I know basically nothing about it, apart from the fact it's still a monarchy. Could someone familiar with the country enlighten me?
(Disclaimer: I've met and discussed politics with several Bhutanese people, but it was a few years ago now.)
To put it glibly but only slightly misleadingly, what’s good and bad about Bhutan is what’s good and bad about the Central Tibetan Administration, but taken to extremes.
Bhutan is a conservative Buddhist sacerdotal monarchy that for the past five or six years has been undergoing quasi-democratization under Dragon King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck (who until last year was the youngest sovereign monarch in the world and indeed does look a little like an Asian Elvis), according to terms spelled out by the previous Dragon King (who's still alive), Jigme Singye Wangchuck. House Wangchuck presents its political ideology--which is shared by both major political parties, although the current governing party is considered marginally less pro-monarchy than the other, which won the first democratic elections in 2008 and was in power until last year, despite having been founded by somebody who is Jigme Singye's brother-in-law
four times over (see below)--as based on the idea of 'Gross National Happiness', which Jigme Singye advanced as an alternative to Gross National Product based on (obviously) much more subjective measurements. A lot of people both in Bhutan and in the West are enamored with the idea of Gross National Happiness to the point where they fail to recognize that it's by its very nature so subjective as to lack any real accountability as a benchmark for specific policy. A lot of people also think it comes across as vaguely Orwellian, which it does for reasons that I’ll get into in the next paragraph, although it must be said that Bhutan is far from the most Orwellian country in Asia right now.
The specific things for which the Bhutanese government has been criticized are its treatment of the Nepalese minority and the fact that it is deliberately stalling Bhutan's industrial and technological development as a means to preserve traditional Bhutanese culture (the logic here, whose validity or lack thereof I won’t comment upon, is that since Bhutanese cultural mores are strongly traditionalist, preserving traditional culture makes most Bhutanese people,
at least in the short term, happy and thus causes the Gross National Happiness of Bhutan to increase). Preserving traditional Bhutanese culture is not an inherently bad motivation in and of itself, and it would obviously be a shame if it were to be subsumed into the broader culture of India or China or wherever else, but in the case of the Dragon Kings preserving it also means preserving their own power at the apex of a combined (but bifurcated) religious and political structure that, as politicus alludes to, doesn’t really have room for a significant portion of the population that isn’t Buddhist, ethnic Ngalop or Sharchop, and primarily conversant in a Bodish language. It’s notable that expulsions of and discrimination against Nepalese in Bhutan started getting worse around twenty-five years ago, which is also around when Jigme Singye started solidifying the terms of the current official House Wangchuck ideology. The justification for doing this had to do with the circumstances under which the neighboring kingdom of Sikkim had collapsed in 1975: Nepali Hindus became such a large proportion of the population that they brought down the royal government and forced not only the abolition of the monarchy but an ultimately successful referendum on annexation to India (which, obviously, is majority-Hindu).
It must be said that
among the Ngalop and Sharchop, Bodish-language-speaking, Buddhist majority in Bhutan support of House Wangchuck and its policies does appear to be genuine and deep as well as broad, and that Jigme Khesar Namgyel is in general a little more open to the type of development that the international community is traditionally concerned with for poor countries than his father is/was. But it also must be said that for liberals in the West to think that Gross National Happiness and Bhutanese cultural policy sound like entirely nice and unproblematic ideas just because they have a whiff of the ‘exotic Orient’ and the state-enforced traditional Bhutanese culture happens to be aesthetically downright gorgeous is more than a little shallow and ignores very real concerns about what happens when a country that decides to pursue genuinely traditionalist cultural policies has a minority
whose traditional culture isn’t the same.
(It should also be noted that Jigme Singye is a polygamist--he's married to all four of the sisters of the founder of the current ruling party (see above)--and that the almost surreally high regard in which he’s held in certain circles obscures the very real achievements of
his father and predecessor, Jigme Dorji, who ended slavery and serfdom, introduced mechanized vehicles and central economic planning, built dozens of schools and half a dozen hospitals, had almost two thousand kilometres of roads constructed, and established the first quasi-independent judiciary and advisory National Assembly with the power to impeach the Dragon King, but was unfortunately very sickly and died young while receiving medical treatment in Kenya in 1972.)