A Loving Old Man Who Meant Well For Bhutan

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister visited Bhutan during September of 1958. It was a reciprocal visit – on the invitation of Bhutan’s 3rd King His Majesty Jigme Dorji Wangchuck – during his visit to India in 1954.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru departed Delhi for Bhutan on 16th September, 1958 and entered Bhutan on 19th September, through Yatung in Tibet over the Nathu-La Pass in Sikkim. He departed Paro on the 27th of September, 1958 to arrive New Delhi on 2nd October, 1958. During a press conference that followed, one of the very interesting question/answer session was the following exchange:

Question:

Does the willingness of Bhutan to have a road go from India to their border, to be linked with their main towns, indicate any recognition on their part of their desirability of closer political and economic contact with India?

Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru:

'Our relations with Bhutan are exceedingly friendly. It is not any reluctance or any apprehension on their part, but it is a general desire not to get overwhelmed by an outside population coming in, a thing which I completely understand. In fact, if I may say so, I advised them to prevent outsiders coming. My definite advice to the ruler was: certainly get your experts and others, but do not encourage too many people to come, even from India. I tell you why. We do not encourage traders to go into the North-East Frontier Agency, which is India. We just do not like our traders going there, and if I may use the word, exploiting the people and spoiling all their tastes, selling cheap articles there which are normally neither tasteful nor good, and uprooting the tribal people from their habits without giving anything good enough in exchange. Therefore, I advised the Bhutanese Government, not that my advice was very necessary, not to encourage too much of this kind of thing but to take persons they wanted, and they do want experts, whether engineers or surveyors or maybe educationists, to take such persons for short periods. Or, better still, they can send their students to India to be trained, which they do not.

There are quite a number of students in India and they can go back and work in their own country.'

Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was truly a loving old man who meant well for Bhutan. But his daughter was a naughty girl 😂