suspect citizenship" of which it forms a part. Part II takes up the failed bilateral verification process between Bhutan and Nepal, the resettlement programme that followed it, and the crisis's least-examined recent chapter: the 2025-2026 reopening of statelessness through deportation, alongside the continued detention, and in one case death, of Bhutan's remaining political prisoners.

Historical Foundations: Migration, Invitation, and Integration

The Lhotshampa are frequently described, in both Bhutanese government statements and unsympathetic commentary, as a population whose presence in southern Bhutan was unauthorized or marginal until relatively recently. The historical record complicates this framing considerably, though it does not resolve into a simple counter-narrative either. Contact between the Himalayan courts of Nepal and Bhutan predates the period of mass migration by more than two centuries: Hutt (2003) documents cordial relations between King Ram Shah of Gorkha and the Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, the seventeenth-century unifier of Bhutan, including reciprocal religious privileges and the summoning of Bhutanese lamas to Nepali courts. These early ties are not, by themselves, evidence of large-scale settlement, but they establish that the two polities were never strangers to one another, a fact that complicates later characterizations of the Lhotshampa as a wholly foreign population with no prior relationship to the Bhutanese state.

Sustained migration into Bhutan's southern lowlands, by contrast, is a phenomenon of the mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it was substantially encouraged rather than merely tolerated by Bhutanese authorities. Following the 1865 Treaty of Sinchula, which concluded the Anglo-Bhutanese Duar War and ceded the Bengal Duars to British India, Bhutan's remaining low-lying southern territory-malarial, densely forested, and largely unsuited to the agricultural practices of the Drukpa-majority north-remained sparsely populated and underdeveloped (Hutt 2003). Bhutanese regional authorities, including the Dorji family of Ha Valley acting under royal decree (kasho), employed local labour contractors (thikadars) to recruit Nepali-speaking settlers to clear and cultivate these lowlands around the turn of the twentieth century (Hutt 2003; Dhakal & Strawn 1994). The settlers introduced sedentary, terraced wet-rice cultivation in place of the shifting cultivation practised in the north, and by the mid-twentieth century the south's agricultural output had become a substantial part of the kingdom's economy.

The historiographical dispute is less about whether migration occurred-it plainly did, in both invited and informal forms- than about how much of it, and which generations of settlers, the state was later willing to recognize as having occurred with its consent.

This is also the point at which a more even-handed reading becomes necessary. Bhutan's own later accounts of this period, and some Western reporting sympathetic to the Bhutanese government's position, describe the same migration not as state-sponsored settlement but as a steady, largely unregulated influx of Nepali labourers drawn by Bhutan's comparatively low population density, free land, and eventually free education and healthcare, which by the late twentieth century the state itself characterized as having outpaced its capacity to track or absorb (O'Brien 2010). Both readings can be true at once: that the initial waves of settlement were actively invited and administratively organized, and that subsequent decades saw migration the Bhutanese state came to regard, rightly or wrongly, as exceeding what it had sanctioned. The historiographical dispute is less about whether migration occurred-it plainly did, in both invited and informal forms-than about how much of it, and which generations of settlers, the state was later willing to recognize as having occurred with its consent.

What is not seriously disputed is that a substantial Lhotshampa population was formally and unambiguously naturalized. The Lhotshampa, far from a monolithic ethnic bloc, comprised Rai, Limbu, Tamang, Gurung, Magar, and various Indo-Aryan caste groups, predominantly Hindu but including Tibeto-Burman-speaking Buddhists and a smaller Christian minority (Hutt 2003). Their economic integration was followed by formal political recognition: the 1958 Nationality Law, promulgated under the modernizing third king, Jigme Dorje Wangchuck, granted citizenship to Lhotshampa residents and explicitly recognized them as Bhutanese "southerners" (Hutt 2003). For three decades thereafter, Lhotshampa citizens served in the civil service, the Royal Bhutan Army, and early development administration; localized political organizing, such as the short-lived Bhutan State Congress founded in 1950, concerned itself principally with taxation and local civil grievances rather than separatism, and in fact helped prompt the very legal inclusions that followed. By any reasonable historical accounting, the Lhotshampa of the mid-twentieth century were not a marginal or unauthorized population on the periphery of the Bhutanese state; they were one of its constituent communities, formally naturalized and materially central to its southern economy. What changed, beginning in the 1980s, was not the historical record of their arrival but the political utility of contesting it.

The Reversal: Citizenship Law, Census, and the Manufacture of Statelessness

The reversal of this settled status did not occur through a single decree but through the sequential operation of legislation and administrative procedure, precisely the combination that the international legal scholar Neha Jain (2022), in an influential recent analysis, terms the "manufacturing" of statelessness: the use of facially neutral bureaucratic criteria of time, documentation, and geography to produce, rather than merely record, a population without citizenship.

This is a common nationalist ideological state concern posed as demographic anxiety; small states bordered by much larger neighbours routinely cite demographic anxiety as a basis for restrictive citizenship and immigration policy, and Bhutan is not historically unique in this regard.

By the late 1970s, the Drukpa-led political establishment had come to view the Lhotshampa's demographic growth and distinct cultural practices as a potential threat to a cohesive Bhutanese national identity, a concern Bhutanese officials and sympathetic commentators have since framed in terms of demographic inundation- a small, sparsely populated kingdom of fewer than a million people situated between two demographic giants, anxious that an unintegrated and rapidly growing minority along its southern frontier could, over time, alter the kingdom's political character entirely (O'Brien 2010). This is a common nationalist ideological state concern posed as demographic anxiety; small states bordered by much larger neighbours routinely cite demographic anxiety as a basis for restrictive citizenship and immigration policy, and Bhutan is not historically unique in this regard. The question is not whether such a concern existed, but whether the legal instruments used to address it were proportionate, prospectively applied, and consistent with basic guarantees against arbitrary deprivation of nationality under Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948).

