What was the Bhutanese Home Minister doing for so many days in Delhi? He left empty-handed and a dissident leader lives to fight another day.
In 1989, Teknath Rizal, a Bhutanese dissident who had taken shelter in Nepal, was kidnapped by the Panchayat-era authorities and handed over to Thimphu´s security officials who waited by a Druk Air jet at Kathmandu airport. Tek Nath Rizal has been in a Bhutanese jail since, declared a "prisoner of conscience" by Amnesty International. An identical modus operandi almost played itself out in mid-April this year when a Druk Air plane was commandeered by Thimphu´s Home Minister, Dago Tshering, and waited on the tarmac at New Delhi´s Indira Gandhi International Airport. The minister´s mission, to spirit home a Bhutanese dissident, whom the Indian Government had detained following an extradition request made by Bhutan. But the ending turned out to be different this time.
As soon as the New Delhi police arrested Rongthong Kunley Dorji on 18 April, the Bhutan Solidarity Group based in the city got active and immediately filed a habeas corpus petition with the Delhi High Court, thus preventing the Ministry of External Affairs from deporting Mr Dorji without due process. This put a spanner in the works, and Minister Tshering had to return home alone, but not before his plan of action had created enough problems for Mr Dorji.
Non-Lhotsampa Dissident
Thimphu´s powers-that-be have no reason to like Rongthong Kunley Dorji. In 1991, the businessman from East Bhutan was arrested on charges of consorting with Lhotshampa (i.e. Southern Bhutanese of Nepali origin) dissidents and imprisoned for almost two months. After his release, Mr Dorji along with his family fled the country and took up lodgings in Kathmandu. In 1994, Mr Dorji established the Druk National Congress (DNC) and earlier this year took up leadership of the newly formed United Front for Democracy (UFD), a five-party Bhutanese opposition grouping which sought to bring together the bickering exile leadership under one umbrella.