D.N.S. Dhakal

D.N.S. Dhakal is a Bhutanese economist and exile politician best known as the long-serving Executive Chairman of the Bhutan National Democratic Party (BNDP) and as co-author, with Christopher Strawn, of Bhutan: A Movement in Exile (Nirala Publications, Jaipur, 1994), one of the earliest book-length studies of the Bhutanese refugee crisis written from a Lhotshampa perspective. Since the early 1990s he has combined academic work in development economics with sustained political advocacy on behalf of the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese community expelled from southern Bhutan. Alongside Balaram Poudyal of the Bhutan People's Party and Rongthong Kunley Dorji of the Druk National Congress, Dhakal is conventionally counted among the three principal exile political leaders of the post-1990 Bhutanese diaspora.

Sources differ on the exact expansion of his initials. Duke University's Center for International Development profile lists him as Dinesh Dhakal; academic and news coverage variously give D.N.S. Dhakal, Devendra Narayan Sharma Dhakal, and Deo Narayan Sharma Dhakal. BhutanWiki follows the form used in his own published writings and in Princeton University Library's South Asian Ephemera Archive catalogue, which records him simply as D.N.S. Dhakal.^[1]

Early career and departure from Bhutan

Dhakal is an economist by training. Reporting in Bhutan News Service and coverage of his later advocacy work state that he served as an economic advisor to the Royal Government of Bhutan from August 1990 until October 1991, a period that coincided with the escalation of the southern Bhutan crisis and the beginning of the mass expulsion of the Lhotshampa population. The same reporting indicates that he left his government post and then the country in protest at the official characterisation of ethnic Nepali Bhutanese as "anti-nationals" and "illegal economic immigrants" during the implementation of the 1985 Citizenship Act.^[2] His specific civil-service rank, his place of origin within southern Bhutan, and his pre-1990 educational institutions are not documented in publicly accessible sources reviewed for this article.

Dhakal is routinely referred to as "Dr Dhakal" in both academic and advocacy materials, and he is listed in the Duke Center for International Development's senior-fellow cohort, a position that typically requires a doctoral degree. The awarding institution and year of his PhD are not stated on the Duke profile page as available in public caches, and BhutanWiki has not independently traced his doctoral thesis; readers should treat the doctoral title as reported rather than verified here.

Academic career

Dhakal's published work and institutional affiliations place him within the international development-economics community that grew out of the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) and its successor programmes. According to coverage of his advocacy work and to the Duke Center for International Development profile, he has taught on executive training programmes in project investment appraisal and management first associated with HIID and later based at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and at the Duke Center for International Development at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, where he is listed as a senior fellow.^[3] He has delivered DCID executive-education modules on project appraisal, risk management, fiscal decentralisation, and local government since the early 2000s.

His published economic work includes a 2008 working paper in the Queen's University economics department series, Power Purchase Agreements for Risk and Rent Sharing in Himalayan Hydropower Developments, co-authored with Glenn P. Jenkins. The paper applies a public-economics framework to the structure of cross-border power trade from Bhutan to India, a topic that connects his academic expertise to the political economy of the country he left.^[4] BhutanWiki has not been able to independently corroborate press claims that Dhakal held a long-tenure faculty appointment at Harvard in the 1990s; the more defensible reading of the record is that his Harvard association was through HIID executive training rather than a tenured or tenure-track chair.

Bhutan: A Movement in Exile (1994)

Bhutan: A Movement in Exile, co-authored with the American scholar Christopher Strawn and published by Nirala Publications in Jaipur in 1994, was among the first book-length treatments of the Lhotshampa expulsion to appear in English and remains one of the few early works written from the perspective of the displaced community rather than from that of the Royal Government or foreign scholars. The book combines a political history of Bhutan, an account of the 1985 Citizenship Act and its implementation, and a narrative of the 1990 demonstrations and subsequent expulsions. It is widely cited in the subsequent academic literature on the refugee crisis, including in Michael Hutt's Unbecoming Citizens (Oxford University Press, 2003), the standard scholarly reference on the episode.^[5]

Readers should note that Bhutan: A Movement in Exile is a partisan as well as a scholarly text: its authors were, at the time of writing, actively engaged in the political campaign whose history they were recording. Hutt and other later scholars treat it as an indispensable primary source for the exile-movement view, not as a neutral chronicle.

