Angshuman Choudhury
In November 2014, just months after taking charge as the prime minister of India following a high-voltage election, Narendra Modi made a somewhat intrepid announcement at the 12th India-ASEAN Summit. “A new era of economic development, industrialisation and trade has begun in India,” he said. “Externally, India’s ‘Look East Policy’ has become ‘Act East Policy’.” While the precise contours of the policy were not clear then, Modi’s intent was obvious: expanding India’s ties with Southeast Asia. What was equally, if not more, significant about the announcement was that he made it in Naypyidaw, the sprawling capital of Myanmar.
One day before his announcement, Modi had met Myanmar’s president, Thein Sein, a retired general who was then the head of the country’s quasi-civilian government. The next day, right after unveiling the Act East Policy at the summit, he met Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s best-known political figure and, back then, the chief of the National League for Democracy (NLD). A year later, the Lady, as Aung San Suu Kyi was popularly known, won a thumping victory with her NLD in Myanmar’s first “free and fair” national election in many decades, and became the head of a new civilian government.
Modi, it seemed, had made his moves at the right time. In fact, his Myanmar dash was an indication of how India was preparing to deal with a key neighbour that had been a working partner for New Delhi for a long time but was now in the middle of tectonic transformations. He had set the tone for India–Myanmar relations for the next few years. For those listening, New Delhi’s message was loud and clear: it was ready to engage with Naypyidaw no matter who was in power.
But, as Myanmar slipped into one crisis after another, culminating in a military coup in 2021, India found itself in uncharted territory. A supposedly clear-headed bilateral strategy eventually devolved into a disparate, if not desperate, foreign policy coloured by confusion and a glaring disregard for human rights.
Myanmar made over
The Modi government came to power at a time when Myanmar had embarked on a process of democratic transition. By the late 2000s, the Burmese military, then under the control of the strongman Than Shwe, came to the realisation that full junta rule was no longer tenable. So, in 2010, Than Shwe allowed Thein Sein, a former general from the “moderate reformist” clique of the military, to take charge as the president of a quasi-civilian government after a stage-managed election. He was to operate under a military-drafted constitution.
Soon, the geopolitical ramifications of this reshuffling became clear. One year after he took charge, Thein Sein pulled the plug on the China-funded Myitsone Dam project on the Irrawaddy River in northern Kachin State. In November 2012, Barack Obama became the first United States president to visit Myanmar when he made a six-hour stop in the country. The Burma of yore was changing. It was no longer going to be an isolated hermit kingdom known as little more than the mysterious “Land of Jade”.
In this, India saw a remarkable opportunity to expand its own footprint in Myanmar and cultivate it as a gateway to Southeast Asia. The political realignment in the country gave New Delhi wider latitude to consolidate its bilateral relationship with Naypyidaw without looking like a country that pandered to a brutal junta. The new opportunities for trade and commerce that Thein Sein offered to the region piqued India’s interests. It is, therefore, no surprise that the Modi government made an ambitious outreach to Myanmar in its very first year in power. From there on, bilateral relations only continued to strengthen, powered by a flurry of high-level bilateral visits.
In 2015, India’s National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, visited Naypyidaw to attend the signing ceremony of the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement, a historic though controversial pact between the Myanmar military and eight Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) to end a sixty-year-old civil war. India’s presence at the event marked it out as a nominal regional stakeholder in an emerging peace process in Myanmar. In October 2016, months after she took charge as Myanmar’s state counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi attended the BRICS-BIMSTEC Outreach Summit in India, combining this with a state visit. Modi visited Myanmar again the following year, this time on an exclusive bilateral state visit.
It became clear that New Delhi sought an intimate working relationship with the civilian government. It was particularly comfortable with Aung San Suu Kyi, a leader who not just commanded strong public support among Myanmar’s Bamar ethnic majority but also had strong legacy ties to India. During his 2017 visit, Modi gifted her a special reproduction of the original research proposal that she had submitted for a fellowship at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla in 1986. The signalling was less than subtle: the Modi government wanted to woo the Aung San Suu Kyi government to boost its own image in the new Myanmar.
At the same time, India scrambled all resources to consolidate its ties with the military. In its eyes, the Tatmadaw, as the military was once widely known, was still a dominant political force in the country, not least because it occupied 25 percent of parliamentary seats and controlled key ministries. India adopted three key pathways in this outreach to the military: joint kinetic engagements, such as coordinated counterinsurgency operations and military training; hardware sales, including torpedoes and a submarine; and multiple bilateral visits at the highest levels of the two countries’ defence establishments. In 2019, during his second visit to India in two years, Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s military commander-in-chief, signed a memorandum of understanding on defence cooperation with New Delhi.
