Abstract

Democracy as a form of government implies a government of the people or for that matter a people’s government. It has come a long way from the Greek ideas of Demos and Kratos and in fact this journey in the tiny Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan since 2008 seems to be one of a regime initiated one. It holds all the trappings of being depicted as yet another model of guided democracy, like the ones prevalent in Turkey (since Ataturk), in Pakistan under the martial law administrators as well as under Pervez Musharraf, Indonesia (under Ahmed Sukarno) and others where, democracy is and was looked upon as an institution under the protection of the armed forces. And this incident made way for autocracy in those countries. In Bhutan, the custodian appears to be the monarchy and the monarchs themselves. The framers of the 2008 constitution of the Kingdom of Bhutan make every effort to insulate their document from political quagmire by putting in place certain qualifications namely that candidates contesting the poll should be graduates only, making way for the technocrats to run for the elected offices. This has been justified on the ground that lessons learnt from the neighborhood as well as from others that it is vital to keep the newborn democracy away from the chaos and all the churning effects of politics. In this paper, I will discuss whether it could be categorized as another example of a guided democracy. For the present time this guided democracy seems to continue without much of a problem but in the future it might give way to some other form or perhaps political turmoil. Therefore we need to look at the other Greek idea of Kratos meaning people’s rule.