Potted plants on rusty metallic kerosene tins line the smooth, swept dirt path leading to the huts of Beldangi-I. Outside, the air is warm, the saplings growing in the planters try to make the area look less brown, and the winter sun blinds as it reflects off solar parabola cookers. Inside, the huts are cool and dark, the walls are plastered with newspaper, and bamboo partitions separate cooking area from the living space.
Beldangi-I is one of the seven refugee camps in the plains of southeast Nepal where the Lhotshampa refugees from Bhutan are housed. Ask to enter one at random, and it is the home of Sanumaya Karki Chettri, mother of three. She shakes her head as she remembers her family's flight from Bhutan 15 years ago. "We had our son with us, but we didn't think we'd be able to get our daughters out of the house. As we ran from our homes, we thought we were going to die. We thought – this is it. Our lives are over. We came here, and after a while, we found the camps."
Sanumaya's story is repeated everywhere in the seven camps, where there are more than 100,000 Nepali-speaking refugees waiting for a solution that has eluded them all these years. Evicted peasants from whom the government of King Jigme Singye Wangchuk feared demographic inundation of his Ngalong-dominated state, the refugees today make up a desperate category whose lives have been on hold for more than a decade- and-half. When they departed Bhutan, as the result of a mass fear psychosis created by the royal Druk government, they were un-politicised farmer families. Today, in exile and as refugees in open camps and jostled by the active public sphere of Nepal and neighbouring West Bengal, they have become aware of the world. Ironically, this very 'politicisation' of the refugee fold would make King Jigme and his government that much more unlikely to want to begin the process of repatriation. And so, throughout the period since 1990 when the first refugees began their flight, Thimphu has played the game of delaying the refugees' return, playing on Indian sensitivities on geopolitical grounds, the international hankering for a Himalayan Buddhist Shangri La to replace a despoiled Tibet, and taking advantage of the continuous political turmoil in the refugee host country.
In 1980, the Thimphu government passed a Marriage Act which severely limited career options for Bhutanese married to non-Bhutanese. An amended Citizenship Act, passed in 1985, decreed that only children with both Bhutanese parents were eligible for citizenship, and that only those whose names were registered in the 1958 census were Bhutanese. That census had set onerous conditions relating to land tax receipts which discriminated against the Lhotshampa. Thimphu carried out a census in 1988, concentrating on the south, and claimed unconvincingly that over 20 percent of the population was made up of illegal immigrants. The census 'results' were used to energise the depopulation drive which followed. Tek Nath Rizal, a Royal Advisory Councillor and Lhotshampa elder, was imprisoned after he submitted a petition to King Jigme seeking redress. Unease spread across southern Bhutan, and in 1990, the first public demonstrations were held demanding civil and cultural rights.