History, culture and politics set the Lhotshampa and the Drukpa apart. The Drukpa has decided to act, but can he prevail in the long term?
It was Kazi Ugen Dorii — the chief of the King´shouse hold the Royal Chamberlain (Gongzim) and the Governor (Jongpon) of western Bhutan, who encouraged large scale Nepali settlementin the southwestern partofthe country in the lastdecades of the 19th century. British diplomat Charles Bell found 14,000 Nepalis on the Torsa river bordering India in 1903. In no time, the land-hungry Nepali cleared the thick vegetation and organised themselves as cultivators in the southern Duars.
Some 25 years later, in 1932, Captain C J. Mams of the Gorkha Regiment was commissioned to investigate the possibility of recruiting Bhutanese. He made an extensive tour of the two Nepali districts of the south and made a crude estimate that the 1,500 households of the eastern and 4,000 households of the western districts contained a population of 60,000. He remarked upon the largeness of Nepali families. Marris stated that the actual number of Nepali settlers in Bhutan was much higher than his estimate because he had not included Sipchu area to the extreme south-east.
Nepali immigration to Bhutan continued well into the present century even though there was a s hortage of arable land. The Drukpa durbar eventually banned further Nepali immigration in 1959. In addition, the Nepalis were forbidden to settle beyond an imaginary east-west boundary drawn north of the Himalayan foothills.