Full disclosure: I know very little about the "Gorkha Conquest." I can infer from my knowledge of Bhutan and Tibet that it probably refers to a series of wars during the Eighteenth Century that expanded the Gurkha tribe from Katmandu Valley to what is now the State of Nepal. In the 1790s the Gurkhas even launched an invasion of Tibet with the goal of plundering Lhasa (and who knows what the borders might look like today if they had succeeded) when the Tibetans asked Manchu China for help, effectively turning Tibet into a client state of China when the Manchus sent enough soldiers to repel the Gurkhas.

As for the Bhutan issue, well I can speak about that with some eloquence. Before I start on the history, I just want to say I'm glad you asked this question with some thought. Most people I know who talk about Bhutan get stars in their eyes when they hear "Gross National Happiness" and think how wonderful it is that there's this happy little Buddhist kingdom on the other side of the world that cares about her people's happiness rather than just making money. But then they hear the words "Nepali crisis" and their mind turns that happy Buddhist kingdom into a genocidal nightmare.

The truth is somewhere in between, as it always is.

In the 1800s, Bhutan was one of many Himalayan Kingdoms that practiced Tibetan Buddhism. The Gorkhas were actually the odd-man out in that they practiced Brahmanism. Sikkim, Ladakh, Mustang, to name a few, all practiced Tibetan Buddhism and could trace their ethnic origins north, not south. The Nepalis, on the other hand, clearly had Aryan origins, not Tibetan ones. In the early nineteenth century, two major events spread the Nepali population throughout the eastern Himalayas. The first was the British conquest of India. In particular, they had just signed a treaty with Sikkim - the tiny kingdom between Bhutan and Nepal - which tied it to the British Raj and gave Calcutta full control over the kingdom. The British goal here was to plant tea. The British employed Nepali workers importing them by the thousands into Sikkim to work these tea plantations.

Secondly, Bhutan was still an independent state (and would remain independent and nobody's client until 1910 when King Ugyen Wangchuck signed the Treaty of Punakha, turning Bhutan into a client state of Britain, but not the Raj) that was very north heavy. The area along Bhutan's southern border is hot, steamy, and malaria ridden. In order to populate this region and make it something more than just a disease-filled treacherous jungle, Bhutan invited Nepalis to clear the jungle and settle the area. After all, Nepalis paid more taxes than mosquitos.

Much of this region - the Duars - was annexed by Britain in a brief war in 1864. There was no clear winner: Bhutan gave the Duars to Britain, but Britain paid the Bhutanese to leave them alone for the next half century. So while Britain annexed the major tea growing regions and continued to import Nepalis into the area to continue tea production, there was still a lot of Nepalis living in Bhutan's borders. Not an invasion, per se, but this wasn't an uncommon practice in the 1800s. Hawaiian sugar cartels did the same thing, importing Chinese and Japanese laborers by the thousand to work the fields, knowing they couldn't get enough Hawaiians to do it for them.

Fast forward to the 1970s. In all of this time, there wasn't really an issue. Lhotshampa (Southerner, the PC term for Nepalis in Bhutan) and Ngalong (The First, western Bhutanese, referring to being the first people in the area to convert to Buddhism, but inaccurately and more commonly referred to as Drukpas) lived side-by-side with nary an issue. After all, in a monarchy, things tend to be very simple ethnically: everyone is subject to the king without exception. Nepali, Drukpa, Buddhist, Hindu, it doesn't matter. If you live in Bhutan's borders, you're Bhutanese. (This is why it's very confusing for me in America when someone tells me they have Bhutanese friends or work with Bhutanese communities. In America, these tend to be Lhotshampa Hindu people, which is all well and good, but I'm just used to the customs and language of the Ngalong Buddhists).

Things changed in the twentieth century when events in Nepal turned sour. I'm rusty on the details, but you can check my sources below for more detailed information. Essentially, there were new ideas in play in Nepal including an ethnic based Maoism that desired (and from what I gather, somewhat successfully did in recent years) to overthrow the Nepali Monarchy. The leaders of this organization didn't just want to stop at the State of Nepal either, they sought to create a unified "Gorkhaland" which united all of the lands where Nepali was the majority language.

When they came out with a map of this proposed "Gorkhaland" it included Nepal, large swaths of India, Sikkim, and the southern provinces of Bhutan. You can already see the issue here. In the '70s, the "Sikkim National Congress" was formed with the aim of achieving democracy in Sikkim. While this seems like an admirable goal to us in the west, it was run by Nepalis, who simply wanted to vote a Nepali government into power. Since Sikkim wasn't technically an Indian state, Sikkim wasn't guaranteed to already have a democratic government (via the constitution). In 1975, chaos erupted with the SNC essentially invading the Chogyal's Palace, dethroning him, and voting themselves into power. The Indian Army stormed into the region and held a referendum in Sikkim to ask if they wanted to join India as a full-fledged state (which implied a democratic state government). The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of annexation (with claims that good Sikkimese of influence were jailed before the vote, and others were coerced and forced at gunpoint to vote in favor). India annexed Sikkim and the Nepalis have been running the show ever since.

Not long after the fall of Sikkim, the Bhutanese State Congress was formed with the similar un-subtle goal of "bringing democracy to Bhutan." Here's the kicker: the Chogyal of Sikkim was closely related to the King of Bhutan. Keep in mind that when he watched his uncle get dethroned, the King of Bhutan was in his late teens and had just ascended to the Throne after the death of his father in Kenya. Harsh position to be in.

To forestall any sort of Sikkimese Tragedy in Bhutan, the King issued policies of cultural preservation (though some might call it cultural genocide, I disagree). The main points of grievance were a national dress code for school and offices (the "gho" for men, "kira" for women), institutionalized code of ethics called "Driglam Namzha" (which included the proper ways to eat, speak, walk, and even sit down; while it's taught everywhere, I failed to see it have any effect on my students, or most adults I met), and the abolition of Nepali language from the schools.