Page 2 of
2 India stands by Myanmar status
quo By Bertil Lintner
Myanmar closer to Beijing. The
result was a dramatic policy shift aimed at
improving relations with Myanmar's generals, as it
was also becoming clear that the pro-democracy
movement would not achieve power within the
foreseeable future.
At that time,
Myanmar's military government had effectively
cowed Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy
party into submission and the exile community
seemed to have little to no impact on
political developments inside
the country - even as some of them actually stayed
in the personal residence in New Delhi of senior
Indian politician George Fernandes, who served as
defense minister from 1988 through 2004.
By January 2000, Indian army chief General
Ved Prakash Malik paid a two-day visit to Myanmar,
which was followed with a reciprocal visit by his
Myanmar counterpart, General Maung Aye, to the
northeast Indian city of Shillong. The unusual
nature of this visit, by a foreign leader to a
provincial capital, was accentuated by the arrival
of a group of senior Indian officials from the
Trade, Energy, Defense, Home and Foreign Affairs
ministries to hold talks with the Myanmar general.
In the aftermath of those meetings, India
began to provide non-lethal military support to
Myanmar troops along their common border. Most of
the Myanmar troops' uniforms and some other combat
gear now originate from India, as do the leased
helicopters Myanmar uses to combat the ethnic
insurgents who operate from sanctuaries along the
two sides' common border. In November 2000, the
Indian government felt confident enough about the
improvement in bilateral relations to invite Maung
Aye to New Delhi, where he headed a delegation
that included several other high-ranking junta
members and cabinet ministers.
In 2004,
junta chief General Than Shwe also visited India,
followed in December 2006 by the third-highest
ranking officer in Myanmar's military hierarchy,
General Thura Shwe Mann, who toured the National
Defense Academy in Khadakvasla, India's premier
officer-training school, as well as the Tata
Motors plant in Pune, which manufactures vehicles
for the Indian military.
Leveraged
cultural heritage About the mid-1990s,
AIR's Burmese language service conspicuously
ceased broadcasting its anti-junta rhetoric; it is
still on air today, but programming consists
almost exclusively of Myanmar pop music. A strange
kind of "cultural diplomacy" followed.
In
the early 2000s, the Indian right-wing Hindu
organization, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ,
renewed its presence in Myanmar. The RSS first
came to Myanmar in the 1940s to provide social and
religious services to the country's ethnic Indian
minority, but it lay dormant after the military
took over in 1962 and commenced nationalizing
Indian private companies.
The renewed
effort to build up the RSS's Yangon branch was
made apparently with the blessings of Maung Aye, a
staunch Myanmar nationalist who has been reported
to frown on the country's recent economic and
military reliance on China. The RSS, which in
Myanmar is referred to as the Sanatan Dharma
Swayamsevak Sangh, appears to have convinced some
of the Myanmar generals that Hinduism and Buddhism
are "branches of the same tree" - and that "the
best guard against China is culture", to quote a
Kolkata-based RSS official.
Although the
RSS is the parent organization of the Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which in
alliance with several other parties led the Indian
coalition government from between 1998 and 2004.
It is not certain that the Hindu fundamentalists'
new mission in Myanmar had the blessings of the
Indian government, but cultural ties between the
two countries have definitely strengthened in
recent years.
So, too, has cross-border
trade. Before 1988 there was scant commercial
activity along the two countries' shared border,
apart from smuggling activities. In February,
Sanjay Budhia, vice president of the Indian
Chamber of Commerce and Industries, said in a
speech in Kolkata that India and Myanmar "have set
a US$1 billion trade target in 2006-07, up from
$557 million in 2004-05".
He noted that
principal exports from Myanmar to India include
"rice, maize, pulses, beans, sesame seeds, fish
and prawns, timber, plywood and raw rubber, base
metals and castor seeds". In return, India exports
machinery and industrial equipment, dairy
products, textiles, pharmaceutical products and
consumer goods. India-Myanmar trade now rivals
that of the booming cross-border trade with China,
which has been brisk for almost two decades.
India has also shown a competitive
interest in purchasing natural gas from Myanmar
and to build a 1,200 megawatt hydroelectric power
station on the Chindwin River across from India's
underdeveloped northeastern region. New Delhi is
also actively involved in several infrastructure
projects inside Myanmar, including major road
construction projects. Myanmar is viewed from
India's perspective as a "land bridge" to
Southeast Asia and as such a vital link in its new
business-driven "Look East" policy.
In
January, Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee
became the first senior leader from a major
democracy to visit Myanmar's new capital
Naypyitaw, where the junta moved its
administrative offices in November 2005. Even in
the midst of the recent tumultuous anti-government
demonstrations in Myanmar, where soldiers fired on
protesters, senior officials from the Indian
state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, led
by Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Murli Deora,
flew to Naypyitaw to sign an agreement to explore
for gas in three new blocks in the Bay of Bengal
off Myanmar's southwestern Arakan coast.
To be sure, India has successfully weaned
Myanmar away from its near-total dependence on
China for economic and military support. And the
strong position the US, the European Union and
Myanmar dissidents are now calling on New Delhi to
take would risk - to China's benefit - the
precious foothold it has achieved in Myanmar over
the past decade.
Like China, India is
unlikely to go beyond statements of tacit support
for the United Nations' latest - and likely futile
- mission to push the military junta towards
national reconciliation with the pro-democracy
opposition. In essence, New Delhi's interests are
also in the preservation of Myanmar's political
status quo.
Bertil Lintner is a
former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic
Review. He is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific
Media Services.
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