Norzin Lam in Thimpu is what Durbar Marg is in Kathmandu. These two arteries that slice through the capitals of Bhutan and Nepal symbolise what’s right and wrong in the two reigning monarchies in Asia.

On a cold, drizzly morning last week, young couples, cloaked in gho and kira, the Bhutanese traditional robe-like clothes for men and women, strolled through Norzin Lam, holding hands. On the Thimpu street, tranquillity reigned supreme ? no posters, no slogans and no signs of the unrest the Kathmandu street is rocked by.

Clearly, the credit for this peace in Bhutan goes to its far-sighted monarch, Jigme Singye Wangchuck. While King Gyanendra of Nepal seems bent on holding on to power at any cost, King Wangchuck is giving it up voluntarily. If the Nepalese king is battling democracy, his Bhutanese counterpart is paving the way for it.

What’s happening in the Land of the Thunder Dragon, as Bhutan is referred to in Dzongkha, the Bhutanese national language, is nothing short of a bloodless revolution. The signs of change are everywhere in this tiny, land-locked country wedged between India and China. And it’s a top-down, monarch-driven move that is transforming the Himalayan kingdom even though the monarchy faces no “external or internal pressures” for political change, as Bhutanese foreign minister Lyonpo Khandu Wangchuk puts it.

Yet no one is sure how Bhutan’s tryst with democracy will turn out. Will it lead to a stable and prosperous nation, as envisioned by the re-formist king, or lead the country into a whirlpool of political chaos and corruption? This is the question being debated in Bhutan.

As the country takes the first tentative steps towards democracy, the Bhutanese are wary. After all, despite rapid economic growth (the gross domestic product climbed to an impressive 8.7 per cent in 2004-2005 from 6.8 per cent in 2003-2004 ) in recent years, mainly driven by the spurt in construction and Bhutan’s abundance of hydro-electric power that it sells to power-strapped India, the nation of only 7,52,000 people remains bogged down in a morass of poverty and illiteracy. Only 54 per cent of its population is literate and 37 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line.

“The majority of the Bhutanese is poor farmers living in villages and they have no idea what democracy is. They are worried,” says Professor Jagar Dorji, pro-vice chancellor of The Royal University of Bhutan in Thimpu. He says the educated are “concerned” as well. “We don’t know whether democracy will work in Bhutan as we have a huge illiterate population,” the educationist says.

Many Bhutanese feel that the country is not yet ready for the parliamentary democracy it’s all set to embrace in two years. The ties between the people and the monarchy are also strong. So people don’t see the reason for change. “For God’s sake, why do we need democracy? My king is my God and I want him to stay on after what he has done for this country and its people,” says Dilu Giri, senior manager of Thimpu’s Hotel Druk.

Though the king has been trying to sell the idea of democracy for some time to his people, they hardly seem convinced. In fact, the foreign minister says if the country were to hold a referendum today, the majority of the people would “opt out of democracy and opt for monarchy”.

But then, the king, who has already announced his decision to abdicate at the age of 65 in favour of his son before the first general elections in 2008, has his own reasons. He feels that democracy is the only option left for Bhutan to survive and prosper in the long run, sandwiched as it is between two Asian giants, senior Bhutanese bureaucrats say. After all, history has shown how some of the small Buddhist kingdoms, including Tibet, have disappeared.

To the question “why now,” the monarch’s reply, bureaucrats say, has been “why not now? Should we wait for a revolution or large-scale protests and violence to change?” And the king’s idea of democracy is having a government committed to increasing not just the gross national product (GNP) but “gross national happiness” (GNH). Economist Karma Ura, the director of the Centre for Bhutan Studies in Thimpu, is working on the king’s idea and will have to get the benchmark ready before Bhutan embraces democracy in 2008. Ura says it’s not just the materialistic growth of the people the Bhutan government is concerned about, but their “health, happiness and well being”. In its quest to create the benchmark, now a $2,00,000-project funded by the UNDP and the Bhutan government, the centre will embark on a nationwide survey of 6,000 households next year. It will cover nine areas, including the living standards, health, education, cultural resilience and emotional well being of the people.

To be sure, there are apprehensions and trepidation about something as unknown as democracy. That, in a way, is understandable in a country that opened up to the world only in the late 1990s when television and the Internet were allowed in.

For nearly half a century, Bhutan had pursued a deliberate policy of isolation, keeping largely to itself. It had severely restricted the number of tourists visiting the country and kept television away from its people, fearing that “outside” influences would corrupt its culture and destroy its age-old traditions. After all, this is one of the few countries in the world that has kept a national dress code alive.

But as the king ? Druk Gyalpo to people ? opens the country’s doors wide, things once unthinkable are happening. A Bhutanese can now see Desperate Housewives or, for that matter, Sex and the City on cable TV at home in Thimpu or Paro, some 64 km from the capital where the country’s only airport is located. Consumers in Bhutan are now offered a bouquet of 32 channels, most of them Indian and Western.