The 1985 Citizenship Act tightened naturalization requirements considerably and, crucially, was applied with retroactive effect: it established 31 December 1958 as a cutoff date by which residence had to be documented, typically through land tax receipts, in order to establish citizenship (Hutt 2003; Jain 2022). The demand for this specific category of documentary proof was, as the U.S. State Department itself noted at the time, difficult to reconcile with the widespread illiteracy and limited administrative capacity that characterized rural Bhutan in 1958, meaning that many families who had lived in the kingdom for generations, and who held later citizenship identity cards issued under earlier procedures, could not produce the singular document the new law required (Neikirk & Nickson 2024). The 1988-89 census that implemented the Act compounded this difficulty by being conducted exclusively in the Nepali-speaking southern districts, sorting residents into a series of numbered categories from genuine citizens down through categories denoting non-national women married to Bhutanese men, returned migrants, and, at the bottom, those to be treated as illegal immigrants regardless of any documentation they held (Human Rights Watch 2007; Neikirk & Nickson 2024). The selective geography of the census, applied only where the Nepali-speaking population resided, is among the strongest pieces of evidence cited by international observers for the proposition that this was not a neutral citizenship review applied uniformly across the kingdom, but a targeted mechanism of exclusion (Jain 2022).

The legal reclassification was accompanied by a cultural one. The state's "One Nation, One People" policy elevated the customs of the Ngalop Drukpa elite-dress, language, and religious practice-into compulsory national standards (Saul 2000; Neikirk & Nickson 2024). The 1989 royal decree requiring all citizens to wear the national dress (gho for men, kira for women) in public, and the restriction of Nepali-language instruction in southern schools under the Driglam Namzha code of conduct, transformed routine cultural practice into a site of state enforcement, policed through on-the-spot fines (Neikirk & Nickson 2024). Bhutanese officials defended these measures, then and since, as necessary cultural preservation in a small kingdom that, in a phrase attributed to the king at the time, could not afford the luxury of cultural pluralism (Hutt 2003, cited in Neikirk & Nickson 2024)-a justification that finds an uncomfortable echo across the region's other minority-citizenship disputes, discussed below, but one that Bhutanese authorities have continued to advance in good faith as a matter of small-state survival rather than ethnic animus.

Beginning in 1988, the government formally encouraged emigration, and from 1990 onward combined this with arrest and the destruction of homes; a U.S. State Department refugee official, Terry Rusch, described the process at the time as people being expelled in what she called a little-noticed but very real ethnic cleansing exercise (O'Brien 2010, quoted in Neikirk & Nickson 2024).

Whatever its intent, the policy's effect was to convert Lhotshampa political organizing, much of it initially focused on civil rights and representation rather than secession, into evidence of disloyalty that further justified denaturalization (Neikirk & Nickson 2024). Beginning in 1988, the government formally encouraged emigration, and from 1990 onward combined this with arrest and the destruction of homes; a U.S. State Department refugee official, Terry Rusch, described the process at the time as people being expelled in what she called a little-noticed but very real ethnic cleansing exercise (O'Brien 2010, quoted in Neikirk & Nickson 2024). Within roughly three years, more than 100,000 people-at the time, close to one-sixth of Bhutan's resident population-had left or been expelled (Human Rights Watch 2007). The Bhutanese government's position, then and largely since, has been that this figure substantially overstates the number of genuine Bhutanese citizens involved, and that many who joined the exodus were recent or undocumented migrants exploiting the camps' humanitarian assistance to claim a citizenship they had never legitimately held (Human Rights Watch 2007). This dispute over numbers-not merely a rhetorical disagreement but the central unresolved question of the bilateral verification process discussed in Part II-has never been authoritatively settled, and any honest account of the crisis has to hold both the scale of documented exclusion and the genuine uncertainty over its precise demographic boundaries in view at once.

Lived Histories: Testimony and the Limits of the Archive

Statistics and statutes describe a policy; they do not, on their own, convey what it meant to live through one. For this reason, much of the most cited writing on the Lhotshampa crisis, including Hutt's (2003) own account, turns to individual testimony, and it is worth pausing on both the value and the limits of this method.

Hutt's portrait of a woman he calls Dil Maya remains one of the most frequently invoked personal narratives in the literature. An agrarian woman who, in her own description, had never owned a pair of shoes before her displacement, Dil Maya experienced the policies discussed above not as abstract legislation but as a sequence of intimate disruptions: restrictions on her language, the closure of familiar local institutions, and ultimately the forced separation of her family, as she spent decades in a refugee camp in Nepal while a son remained in Bhutan, legally and physically cut off from her (Hutt 2003). What makes her account analytically significant, beyond its emotional weight, is her own framing of it: Hutt records her describing her process of recollection as chat-két garnu, "sorting things out"- a deliberate, reflective reconstruction of events that resists the passive, generic category of "refugee" through which her experience might otherwise be flattened. This is close to what C. Wright Mills (1959), writing in a wholly different context, called the sociological imagination: the capacity to locate one's own biography within a structural and historical process, rather than experiencing it merely as private misfortune.

