India needs to act, and not just look east

Maj Gen Ashok K Mehta (retd)
Military commentator

On March 14, Myanmar’s nominal leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, in a televised address, announced that as a global exception, Myanmar has no case of Covid-19. This claim was questioned and criticised on social media. Health ministry officials, in a press conference on March 16, said that China’s Hubei province, the source of the deadly coronavirus, was 1,200 miles away from Myanmar and ‘our lifestyle and diet’had prevented the disease from spreading towards us.

Myanmar shares a 2,100-km border with China. On March 22, it was reported that 202 cases were under investigation, with 187 testing negative. The popular national water festival in mid-April was cancelled and lockdown promulgated in the commercial hub, Yangon. The country has recorded 150 Covid-19 cases so far, including six deaths.

Though the head of the ruling National League for Democracy, Suu Kyi is only a nominal leader as the military-drafted constitution of 2008 forbids a foreigner from holding office. She is the party leader and state councillor in a carefully curated system of governance with joint civil-military leadership which gives her the number three position in state hierarchy after the President and Vice-President, whereas the Commander-in-Chief, senior General Aung Hlaing, who calls the shots, is at number five.

Still, Myanmar’s military dictatorship is a state within a state and the longest lasting in the world, but now with a civilian façade. The Constitution has reserved the posts of defence, home and border affairs ministers for the military and guarantees one-quarter of the seats in parliament for it.

Escaping the radar last month was a monumental event: Myanmar’s parliament blocking NLD’s figurative and futile bid to reduce the role of military in politics. The failed amendments would have reduced, over 15 years, the reservation of seats the military enjoys as lawmakers and made some perfunctory changes — like appointing the Commander-in-Chief and removing the word ‘disciplined’ from the description of the country as a genuine ‘disciplined’, multi-party democratic system. The NLD, which does not have the two-thirds majority, had hoped some military lawmakers would cross-vote.

While Suu Kyi is bent on constitutional reforms to alter the balance of civil-military power, the military junta has institutionalised a system where its role percolates from the centre down to the district and village levels. While the present system ensures that Suu Kyi can never become the democratically elected leader, the military can be ousted only through a coup from within.

Much of the world is happy with this fait accompli, most of all, its northern neighbour, China. It is ironical that Suu Kyi chose to defend the military last year at the International Court of Justice in the Hague against charges of excesses unleashed on the Rohingya.

Myanmar is sandwiched between China and India. Its policy of balance and equidistance between the two has generally worked in a tilt towards China because of a primordial fear of it. The military is happier working with an authoritarian China rather than a democratic India where policy towards the military could change, as it did in the 1980s when India supported Suu Kyi’s NLD but later switched tack, realising it was losing out to Beijing. Myanmar wants India to play the role of a regional balancer, but New Delhi has not got its act together.

At the core of India’s Act East Policy (AEP) is regaining strategic space in Myanmar, its launch pad for giving China a run for its money in the Asean. Unfortunately, the AEP is hobbled by insurgencies in the North-East and fledgling connectivity and identical issues in Myanmar (two dozen active and dormant insurgencies), topped up with snail-paced decision making in the joint civil-military structures, where China has a clear advantage. Finalising the Nagaland Framework Accord of 2015 and ending the mother of all insurgencies in India was to have been achieved by October 31, 2019. But the Naga issue has been drowned in silence despite its garrulous interlocutor and Nagaland Governor RN Ravi’s claim that the matter is resolved, but for the NSCN-IM dragging its feet.

The thrust of connectivity is in re-routing some of the projects through the insurgency-free Mizoram. Some projects are stuck due to the Arakan Army insurgency in Rakhine and Chin states in Myanmar and further north in the Mandalay area. India has reversed work south-north on the multi-modal Kaladan highway due to the Arakan Army depredations. Similarly, for the India-Myanmar-Thailand trilateral highway to become functional, a loop link avoiding Nagaland-Manipur through Mizoram is necessary. Other projects would need to hop, step and skip the insurgency-ridden areas. That is why the management of the 1,450-km Indo-Myanmar border becomes so important.

This January, President Xi Jinping visited Myanmar and signed 33 agreements of which the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor was the centre-piece. It seeks access to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean through the new deepwater port it is developing at Kyakpu to match India’s at Sittwe. Kyakpu will ultimately connect China’s Yunnan province by road, rail, oil and gas pipelines. For India to catch up with China, it requires to ‘act’ and not look east, which it is doing today, as little has changed on the ground in the last decade, except that BJP governments, not the Congress, rule the north-eastern states. The Naga accord is vital for ending the insurgency in Manipur and giving a fillip to connectivity.

The military’s control over politics, economics, Buddhist clergy and wealth is unquestionable. A transition to a genuine democratic dispensation appears a bridge too far. Even in the remote possibility of a civilian control of military, geography will favour China, like it does India in Nepal. India’s AEP has to be re-imagined with settling insurgencies and sorting out connectivity, hoping that Myanmar will do the same on its side.