India’s dual engagement with Myanmar’s civilian government and military was rooted in an older policy of simultaneously engaging the generals and the democratic leadership. Scholars called this “two-track policy” and a pragmatic approach to Myanmar – yet one may argue that it was never truly two-track or pragmatic. The P V Narasimha Rao government, with the Indian National Congress at its head, launched the Look East Policy in 1991 and began to work with the Burmese junta of the time. Rao did this even though India had openly supported the democratic opposition in Myanmar for years, including during a student-led nationwide uprising in 1988 against the military’s arbitrary rule. Now, India slowly directed all its energy to engaging the new junta, known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council. It only maintained informal contact with the pro-democracy political class and civil society, offering no real assistance to them beyond the occasional lukewarm statement in support of democracy in Myanmar.
The view from New Delhi, some 2000 kilometres from Naypyidaw, was that the military was not going anywhere anytime soon. India had no other option but to work with it if it wanted to secure its own interests in its eastern neighbourhood, including the protection of the largely-unfenced, 1643-kilometre India-Myanmar border. Armed groups from the Indian states of Assam, Manipur and Nagaland, as well as contraband traffickers, regularly shuttled across the open border – something which continues to be a headache for Indian security planners today, who had long been convinced that only the Myanmar military can help them secure it.
Even so, another entity guided India’s realpolitik handbook on Myanmar, and that was China.
China paranoia
In 2013, one year after Obama’s historic Myanmar visit, China, under its newly-elected and all-powerful president Xi Jinping, inaugurated its largest-ever international development project – the One Belt One Road initiative. Informally known as the New Silk Road and later rechristened the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the massive endeavour sought to connect China to the rest of the world through multi-sectoral, multi-modal investments. The BRI’s scope was global, but its starting point was China’s immediate neighbourhood. Part of the plan was to open China’s landlocked southeast to the Indian Ocean. One country sat right on that path: Myanmar.
New Delhi saw this as a hostile ingress into its neighbourhood, and it was not wrong. In 2017, China unveiled what it called the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor, an upside-down-Y-shaped route connecting its southeastern Yunnan Province to Mandalay, Yangon and the southwestern coastline of Rakhine State in Myanmar. Designed along the lines of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, which links coastal Pakistan to the Xinjiang region, the BRI-linked project aggravated New Delhi’s concerns over Chinese expansion in its eastern neighbourhood. Worse, the Aung San Suu Kyi government, with whom it hoped to work intimately, seemed to be swayed by the BRI’s pull.
In September 2018, Beijing signed a memorandum of understanding for the project with the Aung San Suu Kyi government, months after the latter approved three new economic zones along the China–Myanmar border. In January 2020, Xi Jinping visited Myanmar, becoming the first Chinese president to do so in 19 years. He not only met Aung San Suu Kyi with great warmth, but also signed an array of bilateral agreements. Needless to say, New Delhi sat up and took notice. Aung San Suu Kyi, after all, was openly embracing Beijing – in sharp contrast to her predecessor, Than Sein, who rejected a major Chinese project. But the context was now different. Myanmar desperately needed large-scale financing to rebuild its broken economy and public infrastructure. China, through the BRI, was willing to offer that.
India too ran its own development aid programme for Myanmar, which the Modi government quantitatively and qualitatively expanded. Since 2014, it has spent more than USD 345 million to build public infrastructure, such as clinics and schools, in Myanmar. But that is nowhere close to the USD 2 billion that China has committed for active projects in Myanmar between 2014 and 2021, according to data published by the William and Mary College’s Global Research Institute.
Beyond just its economic investments, China has emerged as a key political and strategic player in Myanmar over the last decade. It has directly mediated in the country’s peace process, extended covert support to some EAOs, and also transferred critical military hardware to the junta, such as a diesel-electric submarine. These steps, in combination, have allowed Beijing to exercise extraordinary leverage over Naypyidaw. Despite making equivalent moves, such as transferring one of its own diesel-electric submarines to Myanmar’s navy in 2020, India lacks relative strategic advantage in the country over China.
Yet, here too, the story is more complicated than it looks. The current military leadership in Naypyidaw is not too comfortable with Myanmar’s historical overreliance on China. In 2020, Min Aung Hlaing indirectly criticised China for arming the Arakan Army, an EAO based in Rakhine State that has been fighting the military since 2017. It is this subtle anti-China sentiment within the military that the Modi government has sought to build on, looking to offer Myanmar a countervailing presence in the neighbourhood.
But India’s outreach to Myanmar in the last ten years has been far from smooth. From 2017 onwards, it has faced serious complications. Since the coup in 2021, India’s relations with Myanmar have practically hit a stone wall.
The Rohingya crisis
Just a week before Modi’s 2017 visit to Myanmar, the military began a violent campaign of mass murder and forced expulsion of Rohingya Muslims in the northern part of Rakhine State in response to attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army on police outposts. By the time Modi landed in Naypyidaw, where he received a grand welcome, more than a hundred Rohingya had been killed and some fifty thousand forcibly displaced, including to neighbouring Bangladesh.
