On February 1, 2021, six months before the fall of Kabul, one of India’s friendly neighbouring countries Myanmar had a meltdown with the Tatmadaw taking control of the country, overthrowing the democratically elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. At that time, New Delhi chose to look the other way with the preconceived notion that this is the same old junta with whom India has dealt and done business with before. Being its immediate neighbour and that too sharing a long border of over 1600 km, India thought it will be better to keep the earplugs on to keep the noise of the chaos that is being unleashed in that country out as that will keep its north-eastern states safe and secure. But two years down the line, we know that the inevitable happened, warranting the question: should India be tougher with Myanmar?
For the first time since the military coup took place in Myanmar that saw thousands of civilians getting killed, maimed or kidnapped, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar openly and candidly admitted to India facing difficulties in carrying out some of its key strategic projects due to the security situation in Myanmar. He alluded to the fact that while the government has been focused on strengthening the border infrastructure in the border areas, it has not been able to make much progress on the India-Myanmar-Thailand trilateral highway. Jaishankar had mentioned this in Bangkok too while he was attending the 12th Foreign Ministers’ Meeting of the Mekong Ganga Cooperation (MGC) Mechanism and the BIMSTEC Foreign Ministers’ Retreat last month.
“The real challenge today before us, one which we are working on, is how do we build road connectivity between Thailand….We have this project from northeast India, that if we build a road through Myanmar, and that road connects up with what Thailand will be building towards … But it has been a very difficult project. It has been a very difficult project mainly because of the situation in Myanmar. And one of our priorities today is to find ways of how to resume this project, how to unlock it, and how to make it because large parts of the project have been built,” he said in Bangkok.
Jaishankar may be the only minister who has openly spoken about the “difficulties” India is facing in doing business with Myanmar, as the rest of the ministers have largely chosen to remain silent publicly. The fact that the junta has disrupted the government’s ‘Look East’ and ‘Neighbourhood First’ policies, as far as connectivity with the Southeast Asian region is concerned, is now evident. India seems to have gone back to those days when the Northeast was seen as a dreaded zone where civil war-like conditions were regarded as a normal phenomenon. The External Affairs Minister even met Myanmar’s Foreign Minister U Than Swe raising the issue of rising challenges on the country’s north-eastern borders. He spoke about the security of the border areas in the states of Manipur, Nagaland and Mizoram. These states have ethnic and kinship bonds with Myanmar, particularly with the Chin State and Sagaing Region.
The precursor to what is happening in Manipur today was the brutal killing of the Commanding Officer of Assam Rifles, Col Viplav Tripathi, his family and four Quick Reaction Team (QRT) personnel in November 2021 in the Churachandpur district of Manipur. Since then, tensions have been simmering in that state. While the government officially said at that time that it was an act of terrorism, officials did not rule out, albeit off the record, Myanmar’s hand in that. Then began the air raids at the India-Myanmar border, which became much more frequent and fearsome by January this year. Myanmar’s Air Force reportedly dropped two bombs on both sides of the India-Myanmar border in January this year. Indian Army officers refused to speak anything even off the record about the air raids, as they chose to speak only about China.
Around the same time, a report was published that said countries like the US, China, India, France and Japan were providing raw materials to the military junta of Myanmar that was helping them produce large-scale weapons. The report – Fatal Business: Supplying the Myanmar Military’s Weapon Production – was published by the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M), an independent think-tank founded by former officials of the United Nations after the February 1 Myanmar coup.
Like Afghanistan, Today’s Myanmar Is Not With Whom India Dealt Before
While India’s policy towards Myanmar, like Afghanistan, remains that of following the old rule book, New Delhi is missing out on listening to the citizenry, especially the youth. The young generation, which is now social-media empowered, is increasingly getting drifted away from the goodwill India had earned after years and decades of deft diplomacy and robust intelligence. India did not take into consideration, just as it did not in the case of Afghanistan, the fact that while Myanmar’s military generals, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, remained the same in their thought process, the citizenry of these two countries, especially the youth, is now a changed entity. And hence, the government's way of dealing with the rulers should also change.
As armoured tanks, along with fear, rolled into the cities of capital Naypyidaw, Yangon and Mandalay in Myanmar in February 2021, just as they did on the streets of Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Jalalabad, and other cities in August 2021, India through its diplomatic and intelligence channels sought to maintain a demeanour as if it was regular. For India, at one level this was a complete failure of its intelligence establishment and the political class that lacked the foresight to see that the monster was standing right at your doorstep and it was just a matter of time before it entered your house. And it entered in the form Manipur.
This week, Home Minister Amit Shah told Parliament that the instability in Myanmar has prompted thousands of refugees to flee across the open border into Manipur. But when the gruesome killings were being unleashed in Myanmar after the coup, the government here did not give any reaction whatsoever. Prime Minister Narendra Modi even spoke on Manipur in Parliament Thursday after he was compelled to. But this violence could have been avoided if the government had listened to the people of Myanmar while also simultaneously addressing the security situation in the Northeast.
Recently, the United Naga Council, an apex body of Naga people in Manipur, requested Prime Minister Modi to finalise the Indo-Naga Framework of 2015. This comes in the backdrop of the demand for a separate administrative system by the Kukis in Manipur. The government should address this issue immediately so that the situation in the Northeast, especially in Manipur, does not go out of control in the times to come. This is yet another front that has added a new but critical dimension to the Manipur issue. If this goes out of hand, blaming Myanmar is not going to help. With regards to Myanmar, while the government has chosen to deal with the State Administrative Council, a so-called civilian form of the Tatmadaw and also engage with them militarily, New Delhi should also offer tacit support to the widespread protests led by the National Unity Government (NUG) against the junta.
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