With historic vote, Bhutan becomes democracy

But there were ugly moments. One party accused the other of vote buying (it was actually paying its workers); a candidate charged his opponent with trying to influence powerful monks by having his wife donate a butter lamp to a monastery.

'Get rid of these ghos'
But in the political confrontations that so many find unseemly, others see an opening to be relished.

“Criticizing a minister, a civil servant. Can you imagine?” said Jitsen Dorji, a 32-year-old engineer. He said he hoped the democratically elected government would be more transparent.

He also had one other wish — “get rid of these ghos” — the traditional checkered robe Bhutanese men must wear to work. Women wear embroidered silk jackets and wraparound skirts.

That’s probably not going to happen. Bhutan’s monarchy, which only opened the country to the outside world in the early 1960s, has made a point of preserving Bhutanese culture in ways that seem heavy-handed to outsiders — and a few Bhutanese — such as the mandated dress code and not allowing television or the Internet in until 1999.

They also said they needed to protect their culture by driving out more 100,000 ethnic Nepalis — a Hindu minority concentrated in southern Bhutan — in the early 1990s. Most now live in refugee camps in Nepal and Bhutan refuses to take them back.

Even with tens of thousands of other ethnic Nepalis still in Bhutan, candidates were barred from speaking about matters of security or citizenship (that is, the refugees) as well as the royal family.

The Bhutanese say that such rules are needed to protect their tiny country, which lies between Asian giants India and China.

From medieval society to paved roads
In the last half century, they’ve seen every other Himalayan Buddhist kingdom — places like Tibet and Sikkim — swallowed by foreign powers or swamped by outsiders.

While the Bhutanese insist they care little for such places — the recent unrest in Tibet, for instance, garnered little notice here — the country’s kings recognized in the 1960s that they needed to embrace the modern world to survive.

Back then Bhutan was a medieval society with no paved roads, no electricity and no hospitals. Almost no foreigners were let in.

Not anymore. The country is likely to soon join the World Trade Organization and it welcomes about 20,000 tourists a year, albeit on heavily supervised, expensive trips.

But on those tours — which almost always present the fairy tale version of Bhutan as a land of fortress-like monasteries where monks chant amid the riotous murals of temple walls — one can nonetheless get a sense of how tightly controlled Bhutan remains.

When one visitor ditched his guide to go for a walk around Thimphu, he barely made it two blocks before his mobile phone rang. “Where are you,” said his nervous guide. “I need to know where you are.”

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