The Bhutanese Leading the way.
A great deal has been written and analyzed about His Majesty The Fourth King over the years, and more will be written in the years to come.
It is also not just books, academic papers, news articles and videos, but the Great Fourth, through his wise leadership and heroics, is a popular topic of discussion and stories among ordinary Bhutanese.
Practically every Bhutanese adult is an authority on The Great Fourth and will have his or her store of stories.
To understand The Great Fourth, we have to simply look at a 16-year-old boy in 1972 who at an impressionable and even vulnerable age had absolute power thrust into his hands.
The British Historian and moralist Lord Acton came up with the phrase, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.”
So many things could have gone wrong, but what is the greatest quality of His Majesty The Fourth King was that absolute power did not corrupt him, because he took the power not as just power, but a heavy responsibility towards his country and people.
It was this Buddhist sense of non-attachment that allowed His Majesty to step down at the peak of his power and glory at the age of 51 in 2006.
His Majesty has made many contributions to Bhutan over the years, and a lot of it is well documented like GNH, Environment, Development, Security, Democracy and more.
However, one of his greatest contributions to Bhutan and its people, that has not been talked about enough, is a strong sense of national identity and self-confidence.
It was first the colonization of the third world in the 18th and 19th centuries followed by westernization and then finally globalization in the 20th and 21st Centuries. The unsaid but implicit value proposition of westernization and globalization was that western and even dominant cultures are superior, and by extension the west and also anything bigger and richer than you is superior.
This often meant that indigenous peoples and culture were decimated across the world as people lost their language, culture, customs and eventually their identity and confidence.
We do not have to travel far but see in our own neighborhood of people even launching armed rebellions to safeguard their land and culture.
His Majesty The Fourth King has a lot to contribute in that pride in our heart of being a Bhutanese, and our ability to hold our head high anywhere in the world and say we are Bhutanese.
His Majesty not only protected Bhutanese identity and self confidence, but also enhanced it and through his policies gave Bhutan international fame and goodwill.
Another important quality and contribution of His Majesty is his high sense of personal integrity. This integrity not only made His Majesty a moral force, but it is one of the enduring reasons why we have comparatively much cleaner governance compared to our neighbors and as per the Corruption Perception Index we are the 18th cleanest country among 180 countries.
Bhutan could have easily been one of those many basket case countries where a greedy ruler would enrich himself with aid money and natural resources as the country collapsed. Bhutan could also have been again one of the many countries whose natural resources and forests were destroyed for the short term gain of a few.
Far from the above, imagine having a leader who believes in strictly following traffic rules.
It was this personal integrity of His Majesty that enabled him to lead by example.
Being a good leader of a country is also not just about morals and values, but also about governance and where required, shrewdness and toughness.
It is not easy to be a small country in a world where even entire civilizations can be swallowed up or decimated overnight due to some geopolitical faultline or because some powerful foreign leader got up on the wrong side of the bed. There is always a bigger dog around the corner.
In a tough world and even tougher neighborhood, Bhutan lucked out to have a King who could be tough when needed and shrewd where required.
His Majesty, in that sense, was not just an excellent sportsman but he was an adept player of international strategy and power play.
It was this sense of strategy, toughness and shrewdness that enabled Bhutan to overcome even grave challenges, and avoid ones which were not even visible to us.
Ministers, Dashos and others who worked under His Majesty remember a demanding boss who would not brook folly and incompetence, and straightened out any crooked attitudes or assumptions, but he was also a benevolent boss, a fair boss and the one who gave leadership by taking on the heaviest load and leading from the front.
His Majesty was a leader who was both loved and formidable to those who worked for him.
His Majesty may have stepped down in 2006 but his strong sense of service to his people still continues in the thousands of patients of His Majesty often diagnosed during a casual conversation or greeting during His Majesty’s walks or while cycling.
It is perhaps the many qualities of His Majesty that allows us to see him both as a Dharma King in the Buddhist and even Hindu sense, and also a living war-hero who saved his people and country at its darkest hour by laying it all on the line.
“A good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader; a great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