A different kind of testimony comes from Tek Nath Rizal, a former Royal Advisory Councillor who became one of the most prominent Lhotshampa political dissidents after petitioning the king to review the 1985 Act and the 1988 census. Rizal's memoir, written after his own extended imprisonment, documents in detail the conditions he says were faced by Lhotshampa detainees during the late 1980s and 1990s, including prolonged isolation, physical restraint, and what he and other former detainees describe as deliberate psychological pressure (Rizal 2009). Independent corroboration of mistreatment during this period comes from contemporaneous reporting by Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department, both of which documented arbitrary arrest, torture, and the use of bonded labour against detained Lhotshampa during the same years (Neikirk & Nickson 2024). Two brief excerpts from Rizal's memoir illustrate the register in which this testimony is written:

"Once again for a month, I was served food mixed with pieces of broken glasses... I was allowed to eat my food only after smoking forty cigarettes." (Rizal 2009: 39)

"The mechanism was torturing my inner soul, leaving me with unbearable pain... I had been transformed into a dead body with only the consciousness alive." (Rizal 2009: 32)

Evans's (2010) subsequent fieldwork among Lhotshampa communities adds a further, less dramatic but no less significant layer: accounts of relatives who remained in Bhutan after family members fled being denied the "no objection certificates" required for travel, higher education, and formal employment-an administrative, rather than physically violent, form of exclusion that nonetheless entrenched a durable second-class status for those who stayed.

These accounts deserve to be taken seriously as evidence, not merely as colour. At the same time, an honest reckoning with this archive requires acknowledging its asymmetry. Virtually all of the widely circulated personal testimony on this crisis comes from refugees, exiled dissidents, or researchers working with refugee populations; there is, by the nature of the situation, very little comparable testimonial record from Lhotshampa who remained in Bhutan, since the same legal and political conditions that produced the exodus also constrain independent reporting from within the kingdom. Neikirk and Nickson (2024) note that Nepali-speaking Bhutanese who remain in the country are not permitted to form rights-related associations and are themselves viewed with official suspicion. This is not a reason to discount the testimony that does exist-corroboration from independent international monitors over more than three decades is, by ordinary evidentiary standards, substantial-but it is a reason to be precise about what kind of claim the testimonial record supports. It supports, with considerable confidence, the claim that a documented and substantial number of Lhotshampa experienced arbitrary citizenship deprivation, family separation, and, in many recorded cases, custodial mistreatment. It does not, on its own, resolve the separate and more contested question of exactly how many people were affected, nor does it capture whatever account the Bhutanese state and the Lhotshampa who remained within it might offer of the same years-an account that, for reasons rooted in the politics of the kingdom itself, remains comparatively undocumented in any independent or verifiable form.

Regional Resonances: Suspect Citizenship in South Asia

Read in isolation, the Lhotshampa crisis can appear to be either a uniquely Bhutanese aberration, incompatible with the kingdom's pacific international image, or, in more polemical accounts, a singular indictment of Buddhist statecraft. Neither framing withstands comparison with the broader region. Mary Des Chene's (2007) influential argument that postcolonial South Asian studies has systematically under-attended to Nepal and the Himalayan states-treating them as anthropological curiosities rather than as nation-states with ordinary, comparable politics of exclusion-applies with equal force to Bhutan. Once the kingdom's "Shangri-La" branding is set aside (Ferraro 2012; Walcott 2011), its citizenship politics align closely with patterns documented across its neighbours.

Mary Des Chene's (2007) influential argument that postcolonial South Asian studies has systematically under-attended to Nepal and the Himalayan states-treating them as anthropological curiosities rather than as nation-states with ordinary, comparable politics of exclusion-applies with equal force to Bhutan.

The clearest parallel is the Madhesi population of Nepal's own Tarai plains, whose Indian-influenced dialects, dress, and cross-border kinship ties have for decades made their loyalty to the Nepali state a recurring subject of suspicion, and whose access to citizenship documentation has been correspondingly difficult, particularly for women seeking to transmit citizenship to their children (Saul 2000). The structural irony-a state that itself displaced its Nepali-speaking minority on grounds of insufficiently demonstrated loyalty sits adjacent to a state that subjects its own Nepali-affiliated minority to a strikingly similar test-has been noted by several scholars working across both cases, though the legal mechanisms, party politics, and historical grievances involved in each are distinct enough that the comparison should illuminate rather than collapse the two situations into one.

A second resonance lies further east, in India's north-eastern states, where ethnic Nepali communities collectively known as the Gorkha diaspora have long navigated the same basic distinction between an indigenous "son of the soil" and an outsider variously labelled bahiragat or videshi. The implementation of the National Register of Citizens in Assam, intended to distinguish lawful long-term residents from undocumented migrants, produced-much as Bhutan's 1988 census did-a sorting exercise in which the burden of historical documentary proof fell disproportionately on linguistic and religious minorities, generating a population rendered stateless or quasi-stateless by an ostensibly neutral administrative procedure rather than by an explicit ethnic decree. Miyamoto et al. (2021) and Munro (2016), writing on Bhutan specifically but drawing on this wider literature, both note that the conflation of majority religious or ethnic culture with official national identity, whether through Bhutan's Driglam Namzha or through comparable projects elsewhere in the region, is less an exception within South Asian state-making than one of its more common instruments.

The relevant point is narrower and, we think, more useful: the specific combination of retroactive legal cut-offs, geographically selective implementation, and the political reclassification of civic organizing as disloyalty is a recognizable and recurring South Asian pattern of producing "suspect citizens" out of transborder or linguistically distinct populations.

None of this is offered to relativize Bhutan's record by diffusing responsibility across a regional pattern, nor to suggest that documentation-based citizenship review is inherently illegitimate; nearly every modern state, including long-established liberal democracies, relies on some combination of jus soli and jus sanguinis rules that inevitably exclude some long-resident populations. The relevant point is narrower and, we think, more useful: the specific combination of retroactive legal cut-offs, geographically selective implementation, and the political reclassification of civic organizing as disloyalty is a recognizable and recurring South Asian pattern of producing "suspect citizens" out of transborder or linguistically distinct populations. Recognizing Bhutan's policies as an instance of this pattern, rather than as either a uniquely Bhutanese failing or an isolated historical accident, is itself part of what a more rigorous, less sensationalized account of the crisis requires.