Bhutan National Democratic Party

The BNDP emerged in exile in early 1992 as the second major political vehicle of the Lhotshampa community, after the Bhutan People's Party (BPP). Princeton University Library's South Asian Ephemera Archive holds a 32-page BNDP pamphlet titled Bhutan National Democratic Party: Ideology, Manifesto and Organisation Structure, dated 1992, with R.B. Basnet listed as the principal author and D.N.S. Dhakal as a named contributor, placing Dhakal inside the party's founding circle from the outset.^[1] Basnet served as the party's first president; Dhakal subsequently emerged as the party's principal international spokesman and has been described in successive rounds of exile coverage as Executive Chairman, Executive Chief, and Acting President of the BNDP.

The BNDP's platform as set out in its 1992 manifesto and as restated by Dhakal in subsequent interviews centres on four demands: a transition to multiparty parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy; the honourable repatriation of refugees to their places of origin in southern Bhutan; repeal of, or substantive reform to, the 1985 Citizenship Act and the surrounding cluster of implementing regulations; and a review of the property confiscations and demolitions carried out during the expulsion period. The party has positioned itself as a moderate, reformist alternative to the more militant BPP strand, although in practice the two parties' demands have substantially overlapped and their leaderships have often cooperated in international advocacy.

Unlike political parties inside Bhutan, the BNDP has never been registered or permitted to contest elections under the 2008 Constitution. Its activity has been confined to the refugee camps of eastern Nepal, to the broader Indian and Nepali diaspora, and since the mid-2000s to the resettled community in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. R.B. Basnet died on 18 August 2007 at Bir Hospital in Kathmandu after a period of illness, leaving Dhakal as the party's most senior surviving leader.^[6]

Coalition politics and the United Front

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s Dhakal was a persistent advocate of uniting the fragmented exile movement under a single umbrella. In July 1996 the BNDP joined the Druk National Congress of Rongthong Kunley Dorji and the Bhutan Democratic Party in the United Front for Democracy in Bhutan (UFD), a coalition led by Dorji. Coverage of subsequent consolidation efforts reports Dhakal explaining BNDP's willingness to serve under DNC's leadership on the pragmatic grounds that the DNC had "better hold inside Bhutan", a reference to the DNC's Sharchop base in eastern Bhutan as distinct from the Lhotshampa base of the BPP and BNDP in the south.^[7]

BNDP has also cooperated at various points with the Human Rights Organisation of Bhutan (HUROB), associated with Tek Nath Rizal, with the Bhutanese Movement Steering Committee, and with the Global Campaign for the Release of Political Prisoners in Bhutan. The coalitional arithmetic has shifted repeatedly — the UFD effectively lapsed after Dorji's prolonged detention in India in the late 1990s — and Dhakal's role within these umbrella structures has varied from general-secretary to ordinary member depending on the configuration.

Third-country resettlement and Non-Resident Bhutanese

The large-scale third-country resettlement programme launched under UNHCR auspices in 2007 split the exile movement. Dhakal's stated public position, as reported in The Kathmandu Post and in the Non-Resident Bhutanese initiative's own materials, has been to support resettlement as a humanitarian necessity for camp residents while continuing to insist on the right of return and on political reform inside Bhutan. From roughly 2010 onwards he has been the principal public proponent of a Non-Resident Bhutanese (NRB) status for the resettled population, modelled loosely on the Indian Non-Resident Indian status, under which Bhutanese citizenship would be restored or acknowledged for the more than 100,000 people resettled in Western countries and a channel created for their economic and cultural engagement with Bhutan.^[8]