With the Internet accessible in all the 20 dzongkhags or districts in the country, information technology is the latest buzzword here. After an initial attempt to police the Net, the Bhutan government left it to parents and schools to keep children from cyber porn.

Mobile phone services, launched last year, are a huge hit. In fact, residents of Thimpu already fret about cabbies taking their hands off the wheel and their eyes off the mountainous roads to answer frequent calls on their cellphones.

Bhutan Telecom has invited and received bids from three international companies, one of them Indian, to launch broadband services by the end of this year.

Bhutan is, clearly, zipping down the information superhighway and, if all goes well, the first “free” privately-owned newspapers will hit the news stands in June. Dawa Penjor, a civil servant with the information ministry’s media department, says they have already issued licences to two private companies that are bringing out the Bhutan Times and Bhutan Observer.

The gale of change sweeping through Bhutan has not left the state-owned Kuensel, so far Bhutan’s only newspaper, untouched. From an eight-page weekly in 1986, it has become a 20-page bi-weekly newspaper, with reduced government control and subsidies. Kuensel editor-in-chief Kinley Dorji says he now runs the paper professionally with a team of eight journalists, two photographers and a circulation department. “We are now critical of every government ministry,” Dorji says.

At the moment, the country is confronted with its newly framed Constitution ? its first ? that pledges, among other things, to “enhance the unity, happiness and well being of the people for all time”. Bhutan’s journey from an absolute monarchy to a “democratic constitutional monarchy” with the king as head of state and an elected government running the country hinges entirely on the Constitution’s acceptance.

It took Bhutan nearly four years from 2001 to get the draft ready and Crown Prince Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck (the monarch in waiting) is now travelling through the country, seeking the people’s opinion on all 34 articles of the Constitution.

“They have learnt from history, from what’s happened in democratic India since 1947,” says senior lawyer K.K. Venugopal of the Supreme Court of India, an advisor to the high-powered Bhutanese committee that drafted the Constitution. For one, Bhutan will have only two political parties ? one a ruling party and the other an Opposition party ? to avoid a coalition government. For another, only a “natural-born citizen not married to a person who is not a citizen of Bhutan” will be able to hold constitutional office in the country. Bhutan clearly aims at preventing the political furore that India faced a few years ago over Italy-born Sonia Gandhi’s chances of becoming prime minister.

Significantly, a public election fund will be created by parliament to finance elections in Bhutan. Government funding of elections, Bhutanese officials say, will go a long way towards curbing any business-politico nexus that could flourish in a democratic set-up.

At this juncture, analysts believe a democratic Bhutan will mean a lot to India, Bhutan’s closest ally and the single largest development partner. If nothing else, it will prevent another Nepal-type situation on its doorstep. Sudhir Vyas, Indian ambassador to Bhutan, says the change of government will, however, have no impact on India’s ties with its neighbour. “It’s an exemplary relationship which has only grown and matured over the years. We will continue to cooperate and interact across the board, no matter what government is in power in Thimpu,” Vyas promises.

To be sure, Bhutan is not rushing into democracy. It’s been a “cautious and a gradual” process, as a foreign envoy in Thimpu puts it. Foreign minister Wangchuk, too, says the changes are not happening “out of the blue”. He says the king, who was crowned when he was in his teens in 1974, has been devolving authority over the last decade or so, starting at the village level. Already, the country is run by an elected council of ministers with a rotational prime minister as the head of government.

Bhutan High Court judge Jigme Zangpo says it might take Bhutan a while to get used to the idea of a democracy but it will pick up as it goes along. After all, Bhutan doesn’t yet know what political parties are or, for that matter, what a bandh or a gherao is, the offshoots of democracy. But the king is putting all democratic institutions ? including the Supreme Court, an Election Commission and an Anti-Corruption Commission ? in place before the transition takes place in 2008, Zangpo notes.

The young ? more than 45 per cent of the Bhutanese is under 15 ? seem to be already enjoying the new openness the promise of democracy is bringing in. School girls brought in to watch the proceedings of the National Assembly’s last session argued vociferously on how men were trying to get around a marriage Act that stipulated that at least 20 per cent of the basic pay of a divorced man should go to his child until he or she turns 18.

And at an Internet caf? in Thimpu last week, Dechen and her friend Leela, both in their early twenties, squealed with delight each time their online boy friends replied to their instant messages. And they were not wearing the kira, the traditional dress for women, but shirts and faded blue jeans. “Earlier, the police would chase us and even fine us if we went around in this,” Leela says, pointing to her jeans. “But now, they ignore if we wear casual dresses after we return from work.”

Clearly, who wants a Durbar Marg in Thimpu?