Part II of this article turns from this historical and evidentiary foundation to the crisis's unresolved policy afterlife: the failed bilateral verification process between Bhutan and Nepal, the resettlement programme that followed it, and the events of 2025-2026 that reopened the question of Lhotshampa statelessness in a register neither Bhutan nor Nepal anticipated.

References

Des Chene, M. (2007). Is Nepal in South Asia? The condition of non-postcoloniality. Studies in Nepali History and Society, 12(2), 207–223.

Dhakal, D. N. S., & Strawn, C. (1994). Bhutan: A Movement in Exile. Nirala Publications.

Evans, R. (2010). The perils of being a borderland people: On the Lhotshampas of Bhutan. Contemporary South Asia, 18(1), 25–42.

Ferraro, M. (2012). Stateless in Shangri-La: Minority rights, citizenship, and belonging in Bhutan. Stanford Journal of International Law, 48(2), 405–435.

Human Rights Watch. (2007, February 14). Stateless refugee children from Bhutan living in Nepal. Human Rights Watch.

Hutt, M. (2003). Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan. Oxford University Press.

Jain, N. (2022). Manufacturing statelessness. American Journal of International Law, 116(2), 237–288.

Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press.

Miyamoto, M., et al. (2021). Animal slaughter and religious nationalism in Bhutan. Asian Ethnology, 80(1), 121–145.

Munro, L. T. (2016). Where did Bhutan's Gross National Happiness come from? The origins of an invented tradition. Asian Affairs, 47(1), 71–92.

Neikirk, A., & Nickson, R. (2024). Transitions without justice: Bhutanese refugees in Nepal. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 18(2), 267–280.

O'Brien, M. (2010, August 28). Fears of "demographic inundation" behind Bhutan's refugee crisis. East Bay Times.

Rizal, T. N. (2009). Torture Killing Me Softly: Bhutan Through the Eyes of a Mind-Control Victim.

Saul, B. (2000). Cultural nationalism, self-determination and human rights in Bhutan. International Journal of Refugee Law, 12(3), 321–353.

United Nations. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Walcott, S. (2011). One of a kind: Bhutan and the modernity challenge. National Identities, 13(3), 253–265.

For many of us in the Sikkim-Darjeeling hills, the word ‘refugee’ exists as an abstraction – a word, a chapter in a book, a documentary; something else, someone else, somewhere else. Growing up in Sikkim it was not something that ever came up in conversation, even though many of my Tibetan friends had a refugee background. Maybe it was owing to adolescence, youth, interest, information (or the lack of it) that the word ‘refugee’ barely entered our lexicon. Or maybe it was the privilege of having been born and brought up in Sikkim, where we were far removed from the plight that had befallen the ethnic Nepalis in Bhutan. It would be decades later that I would learn about their displacement, and their presence and proximity in Sikkim and Darjeeling, where many Bhutanese refugees worked as seasonal migrant labour or married into families in the region. 

‘Refugee’ is a loaded word – it carries history, trauma, memory, stereotypes, colours perception and action. When I began to prepare for my research on the Lhotsampas in Launceston, Tasmania, I thought I understood what that word meant in practice. I had read books and articles on Bhutanese refugees and refugees in general, after all. However, in hindsight, I was underprepared when I arrived in Launceston. Not underprepared in terms of theory and concepts, but more in terms of my own spatial and cultural dissonance, my surprise at how trauma, memory, past and the present were interspersed in everyday life, their real estate successes, and for their ‘moving on’ with their lives in Australia, while still sharing a collective nostalgia for Bhutan and their camps in Nepal. 

What began as a research project in 2021 has evolved into a very close relationship with many Bhutanese families and individuals in Launceston. One of the very first things I learnt was that no one self-identified as Lhotsampa – the people of the south/southerners. Everyone spoke of themselves and of others in their community as Bhutanese. Following common practice, I too use the term Bhutanese when I speak or write about them. 

Resettlement did not end when they arrived in Australia, it is still a constant and everyday negotiation. 

The more time I spent with the Bhutanese, the more loaded and intense the word ‘refugee’ felt. While I felt uncomfortable using the word, scared of triggering memories and trauma, the Bhutanese seemed to own their ‘refugee-ness’. They lived with it and built their futures despite it. And owing this reResettlement did not end when they arrived in Australia, it is still a constant and everyday negotiation. fuge-ness also meant a constant adjustment and recalibration of identities as refugee, citizen, Bhutanese and Australian. Resettlement did not end when they arrived in Australia, it is still a constant and everyday negotiation. 

Making Home

The Bhutanese community in Launceston, Tasmania live predominantly in three neighbouring suburbs of Invermay, Mowbray and Newnham. While many rent, many more own their own homes; a seamless convergence of the booming migration-led real estate market in supposedly unsavoury Australian suburbs and the Bhutanese aspiration to own their own homes. While home ownership provided many a sense of comfort and stability, many have found financial upward mobility through multiple home ownership. A feat significant for anyone but even more impressive for those who only started arriving in Australia in the late 2000s. 

While home ownership is a universal aspiration, this was a particularly important for the Bhutanese. As one of my friends explained, many Bhutanese families had never lived in rented accommodation. While in Bhutan they had lived in their own homes, no matter how small, and then for the next two decades, had lived in the camp in rows of bamboo and ikra huts. Renting, therefore, added a sense of ukkus-mukkus (उक्कुस मुक्कुस), that feeling of uneasiness in an already alien land. 

