India stands by Myanmar status quo

The United States, the European Union and even Myanmar exiles in New Delhi, who have recently demonstrated outside the Indian Parliament, have all appealed to what Indian politicians proudly proclaim is the world's largest democracy to live up to those ideals and push for change in Myanmar.

India and Myanmar share a complicated and delicate history, one marked as much by mistrust as amity. In recent years India has shifted its diplomatic support from Myanmar's hamstrung pro-democracy movement towards the ruling military junta, driven by realpolitik imperatives including greater access to Myanmar's untapped energy resources and its support in putting down ethnic insurgent groups active in remote border territories.

India's still delicate rapprochement with Myanmar means that New Delhi will no time soon answer the West's call to take a more assertive policy position with regard to the military junta. Indeed, India's foreign policy has never been guided by promoting democracy in other countries.

On the contrary, "democratic" India was the Soviet Union's main ally in Asia during the Cold War, because it suited the regional security interests of both countries. India has not even pushed for democracy in one of its closest neighbors and allies, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, one of the world's last remaining absolute monarchies.

India's relations with Myanmar are even more troubled and delicate than China's. During the British colonial era, Myanmar, then known as Burma, was made into a province of British India, which it remained until 1937 when it became a separate colony.

During that time, large numbers of Indians migrated or were brought in by the British as laborers. The railways, post and telegraph, the police and the civil service were also staffed with people of Indian origin.

Just before World War II, the Indians numbered over 1 million of a total population of about 16 million at the time and 45% of the former capital Yangon's population was of South Asian origin - Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. Their numbers were reduced when the Japanese invaded in 1941 and many of them fled to India. But many also remained until the war was over, and even after independence in 1948.

The role Indians played as intermediaries between the colonial British and the native population gave rise to sometimes fierce anti-Indian sentiments. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Myanmar nationalist movement had strong undertones of communal tension.

Even today, people of South Asian origin are often looked down on in Myanmar, popularly referred to as kala a Burmese language pejorative meaning "foreigner" or "Indian". Curiously, Caucasians are still called kala pyu, which translates from the Burmese to "white Indians".

Still, Myanmar's relations with India were in the main cordial after independence. Myanmar's first prime minister, U Nu, was known to be a close friend to his Indian counterpart Jawaharlal Nehru and both leaders were prominent figures in the Cold War-inspired Non-Aligned Movement.

Indeed, India helped Myanmar survive its first difficult years as an independent state, including crucially when various political and ethnic insurgent groups threatened to break the new country apart. Without India's massive military and economic aid, U Nu's government would most probably have collapsed.

Xenophobic backlash

However, Indo-Myanmar relations chilled after General Ne Win's military coup and seizure of power in March 1962. After a few years in power, his revolutionary council moved to nationalize privately owned businesses and factories, of which an estimated 60% were owned by people of Indian origin. Thousands lost their property and livelihood and during the four-year period spanning 1964-68 some 150,000 Indo-Burmese left the country.

Many leaders of the formerly democratic Myanmar also fled, among them U Nu, who went into exile in India. The Indian government put him up in a stately residence in Bhopal, where he remained for well over a decade before returning to Myanmar under a general amnesty in 1980.

Bilateral relations between India and Myanmar remained more or less stagnant until Myanmar's 1988 uprising for democracy, which was brutally crushed by the military.

In an official statement issued in the wake of the violence, India expressed its support for the "undaunted resolve of the Burmese [Myanmar] people to achieve their democracy".

The Burmese language service of the state-sponsored radio station All-India Radio (AIR) became even more outspoken in its criticism of Myanmar's military government, which made it immensely popular with the population at large.

In response, Myanmar's state-run Working People's Daily newspaper began publishing outright racist articles and cartoons against AIR and ethnic Indians in general, attempting to revive the anti-kala xenophobia of the 1930s. But even then it was clear that India's hard diplomatic stand was not driven by illusions of serving as a regional guardian or promoter of democracy.

India shares a 1,371-kilometer frontier with Myanmar and ethnic insurgents fighting against New Delhi have long used under-administered territories in Myanmar as sanctuaries to conduct cross-border raids into India's sensitive northeastern areas. Myanmar's only reaction to this situation had been to mount half-hearted and essentially futile military operations against the insurgents, mainly ethnic Nagas.

It was widely believed in New Delhi in the late 1980s and early 1990s that a new democratic government in Myanmar would likely take a more tactful approach. India's sympathy for Myanmar's pro-democracy movement was further strengthened by the fact that until December 1989 its prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was a personal friend of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Their acquaintance dated to the early 1960s, when her mother, Daw Khin Kyi, served as Myanmar's ambassador to India. Suu Kyi's father, national independence hero Aung San, had also known Rajiv's grandfather, Nehru personally.

But at the time it was also clear that India's support for Myanmar's pro-democracy forces was also guided by an Indian desire to counter its main regional rival China's growing influence with Myanmar's internationally isolated generals.

About 1993 India began to re-evaluate its strategy due to concerns that its policies had achieved little except to push 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.