Dasho Benji (Paljor J. Dorji)

Dasho Paljor Jigme Dorji (born 24 August 1943), almost universally known in Bhutan as Dasho Benji, is a Bhutanese conservationist, former judge and former diplomat. He is a son of Jigme Palden Dorji, Bhutan's first Prime Minister, a member of the Dorji family, and a maternal cousin of the Fourth King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck.^[1]

He is most closely associated with the founding of the Royal Society for the Protection of Nature (RSPN) in 1987, the first non-governmental environmental organisation established in Bhutan. Through the RSPN and a series of overlapping public roles he played a central part in shaping conservation policy from the late 1980s through the 2000s, and is widely referred to in Bhutanese public discourse as the country's "father of conservation" or "godfather of conservation".^[2]

Early life and family

Paljor Dorji was born on 24 August 1943 in Kalimpong, in present-day West Bengal, India, where the Dorji family then maintained substantial property and a long-standing presence dating to the 19th-century role of his ancestors as Bhutanese agents to British India. His mother, Tsering Yangzom, was the daughter of the Tibetan general Tsarong Dazang Dramdul. His elder sister Ashi Kesang Choden Wangchuck became the wife of the Third King, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, making Paljor Dorji a maternal uncle of the Fourth King.

His father, Jigme Palden Dorji, was assassinated in Phuentsholing in 1964 while serving as Prime Minister of Bhutan. The political turbulence that followed shaped much of the Dorji family's subsequent public life, and Paljor Dorji entered government service in his early twenties partly in the wake of that crisis.

Judicial career

Dorji served as Magistrate of Paro District from 1969 to 1972 and as a High Court judge from 1972 to 1974. In 1974 he was appointed the first Chief Justice of the High Court of Bhutan, a position he held until 1987, initially in an acting capacity until his appointment was formally confirmed in 1985. During his thirteen years on the bench he oversaw the consolidation of the High Court as a separate institution from the executive and contributed to the early codification of Bhutanese case law in a system still heavily reliant on customary precedent.

Founding of the RSPN

In 1987, at the directive of the Fourth King, Dorji established the Royal Society for the Protection of Nature, conceived as a non-governmental complement to state conservation programmes. The RSPN was given a particular focus on the conservation of the black-necked crane (Grus nigricollis), the Tibetan-Plateau migratory species that winters in the Phobjikha valley in Wangdue Phodrang.

Dorji is credited with persuading the government in the late 1980s to abandon a proposal to drain the Phobjikha wetlands to expand commercial seed-potato cultivation, a decision that allowed the valley to remain Bhutan's most important wintering ground for the species. The RSPN went on to operate the Black-Necked Crane Information Centre in Phobjikha and the annual Black-Necked Crane Festival held each November.^[3]

Other public roles

Dorji served as Bhutan's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York from 1991 to 1994, a period in which Bhutan substantially expanded its multilateral diplomatic engagement. He was also Deputy Minister for Social Services from 1988 to 1991 and held a senior position on the National Environment Commission between 1994 and 1997. He was instrumental in the drafting of The Middle Path, Bhutan's first National Environmental Strategy, published in 1998, and helped establish the Bhutan Trust Fund for Environmental Conservation, one of the earliest endowed environmental trust funds in any developing country.

He is a founder and past president of the Bhutan Ornithological Society and the Bhutan Ecological Society, and has continued to advise the RSPN board into the 2020s. He is widely credited with introducing basketball to Bhutan during his school years in Kalimpong, where he learned the sport from Canadian Jesuit teachers, and is said to have taught the game to the young Fourth King.

Recognition

Dorji has received a series of honours for his environmental work, including the inaugural Jigme Singye Wangchuck Outstanding Environmental Stewardship Award for Policy Leadership in 2010, and recognition as one of the World Wildlife Fund's "Nature's Heroes" in 2018. Within Bhutanese public life he is invariably addressed by the honorific Dasho, and is one of a small number of figures whose biography is closely identified with the institutional history of conservation in the country.^[4]

References

1. Paljor Dorji — Wikipedia
2. RSPN's founder wins first Jigme Singye Wangchuck Outstanding Environmental Stewardship Award — RSPN
3. Dasho Paljor J. Dorji awarded "The Nature's Heroes Award" — RSPN
4. Dasho Paljor J. Dorji — Bhutan Ecological Society
5. "Good Evening, Dasho Benji!" — SAGE Magazine, Yale School of the Environment