Beyond comfort and stability, Bhutanese investments in real estate and businesses are also shaped by the heartbreaking acceptance of the fact that they will never be able to go back to Bhutan, not even as visitors. That door is conclusively shut. Australia is now their home, at least in a legal, technical and administrative sense. However, does this extend to the feeling of home? This is not something easy to decipher. This is an even more painful question for the older generation who live with the memories of their life in Bhutan – their rice fields and plum trees, the obstinate mules and domesticated pigeons that they still remember fondly, and for many, the families and friends they will never see again. 

How do you make home somewhere else when your identity and entire being are entangled in the memories of the hills and valleys, the gurgling rivers, in the sweetness of the freshly plucked orange from your garden, in the noises and rhythms of village life, where you yourself were a different person? As a refugee, it is not just about making home; it is making yourself all over again. 

For many Bhutanese, across all age groups, social interactions beyond the Nepali-speaking world are hampered by their limited grasp of the English language. Their engagement and understanding of Australia and Australians are mediated by those who can speak and understand English. Making home and perhaps, even their own selves, comes through the re-creation of place and through activities and rhythms that were part of daily life, especially for many older Bhutanese. 

When engagement with the outside world is a series of translations, the home and the kitchen garden become a refuge. Many Bhutanese spend significant time and energy on their kitchen gardens, a space and activity that feels familiar and maybe, even intuitive. The humble kitchen garden, thriving with raaya ko saag (mustard leaves), iskus (chakos), dalle khorsani and chillies of different varieties, makaai (maize), farsi (pumpkin), rukh tamatar (tamarillo) etc., is not just any ordinary garden. It is a space that is intentionally cultivated, honed, and cared for. Not only does the garden keep the memory of home and food cultures alive, the familiar action of hoeing, weeding, planting, watering, harvesting, fermenting also lends a sense of confidence and purpose. For those whose knowledge and experience do not find meaning in their new settlement, the kitchen garden becomes a space where they are still purposeful, productive, and valuable. 

When engagement with the outside world is a series of translations, the home and the kitchen garden become a refuge.

Making home is also difficult when there are multiple versions of home. For most Bhutanese in Launceston there are at least two versions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ – before and after Bhutan, before and after the camp in Nepal. While Bhutan is home, the camps were also home for more than two decades before third-country resettlement began in 2008. 

Making home is also difficult when there are multiple versions of home.

Life in the camp was difficult. Families lived on meagre rations provided by the World Food Program, and the goodwill of their neighbours when they ran out of basic necessities. Memories of harassment and discrimination by their Nepalese neighbours who lived in the camp vicinity still throbs and smarts; they remember the hardship of earning just a fistful of money, enough only just to get by. However, despite the everyday struggles, the camp provided community, friendship and solidarity. Most Bhutanese, young and old, still reminisce about this sense of community and closeness that they shared in the camp; the physical proximity of houses and peoples perhaps heightened these relationships. Once re-settled in Australia, lives have become busier, houses farther apart and the need to borrow sugar or oil does not arise anymore. 

Yet, there is familiarity and closeness still; community members celebrate festivals and various cultural events together, and support each other through difficult times. They remain connected with other Bhutanese around the world through social media, which offers moments of comparison and reflection on how their lives have changed so far. TikTok has had a transformative effect on middle-aged women especially who enjoy watching and making videos together, much to the chagrin of their children, who had never witnessed this singing and dancing versions of their mothers before. 

Resettlement has been transformative on many other levels too. It has encouraged, compelled or forced Bhutanese men and women to go above and beyond their comfort zones, to adapt once again to a new place and situation, none of which they asked for in the first place. For a community that had lived within the confines of a camp for more than two decades, the possibility of freedom- to choose where to live, work, travel- was perhaps a daunting proposition. While there were many fears and challenges, necessity often forced change; overcoming them also meant mobility and financial independence, which was truly transformative, especially for women. However, while most embraced Bhutanese new opportunities to study, work, earn, some were unable to face these challenges.

While memories of Bhutan, the displacement and settlement in the camps are firmly etched in the minds of the older generation, they hold a different place in the lives of the younger Bhutanese, born in the camps in Nepal, who came to Australia at a young age. This generation of youth have a shared sense of distinction as Bhutanese, despite having never been to Bhutan. Maybe this distinction from other Himalayan nationalities comes from their shared experiences of socio-economic hardships, their political limitations as refugees and restricted mobility beyond camp boundaries. This distinction is also shaped by their experiences as young refugees in Australia, often living in outer suburbs, and attending underfunded public schools. In the early re-settlement years, many young Bhutanese experienced racism and ostracization from their peers which pushed them towards each other and other young people from the Global South. While Bhutanese youth work across different sectors and have friends and colleagues from different communities, they often tend to socialise mostly within the Bhutanese community – maybe it’s the comfort and familiarity of language, food, music, social norms and their shared refugee background; which in turn strengthens their bonds and identity as Bhutanese, even across state borders.

However, this generation could be the last generation of Bhutanese youth to speak Nepali fluently and share this sense of Bhutanese-ness whilst also embracing Australian norms and practices. For the generation that was born in Australia, being Bhutanese is a part of their history and heritage, but perhaps not central to their identity.

Conclusion

When Bhutanese families left their camps in Nepal, they were not entirely sure of where Australia or Tasmania was, what the people were like, or what they would do when they arrived. When they left the camps, every individual was allowed a single bag weighing 20 kgs each; many families did not even collectively own belongings that weighed the total weight allocated to their family. Those who arrived first reassured and guided others who followed. Accepting the re-settlement offer was, on many levels, a leap of faith in the system and themselves. While re-settlement has offered stability, the opportunity to belong to a country, and to participate in the world with equal rights, it is also a liminal experience wherein the Bhutanese are constantly negotiating different social worlds. 

And while their story of adversity, resilience, failures and success is not unique to other refugee experiences, it is one that definitely warrants listening and understanding that refugee lives are not always resolved once they are re-settled. 

