A Foot Soldier Without Compare

On the morning of 23rd of December, 2024—bound and adorned in silk and brocade, draped on all five sides by the national flag, enveloped by the soulful melody of the bugle, commemorated by the sharp reverberations of gun salutes—one of Bhutan’s most outstanding sons was reduced to ashes. Dasho Tsering Wangda was honored with a state funeral worthy of a foot soldier without compare.

A youthful Dasho Tsering Wangda

Even as the funeral pyre crackled and blazed with an uncommon ferocity, consuming his last remains, more than 700 mourners stood immobile and grief-stricken—their eyes fixed on the blazing pyre as it systematically reduced to nothingness the physical remains of someone they had come to love, respect and admire.

For me, as I confessed to some close family members, the sadness was not in the fact that his life had come to an end, but that it was snuffed out by the same beings in whose cause Dasho Wangda was set to do battle. The problem of wild elephants in the Special Administrative Region of the Gelephu Mindfulness City has been hanging fire for decades. Even as the Royal Government of Bhutan was aware of the increasingly aggressive animals who had lost their natural habitat, it has done little to resolve the issue.

When I last spoke to Dasho Wangda on Friday the 13th December, 2024 (he was on his way to Bhangtar, in eastern Bhutan), he said that he hoped to sit with me when he came up to Thimphu to participate in one of the events during the National Day celebrations. He wanted us to jointly fine-tune a proposal that he would soon be submitting to the RGoB—a bold and daring proposal that laid out a mindful solution to the dangerous situation brewing between the people domiciled within GeSAR and the burgeoning wild elephant population. It was a document that truly lived up to the values our country espouses.

To be sure, the RGoB did us all proud by honoring Dasho Wangda with a fitting send-off. In doing so, it demonstrated that it will not be found wanting in its duty to those who are deserving. But will the official response end there?

It may sound strange, but I am wont to believe that Dasho Wangda’s untimely death was an act contrived by Providence. Almighty God may have decided that the only way to get Bhutanese authorities to wake up and act was by engineering a devastating tragedy of this scale.

But what will change going forward? Will the government finally take action on this chronic and perilous problem? Or will Dasho Wangda’s ultimate sacrifice be in vain?