Jigme Singye Wangchuck

Jigme Singye Wangchuck was the fourth Druk Gyalpo of Bhutan, reigning from 1972 until he abdicated in 2006. He is the ruler most associated with the idea of Gross National Happiness. He was the only son of King Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, was schooled in Darjeeling and then in England, and was appointed chairman of the National Planning Commission at fifteen. His father died suddenly in Kenya in July 1972, and he came to the throne at sixteen, the youngest reigning monarch in the world. Early in his reign he argued that a country should measure its progress by the wellbeing of its people rather than by output alone. The idea was later formalised around four pillars: sustainable development, cultural preservation, environmental conservation and good governance. It has since been borrowed by economists and governments far beyond the Himalayas. He opened Bhutan cautiously to the outside world, admitting television and the internet only in 1999, and wrote environmental protection into national policy by committing the country to keeping most of its territory under forest. The darkest passage of his reign was the citizenship legislation of the 1980s and the One Nation, One People policy, which drove roughly a hundred thousand Lhotshampa of Nepali origin out of southern Bhutan into refugee camps in Nepal. That displacement remains largely unresolved. In 1998 he gave up his executive powers to an elected Council of Ministers. He then did what few monarchs do voluntarily: he pressed a reluctant country towards parliamentary democracy and gave it a written constitution. He abdicated in December 2006 in favour of his son so that the transition would happen under his supervision rather than after his death.

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