Hydropower projects on the Teesta have been accompanied by intense debate and conflict. While policymakers frame dams as symbols of clean energy and development, local communities have raised concerns about environmental degradation, cultural survival, and increased disaster risks (Rai & Khawas,2021).

Hydropower projects on the Teesta have been accompanied by intense debate and conflict. While policymakers frame dams as symbols of clean energy and development, local communities have raised concerns about environmental degradation, cultural survival, and increased disaster risks (Rai & Khawas,2021). Resistance movements have taken many forms. Youth-led organizations such as the Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT) have organized hunger strikes, petitions, and media campaigns, while traditional village councils in Lachung and Lachen ( Dzumas) have used customary authority to oppose projects ( Navin & Vimal, 2021). Scholars such as Sherpa (2022), Rai & Khawas (2021), and Chettri (2018) have highlighted how these movements are linked to questions of indigenous identity, environmental justice, and the right to define development. 

The glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) and the failure of the Teesta Stage III hydropower project reshaped the stakes of this debate. Scientific and journalistic accounts describe how the GLOF travelled far downstream, causing severe destruction and loss of life, and reigniting long-standing warnings about the risks of placing major infrastructure in an evolving cryosphere. While hydropower politics in Sikkim has been studied in depth, much scholarship implicitly treats 'the community' as a single unit, either resisting or accommodating development. My research begins from a different question: how do internal differences, especially across two generations, the older and the youth,  shape the way hydropower is understood, contested, or reluctantly accepted? 

While hydropower politics in Sikkim has been studied in depth, much scholarship implicitly treats 'the community' as a single unit, either resisting or accommodating development. My research begins from a different question: how do internal differences, especially across two generations, the older and the youth, shape the way hydropower is understood, contested, or reluctantly accepted?

The interesting part that became clear over time was that there wasn’t just one way to understand the river or the changes around it. Conversations with elders often moved through memory, rituals and a sense of responsibility towards the land, while younger people spoke in terms of environmental change, livelihood and the future. This article grows out of these conversations. It examines how hydropower is understood differently across generations in North Sikkim's Dzongu and Chungthang, and how these differences shape how people relate to the river.

Intergenerational Perspectives: Dzongu and Chungthang

For many elders, the river forms part of a larger cosmological system in which mountains, forests, and rivers are interconnected through spiritual relationships. Disturbing the natural flow of the river through hydropower development is therefore perceived not only as an environmental change but also as a disruption of cultural and spiritual balance.

Across both areas and generations, the river was consistently described as more than a physical resource. Participants frequently referred to the Teesta and Rongyong rivers as sacred landscapes embedded in cultural traditions and everyday life. The stories of Rongnyu (now known as Teesta) and Rangeet, also known as the story of Parilbu and Tutfo , a famous Lepcha folk story, were stories I heard from many older people I conversed with. Namgyal Lepcha, a 63-year-old resident of  Dzongu says, “When we were children, these stories were part of our textbooks. Now I often wonder whether today’s children still know these stories or feel connected to them”. Ritual practices related to healing, death ceremonies, and oath-taking often take place in relation to the river, reinforcing its role as a moral and spiritual anchor within the community.  For many elders, the river forms part of a larger cosmological system in which mountains, forests, and rivers are interconnected through spiritual relationships. Disturbing the natural flow of the river through hydropower development is therefore perceived not only as an environmental change but also as a disruption of cultural and spiritual balance. Chewang Lepcha, an older respondent, explained, "We Lepcha people worship the environment, our land, and the river. We pray for our rivers, mountains… when they dig big tunnels for the dam, there is a negative impact on that because we don’t know whether they are only impacting the environment but also harming our sacred deities that are present in our land and river". Therefore, they view large dam projects as harmful not only to nature but also to the sacred relationships embedded within the landscape. 

Younger respondents often framed their concerns through discussions of ecological sustainability, tourism-based livelihoods, and environmental protection...However, these generational differences do not indicate a weakening of cultural attachment. Instead, it suggests that cultural identity is being reinterpreted by younger generations through contemporary concerns about environmental change and future livelihoods.

While elders articulated their connection to the river primarily through ritual practices and oral histories, the youth participants expressed their attachment in different ways. Younger respondents often framed their concerns through discussions of ecological sustainability, tourism-based livelihoods, and environmental protection. A  young mind from Upper Passingdang Dzongu recalled her childhood memory, “The river holds many picnic stories for us. We often went to the riverbeds to collect wood, and that is also where we found an insect called Nokbu”. However, these generational differences do not indicate a weakening of cultural attachment. Instead, it suggests that cultural identity is being reinterpreted by younger generations through contemporary concerns about environmental change and future livelihoods. Youth participants frequently emphasized that protecting the river is essential not only for cultural identity but also for sustaining economic activities such as tourism and community-based enterprises. This indicates that rather than experiencing cultural erosion, the relationship with the river is being expressed through new forms of environmental awareness and practical engagement. 

Development as a Contested Promise 

Another major theme that emerged from the interviews was skepticism toward development narratives associated with hydropower projects. Both elders and youth expressed concerns regarding the benefits promised by hydropower companies and government institutions. Participants frequently mentioned employment opportunities as one of the main justifications used to promote dam construction. A youth from Chungthang shared, "The dam promised development, but the work in tunnels was dangerous and temporary".

This perception reflects broader concerns about uneven development, where the economic benefits of electricity generation are distributed beyond the region while environmental and social risks remain concentrated locally.

However, other  respondents also described these jobs as temporary and often dangerous, particularly tunnel work carried out during construction phases. Several participants explained that once the construction phase ended, long-term employment opportunities were limited. This perception reflects broader concerns about uneven development, where the economic benefits of electricity generation are distributed beyond the region while environmental and social risks remain concentrated locally. 

