Burmese tightrope

By Shankar Roychowdhury

India must look away for a moment from the turmoil in the country’s western vicinity and spare a glance eastwards towards the “other border” as well, the one which India shares with another significant neighbour, Burma. Burma, formed part of Britain’s Indian empire till 1937 when it was declared a separate colonial entity. There is little ethnic or cultural connectivity eastwards, between the dominant Indo-Gangetic civilisation of India and that of the Irrawaddy heartland of Burma. In Burma, the traditional Indian presence has been of petty traders and subordinate-level bureaucracy of British Burma who did not endear themselves to the locals. Memories linger and, surprisingly, Indians even now are not generally well regarded.

The internal political and civil structure of Burma is fluid and complicated. There is Tatmadaw — the Burmese defence forces — in total charge of all aspects of governance, through the State Peace and Development Council (SDPC), which is a military junta of 11 generals, serving as well as retired, whose political fortunes fluctuate with their internal equations. With an estimated strength of 450,000 to 500,000, the Burmese Army is predominantly a light infantry force. Reputed as capable and professionally competent, it is combat-hardened by long experience of almost unbroken counterinsurgency and jungle operations against separatists almost since independence in 1948.

But its record of human rights has been severely criticised by the Western countries, particularly the United States, which regards the SDPC government as a rogue regime and is putting pressure on India to dissociate and condemn the country’s military junta. Burma carries the reputation of an enigmatic and somewhat prickly hermit kingdom which prefers to keep to itself. Inside the country, 19 major and minor ethnic groups are in distinctly uneasy diversity amongst themselves. The predominantly Christian tribal minorities along Burma’s mountainous, densely jungled outer periphery bordering Thailand, Laos, China, India and Bangladesh, are in almost permanent mutiny against the ruling Burman majority in the central heartland, who profess Buddhism and constitute 69 per cent of the population. The 1,643 km of porous, densely- jungled border shared by the two countries is comparatively loosely controlled, particularly on the Burma side and slow-burning; separatist tribal militancies of various persuasions against both New Delhi and Yangon smoulder across the entire region. Two-way traffic in border crime, drugs, weapons and other categories of smuggling have reinforced these insurgencies into a fairly major narco-conflict drawing sustenance from the Golden Triangle, in which Burma is the geographical pivot.

On the Indian side, the Indo-Burma border is, as usual, the relatively “forgotten frontier” in comparison with its western counterpart. Inter-sectoral priorities for allocation of resources are lower in the east and the Assam Rifles, that constitutes the Indian border guarding forces here, faces the usual paucity of troops. This, coupled with extremely difficult terrain and debilitating climate, makes effective border management tenuous, though still relatively better than on the Burma side.

Ethnic and cultural commonalities between the Naga, Mizo and Kuki tribes on the Indian side of the border in Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram, and those inhabiting the contiguous western and northwestern border regions of Burma add to the complexities of the situation, typified by the anti-India Naga insurgent group, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Khaplang (NSCN-K) in Nagaland and Manipur, which operates in India but is based in Burma and headed by S.S. Khaplang, a Hemi Naga from that country.

Relations between India and Burma are relatively low-key but on a generally even keel. India has no military problems with Burma and the focus is towards establishing a viable Indian politico-economic presence in the country. However, Burma is an area of well-entrenched Chinese interests and influence, and Indian interests must contend with strong adverse factors, which transcend purely economic or corporate rivalries. Nevertheless, it remains a geo-political imperative for India to engage as closely as possible with Burma’s military dictatorship to progress its own entry into the region.

Association with an authoritarian military government whose record of human rights has been internationally criticised draws the disapproval of the US and the West, besides that of the growing internal movement for democracy within Burma led by student and liberal activists, centred around the personality of Aung San Suu Kyi. Her party, the National League for Democracy, swept to an overwhelming victory in the national polls in 1990, which was disregarded by the military rulers who placed her under house arrest in 1992. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1991, and many of her followers have escaped to India where they have been accorded sanctuary and are attempting to carry forward their movement from exile.

India for its part has to keep channels of communication open to both, the junta government and the democracy movement, using official as well Track II channels. It is an unenviable tightrope and for the present India has chosen to be pragmatic, becoming Burma’s fourth-largest trading partner (after Thailand, China and Singapore), besides involvement in major infrastructural projects in that country, including the 160-km Tamu-Kalewa-Kalemyo road, completed in 2001 and funded totally by India, and the ambitious Sittwe-Kaladan river-Lawngtlai multi-mode sea-river road transport corridor scheduled to be completed in 2013, connecting Sittwe port in Burma with National Highway 54 at Lawngtlai in Mizoram.

However, for India, the real cloud on the horizon is Burma’s nascent nuclear programme. Burma as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty reached an agreement with Russia in 2007 for acquiring a 10-megawatt nuclear reactor for research purposes and generation of nuclear power. This cannot be a reason for concern in any manner, but there are more diffused reports of a clandestine nuclear weapons partnership with North Korea, with which Pakistan’s rogue nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan’s nuclear network is also allegedly associated. If true, this would definitely be a matter of concern for India, which hopefully has the means and capabilities to keep itself informed and prepared vis-a-vis such developments next door.

Meanwhile, it is to be hoped that the Burmese junta has taken note of the Arab Spring far away in West Asia, and may be considering options to ease the internal conditions within the country.

* Gen. Shankar Roychowdhury is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former Member of Parliament