The joint statement issued during the visit by Modi and Htin Kyaw, then the president of Myanmar, did not mention the word “Rohingya”. It simply condemned “the recent terrorist attacks in northern Rakhine State” and the deaths of Myanmar soldiers. It even drew a comparison to the attacks by allegedly Pakistan-based militants against Hindu pilgrims visiting the Amarnath shrine in the Kashmir Valley in 2017. There was no mention of the Myanmar military’s violent “clearance operations” against the Rohingya, which the UN human rights chief, just days after Modi’s visit, labelled a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, and which a UN fact-finding mission in 2018 concluded had “genocidal intent”.
In many ways, the Modi government used the Rohingya crisis to demonstrate political and ideological convergence with the Suu Kyi government, which doggedly refused to condemn the military’s violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority and even went on to defend the military at the International Court of Justice in 2019. India’s reluctance to take a moral stand did not play well in Dhaka as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled to southeastern Bangladesh to seek refuge. This prompted New Delhi to issue a more balanced statement after Modi’s visit urging Naypyidaw to handle the “situation in Rakhine State” with “restraint and maturity”. But India did little to follow up on this request, and, three months later, offered broad-spectrum aid to the Myanmar government for the development of Rakhine State. At home, meanwhile, the Modi government continued to clamp down on Rohingya refugees using strict provisions in India’s foreigners’ law, and did little to stop rising hate speech against the minority community by Hindutva provocateurs.
The Rohingya crisis was the first point of inflection that showed the limits of Modi’s realpolitik in Myanmar policy. As the West abandoned Aung San Suu Kyi for her abetment of the violence, New Delhi, once again, found itself in a tight corner. China, meanwhile, continued to back her government steadfastly and even initiated a mediation effort between Naypyidaw and Dhaka to repatriate the Rohingya refugees. This brought Suu Kyi closer to Beijing. But this was just the beginning.
In February 2021, three months after Aung San Suu Kyi’s return to power in a landslide victory, a second crisis hit. The military pulled the plug on Myanmar’s democratic experiment once again and dissolved the newly-elected parliament in a coup.
Into a tailspin
The putsch completely disrupted the momentum that the Modi government had cautiously maintained by calibrating its outreach to Myanmar’s duopolistic power structure. The new junta, which calls itself the State Administration Council (SAC), pushed the country into an abyss of violence, instability, social turmoil and economic uncertainty. Work on India’s projects in Myanmar, including the Kaladan Multi Modal Transit and Transport Project (KMMTTP) and the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway, came to a grinding halt. Initially, India dealt with the flux with a light touch, watching and waiting through the second half of 2021 for the dust to settle. It continued to urge “all parties” to stop the violence and to encourage the SAC to release political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi, while leaving it to ASEAN to find a regional solution to the problem of who rules Myanmar.
In the middle of 2022, however, New Delhi began to normalise ties with the junta through limited secretarial and ministerial-level engagements. This was guided by a continued self-interested diplomatic approach based on a deeply-entrenched belief that the military could not be comprehensively defeated by the armed groups now fighting against it and would remain pivotal to Indian interests in Myanmar. This is despite the emergence of an all-encompassing armed resistance to the junta that includes ethnic minorities and the bulk of the Bamar majority, from which the military has traditionally drawn recruits and political support. This is also despite the SAC waging a brutal war against its own people, maiming and displacing thousands and forcing an entire generation of young people into the battlefield through a recently activated mandatory conscription policy.
After initially trying to seal its border with Myanmar, New Delhi silently allowed refugees to come into India, mostly to the northeastern state of Mizoram whose Mizo-dominated government refused to turn refugees belonging to the kindred Chin ethnic group away. But it has so far refused to formally engage with pro-democracy forces, including the National Unity Government, a civilian administration made up mostly of deposed NLD politicians.
Since October 2023, after a series of coordinated offensives by EAOs based in the north of Myanmar triggered renewed armed resistance against the SAC across the country, India has begun to rethink its approach. This February, K Vanlalvena, the only Rajya Sabha member of parliament from Mizoram, met members of the Arakan Army, which has made swift territorial gains in Rakhine and southern Chin states in recent months and now controls areas through which the India-funded KMMTTP passes. The Chin National Army too has recently gained control of areas along the India–Myanmar border, including the key trading town of Rikhawdar, right across the border from Zokhawthar town in Mizoram. This rapidly shifting geography of sovereignty in western Myanmar has now compelled New Delhi to diversify its relationships in the country. But it continues to give credence to the SAC by engaging with it at a formal government-to-government level.
In essence, the Modi government’s Myanmar policy has been reactive, not proactive. It has swung from one normative pole to the other in an attempt to consolidate its presence in the country. It has sought to counter China, but done little to project itself as a distinct alternative to Beijing in Myanmar. It has avoided taking risks in favour of stability and predictability. The outcome, however, has been the very opposite – greater instability and unpredictability. The Modi government might be slowly realising that the anti-democratic military cannot protect its interests in a Myanmar where the majority of the population seeks a federal democratic union. But it needs to break out of its policy inertia and do things differently if it wants to ensure a constructive presence in Myanmar that benefits the country’s people rather than just a small clique of generals with a pathological disregard for human life.
source : himalmag