The Royal Government of Bhutan has not engaged with the NRB proposal, and it has found a mixed reception within the exile community itself. Critics in the BPP and among some independent activists have argued that accepting NRB status would amount to abandoning the demand for physical repatriation and for accountability for the events of 1990–1993. Dhakal has responded that NRB status and repatriation are not mutually exclusive, and that the demand for the right of return must be accompanied by concrete intermediate measures if it is not to remain a symbolic claim indefinitely.^[2]

2025 deportation crisis

The 2025 deportation crisis, in which US authorities removed a number of resettled Bhutanese to Bhutan and in which the Royal Government then refused to readmit many of them, reopened long-standing questions about the citizenship status of the exiled community. Dhakal's published commentary on the 2025 deportations, where it can be identified in the sources reviewed for this article, has continued to argue for formal recognition of the resettled community's Bhutanese status as a precondition for any durable resolution. A full record of his statements during the crisis is not yet available in a consolidated form and should be added as documentation develops.

Writings

• D.N.S. Dhakal and Christopher Strawn, Bhutan: A Movement in Exile (Jaipur: Nirala Publications, 1994).
• D.N.S. Dhakal and Glenn P. Jenkins, Power Purchase Agreements for Risk and Rent Sharing in Himalayan Hydropower Developments, Queen's Economics Department working paper, 2008.
• Numerous shorter pieces in Bhutan News Service, Bhutan Watch, and the Non-Resident Bhutanese platform on refugee policy, repatriation, and Bhutan's political economy.

Assessment and sourcing note

Exile political biographies from the post-1990 Bhutanese movement are under-reported in mainstream Bhutanese press. Kuensel and BBS have not published substantive biographical coverage of D.N.S. Dhakal on the public record reviewed for this article, consistent with the broader pattern of non-coverage of exile political leaders in domestic Bhutanese media. Most of the available material originates either from Dhakal's own writings and from BNDP communications or from exile outlets such as Bhutan News Service and Bhutan Watch, which are themselves movement-aligned. The Duke Center for International Development profile and the Princeton University Library catalogue entry for the 1992 BNDP pamphlet are the most institutionally independent anchors currently available. Several specific biographical claims that circulate in secondary coverage — including the precise form of his given names, the institution and year of his doctoral degree, and the nature of his Harvard association — have not been independently confirmed here and are flagged as reported rather than verified in the sections above.

See also

• Bhutan National Democratic Party
• Bhutan People's Party
• Balaram Poudyal
• Rongthong Kunley Dorji
• Tek Nath Rizal
• Bhutanese refugee crisis
• Lhotshampa
• 1985 Citizenship Act
• Global Campaign for the Release of Political Prisoners in Bhutan

References

1. "Bhutan National Democratic Party: Ideology, Manifesto and Organisation Structure" — Princeton University Library, South Asian Ephemera Archive (1992 pamphlet, R.B. Basnet with D.N.S. Dhakal)
2. "Experts throw mixed reactions on NRB formation" — Bhutan News Service
3. Dinesh Dhakal, Senior Fellow profile — Duke Center for International Development, Sanford School of Public Policy
4. D.N.S. Dhakal and Glenn P. Jenkins, "Power Purchase Agreements for Risk and Rent Sharing in Himalayan Hydropower Developments" — Queen's Economics Department Working Paper, 2008 (RePEc)
5. D.N.S. Dhakal and Christopher Strawn, Bhutan: A Movement in Exile (Nirala Publications, 1994) — Google Books record
6. "Bhutan's survival hinges on the return of its exiled people" — Khabarhub interview with Balaram Paudel (reporting the death of BNDP president R.B. Basnet)
7. "BNDP to initiate process to consolidate movement, says Dr Dhakal" — Bhutan News Service
8. "Refugee leader wants right to return" — The Kathmandu Post, 28 February 2015
9. List of political parties in Bhutan — Wikipedia
10. "Bhutanese refugee leaders announce unified move for democracy in Bhutan" — ReliefWeb / AFP