Disaster as Lived Evidence of Risks 

The October 2023 glacial lake outburst flood played an important role in shaping perceptions of hydropower projects. For many participants, the disaster transformed environmental risk from an abstract possibility into a lived reality.

The October 2023 glacial lake outburst flood played an important role in shaping perceptions of hydropower projects. For many participants, the disaster transformed environmental risk from an abstract possibility into a lived reality. Elders frequently interpreted the flood through spiritual narratives, describing it as a reminder of the consequences of disturbing natural balance. In contrast, younger participants often framed the disaster in terms of environmental miscalculation and infrastructural vulnerability. Despite these differences in interpretation, the disaster created a shared sense of concern regarding the long-term sustainability of large-scale hydropower infrastructure in the region. 

Generational Knowledge and Ecological Memory 

A key difference between elders and youth lies in the type of knowledge they value. Elders often draw on oral histories and spiritual beliefs when discussing the river. Many described how the landscape used to look before hydropower development and how certain areas were considered sacred. This form of ecological memory provides a historical perspective on environmental change. Elders frequently compared present conditions with past experiences, describing shifts in water flow, changes in agricultural patterns, and the disappearance of certain fish species. 

A key difference between elders and youth lies in the type of knowledge they value. Elders often draw on oral histories and spiritual beliefs when discussing the river...Youth participants, by contrast, often framed environmental concerns through discussions of climate change, sustainability, and tourism.

Youth participants, by contrast, often framed environmental concerns through discussions of climate change, sustainability, and tourism. Their language reflected exposure to environmental education and media narratives. However, this did not mean that the youth lacked emotional attachment to the river. Rather, their relationship with the landscape was expressed through different cultural forms. 

Cultural Revival and Resistance 

An unexpected finding was the role of cultural revival among youth participants...This presented a unique way of showing how resistance movements are evolving across generations. While earlier protests relied heavily on hunger strikes and public demonstrations, younger activists are experimenting with new forms of communication that combine culture, art, and environmental activism.

An unexpected finding was the role of cultural revival among youth participants. Several young people described efforts to promote Lepcha culture through modern artistic forms such as music, film, and fashion. Traditional clothing and musical instruments were being incorporated into contemporary performances. These cultural expressions often carried environmental messages. Songs and stories about the Teesta River were used to raise awareness about hydropower issues and to communicate the importance of protecting the landscape. 

This presented a unique way of showing how resistance movements are evolving across generations. While earlier protests relied heavily on hunger strikes and public demonstrations, younger activists are experimenting with new forms of communication that combine culture, art, and environmental activism. 

Differences between the Two Sites- Dzongu and Chungthang

The two field sites, Dzongu and Chungthang present distinct contexts that shape how hydropower development is perceived and experienced. While both locations are situated within the Teesta river basin, their relationship with hydropower projects differs significantly, influencing the nature of community responses. 

Dzongu 

Dzongu, a protected Lepcha reserve, is characterized by a strong and long-standing opposition to hydropower projects. Resistance in this region is deeply rooted in the cultural and spiritual significance of the landscape.... The presence of movements such as the Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT) has played a crucial role in shaping collective resistance. Over time, this resistance has become part of the region’s social and political identity.

Dzongu, a protected Lepcha reserve, is characterized by a strong and long-standing opposition to hydropower projects. Resistance in this region is deeply rooted in the cultural and spiritual significance of the landscape. For many residents, the river is not only an ecological resource but also a sacred entity connected to ancestral identity and ritual life. As a result, opposition to hydropower in Dzongu is often framed as a form of cultural and environmental protection. 

The presence of movements such as the Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT) has played a crucial role in shaping collective resistance. Over time, this resistance has become part of the region’s social and political identity. The opposition in Dzongu can be understood as preventive, as it aims to resist hydropower development before significant environmental or cultural disruption occurs. The relative absence of large-scale hydropower infrastructure in the region allows residents to imagine and advocate for alternative futures centred on ecological preservation and cultural continuity. 

Chungthang 

In contrast, Chungthang represents a site where hydropower development is already embedded within the landscape. The presence of dam infrastructure and the impact of the 2023 GLOF have shaped local experiences in more immediate ways. Unlike Dzongu, where resistance is collective and clearly articulated, perspectives in Chungthang are more fragmented and complex. 

In contrast, Chungthang represents a site where hydropower development is already embedded within the landscape. The presence of dam infrastructure and the impact of the 2023 GLOF have shaped local experiences in more immediate ways. Unlike Dzongu, where resistance is collective and clearly articulated, perspectives in Chungthang are more fragmented and complex.

Many residents in Chungthang have direct experience with both the benefits and risks associated with hydropower. While some acknowledge the economic opportunities and infrastructure development linked to these projects, others express concerns about environmental degradation, safety, and further intensified these concerns, making environmental risks more visible and tangible. At the same time, economic dependency on hydropower related activities and the presence of infrastructure complicate unified resistance. This results in a more ambivalent stance, where individuals may simultaneously recognize the risks of hydropower while also navigating its economic realities. 

Comparative Insight 

The contrast between Dzongu and Chungthang shows how local context shapes perception. While Dzongu reflects a strong, culturally rooted resistance, Chungthang illustrates a more complex engagement shaped by lived experience and infrastructural presence. These differences reinforce the importance of not treating communities as homogeneous entities, as perspectives vary not only across generations but also across locations.

The contrast between Dzongu and Chungthang shows how local context shapes perception. While Dzongu reflects a strong, culturally rooted resistance, Chungthang illustrates a more complex engagement shaped by lived experience and infrastructural presence. These differences reinforce the importance of not treating communities as homogeneous entities, as perspectives vary not only across generations but also across locations. 

