The Bhutanese refugee problem has been plaguing Nepal for the last ten years. Starting with the trickling in of a few Bhutanese of Nepalese origin back in 1989, the trickle changed into a torrent of humans and now Nepal is housing around 100,000 such refugees. In the ten long years since the arrival of these politically prosecuted citizens of that country, Nepal has had to face a manifold of problems. From environmental degradation to social aberrations, the damages Nepal has had to suffer may be incalculable. However, in spite of the huge burden Nepal has been saddled with, no achievements have been made in repatriating the refugees back to their homeland. There have been seven round of ministerial level talks between Nepal and Bhutan, but Bhutan has been able to cleverly stall all efforts of the Nepalese side to send back the refugees.

One obstacle that has cropped up in sending them back, is in Indian government now allowing the Bhutanese to travel through India. As Nepal and Bhutan don’t share any common border, the refugees must go via India when they return back to their country. It is an irony that the refugees came overland from India when they entered Nepal, but now they are not being allowed to go back via the same route. However at present it is encouraging that Nepalese officials have raised this issue with the visiting Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh. None less than Prime Minister Krishna Prasad Bhattarai himself informed the press on Friday that he talked about the problems posed to Nepal by the presence of the refugees. “We told them our point about the free passage and the problems it is causing to Nepal and they listened to it very patiently,” he said. Foreign Secretary Murari Raj Sharma added, “The main issue of the free passage is that when the refugees wanted to go back to Bhutan they were not given the same kind of free passage as they were given when they were coming in to Nepal”. Therefore it can be seen India can play a crucial role in creating the proper environment for the refugees to go back. In this regard, it is a positive development that Nepalese officials have taken up the present opportunity to request India to use its good offices in solving this problem.

Now the eighth ministerial level meeting between Nepal and Bhutan is about to take place tomorrow (Monday). With a majority government in power here, many people are very hopeful that concrete developments will take place after this round of talks. One has to admit that the political instability in Nepal for the past couple of years did not help matters. Bhutan took full advantage of the turbulent political situation and no talks were held. Also, Nepal’s drawback was in not being fully prepared to deal with the stalling tactics of Bhutan. After every meeting, Bhutan came up with one pretext or the other which delayed the repatriation of the refugees. Sometimes it said verification had to be made whether the refugees were real Bhutanese citizens or not and sometimes it said classification of the refugees had to be made. Nepalese negotiators always came back agreeing to such demands of the Bhutanese side. However Nepal now seems to be in a better position to deal with Bhutan and with a new Foreign Minister handling things, it would not be wrong to be optimistic and expect positive developments to crop up after the upcoming talks.