 Hydropower expansion in the Eastern Himalaya intensifies landslides, seismic instability, and flooding.  Many interviewees described how blasting for tunnels and dam construction had altered landscapes, increased landslide risks, and disturbed natural water flows, reinforcing concerns highlighted in the literature regarding the incompatibility of large-scale infrastructure with fragile mountain ecosystems. They described hydropower projects as decisions imposed from outside the community rather than initiatives emerging from local needs. Several interviewees noted that development decisions were made by government institutions and private companies with limited consultation with the communities living closest to the river.

Hydropower expansion in the Eastern Himalaya intensifies landslides, seismic instability, and flooding.  Many interviewees described how blasting for tunnels and dam construction had altered landscapes, increased landslide risks, and disturbed natural water flows, reinforcing concerns highlighted in the literature regarding the incompatibility of large-scale infrastructure with fragile mountain ecosystems...Several interviewees noted that development decisions were made by government institutions and private companies with limited consultation with the communities living closest to the river...

Participants also frequently expressed frustration about the lack of local benefits from hydropower projects. In particular, several respondents pointed out the paradox that electricity is generated in their region while nearby villages still face irregular power supply. Others emphasized that employment opportunities created by dam construction were temporary and often dangerous, particularly tunnel work. These narratives reinforce Gergan (2020) observation that local communities often bear environmental costs without receiving corresponding long-term economic benefits. 

These narratives reinforce Gergan (2020) observation that local communities often bear environmental costs without receiving corresponding long-term economic benefits. 

The legacy of ACT remains highly visible within community narratives. Many participants referred to the movement as a collective struggle that had shaped local attitudes toward hydropower over several decades. Interestingly, while earlier protests were largely organized by elders, younger generations now appear to be carrying forward the movement in new ways. Youth participants described engaging with the issue through cultural expression, such as music, storytelling, and art related to the Teesta River. It also shows that while the forms of resistance may be changing across generations, the underlying commitment to protecting the river remains strong. Many elders described the river as a living presence involved in important life-cycle rituals. Participants explained that the Teesta and Mount Kanchenjunga are invoked as witnesses during marriages and other social ceremonies, reflecting a belief that natural landscapes hold moral authority. 

Some elders also described funeral rituals in which ashes and bones are returned to the river, reinforcing the idea that the river forms part of the spiritual journey of the soul. These narratives demonstrate how hydropower development is experienced not only as environmental transformation but also as a disruption of cultural and spiritual order. Elders frequently framed their opposition to hydropower in terms of sacred geography and ancestral responsibility, emphasizing the spiritual consequences of disturbing the river. Youth participants, on the other hand, often discussed hydropower in relation to environmental sustainability and future livelihoods. Several young respondents emphasized the importance of protecting the river and not disturbing its natural flow, and also on initiating tourism-based livelihoods such as rafting, trekking, and homestays. These perspectives suggest that generational differences do not necessarily represent disagreement but rather reflect different ways of articulating environmental concerns. 

The legacy of ACT remains highly visible within community narratives. Many participants referred to the movement as a collective struggle that had shaped local attitudes toward hydropower over several decades.

While elders and youth share many concerns about hydropower, they frame these concerns differently. Elders emphasize the sacredness of the landscape and the importance of preserving cultural traditions. Their narratives often reflect a sense of responsibility toward ancestral land and spiritual balance. Youth perspectives, while still rooted in cultural identity, focus more strongly on future livelihoods and environmental sustainability. For example, several participants expressed interest in developing tourism activities that rely on a healthy river ecosystem. These differences should not be interpreted as a generational divide, instead, they represent complementary perspectives that together strengthen community resistance. Elders provide historical and spiritual legitimacy to environmental concerns, while youth contribute new forms of activism and communication. This intergenerational dynamic may also explain the resilience of anti-dam movements in regions such as Dzongu. Rather than fading over time, resistance continues to adapt as younger generations reinterpret cultural values in contemporary contexts. 

Elders provide historical and spiritual legitimacy to environmental concerns, while youth contribute new forms of activism and communication. This intergenerational dynamic may also explain the resilience of anti-dam movements in regions such as Dzongu. Rather than fading over time, resistance continues to adapt as younger generations reinterpret cultural values in contemporary contexts.

Conclusion

Hydropower conflicts in North Sikkim cannot be understood solely through economic or technical frameworks. They are deeply embedded in cultural identity, environmental memory, and evolving forms of activism. By examining intergenerational perspectives, the study reveals that community opposition to hydropower is both shared and diverse.

Hydropower conflicts in North Sikkim cannot be understood solely through economic or technical frameworks. They are deeply embedded in cultural identity, environmental memory, and evolving forms of activism. By examining intergenerational perspectives, the study reveals that community opposition to hydropower is both shared and diverse. Elders and youth articulate their concerns through different narratives, yet both groups remain deeply connected to the river and the landscape. The findings also highlight the importance of incorporating local knowledge and cultural values into development planning. Policies that treat rivers purely as economic resources risk overlooking the complex social relationships that communities maintain with their environment. As climate change and infrastructure expansion continue to reshape Himalayan landscapes, understanding these relationships will become increasingly important. Development strategies that fail to engage with local perspectives may deepen existing conflicts and undermine long-term sustainability. Recognizing the diversity of voices within communities is therefore essential for creating more inclusive and just approaches to development in mountain regions.

The findings also highlight the importance of incorporating local knowledge and cultural values into development planning...Recognizing the diversity of voices within communities is therefore essential for creating more inclusive and just approaches to development in mountain regions.

Author’s Note: This article is based on my Master’s field research (Azim Premji University) conducted in Dzongu and Chungthang, North Sikkim, focusing on intergenerational perspectives on hydropower projects and the Teesta River. 

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