Fire comes out from Maung Po Than’s arm,” shouted the excited villager who ran through the streets of Pegu in the winter of 1909-1910, “lightning will strike those who do not believe and tigers will devour them.” The sleeve of his jacket had indeed caught fire from a lit cheroot which he had carelessly stuffed into a pocket, but signs the villager was to be Myanmar’s new king kept mounting. A girl’s silk handkerchief was carried away by a kite, it was said, and an old ring was found; a white elephant was sighted, and the Shweyinna Pagoda was miraculously gilded.
Later that year, historian SR Ashton wrote, hundreds of insurgents armed with swords and a single, crude firearm marched against British colonial forces in the province of Sagaing, along the borders with India. The rebellion, backed by local monks, was brutally crushed—by police drawn from India.
The colonial authorities also tried to tame their restive colony by recruiting immigrants from India, creating a new élite that came to control land, capital and administration. The policy engendering racial bitterness that still runs deep in independent Myanmar. “To be Burmese means to be Buddhist!” one independence-movement slogan went.
Ethnic-Bamar nationalist leaders in colonial Myanmar, scholar Matthew Bowser records, thought it was more important to free their country from the ‘Kalar’—a derogatory word meaning Black, used interchangeably for Indians and Muslims—than evicting the coloniser.
“The history of Myanmar is the history of a succession of revolutions and wars in which strange changes come about,” GJS Hodgkinson, the commissioner of the Pegu division, observed in 1888. The wheel of destiny is turning—and this time around, guardians of Bamar nationalism looking to India for salvation.
The military’s monks
Faced with an increasingly successful insurgent campaign, the country’s all-powerful Tatmadaw, or army, has been desperately seeking help from New Delhi. Last week, the Tatmadaw rolled out the red carpet for an Indian Army delegation led by the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Major-General Charanjeet Singh Dewgun. And even as Myanmar’s air force continued to bomb rebel-held villages along the border with India last month, Air Vice Marshal Ichettira Iyappa Kuttappa, was in Naypyidaw for talks.
To influential sections of New Delhi’s foreign policy establishment, the Myanmar military seems like a natural partner. For one, the Tatmadaw’s long-standing superpower sponsor, China, has now deepened its ties with the insurgents. Like Hindu nationalists, moreover, the Generals see themselves as being beseiged by jihadism and ethnic minorities, often linked to the church.
Ever since it seized power in 2021, the Tatmadaw marketed itself as a defender of the Buddhist state against assault by Islam and the West. Far-Right monks like Ashin Nyanissara and Ashin Chekinda, who supported the coup, gained patronage from the Generals. The leaders of pro-military religious orders, commentator Aung Zaw writes, began to be seen on the streets of Yangon in Mercedes and Bentleys—drawing derision from an increasingly impoverished population.
The junta even cultivated Ashin Wirathu, sometimes described as the Buddhist Bin Laden. The monk, alleged to have provoked genocidal violence against the Rohingya, was released from prison, acquitted of all charges, and eventually given state honours. Thiri Pyanchi, the title granted to Wirathu, honours those who have performed services to advance the greatness of Myanmar.
Fearful of alienating its core Bamar supporters, the government of former Prime Minister Aung San Suu Kyi had been reluctant to act against Wirathu. Even though Wirathu was banned from preaching in 2017 for a year by the state-run council that regulates religious activity, he toured the country after the anti-Rohingya violence broke out. In one speech, he called Muslims “crazy dogs” that are “breeding so fast,” “stealing our women, raping them” and “would like to occupy our country.”
The monk was charged with sedition in the summer of 2019, after claiming the Prime Minister was “sleeping with a foreigner,” surrendering to the authorities just before the November 2019, elections.
Like Wirathu, the monk U Warthawa has played a key role in mobilising on the military’s side, setting up pro-junta militias drawn from the ranks of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party party. As the civil war in Myanmar has escalated, and the military sustained catastrophic losses, militia like these have become increasingly important for the survival of the junta, by waging a brutal scorched-earth campaign against opposition-held villages.
According to Aung Zaw, the regime’s favourites include the monk U Kovida, known for his astrological forecasts—and for allegedly urging soldiers to shoot protestors in the head.
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The rise of MaBaTha
Fearing the influence of the Buddhist clergy over the popular imagination—the cause of multiple colonial-era rebellions—the military moved to contain their influence after staging their first coup in 1962. In 1980, journalist and scholar Bertil Lintner writes, the General Ne Win’s regime created the Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, the state body which would regulate the activities of the country’s 1,00,000 monks. The monks were now to carry government registration cards, and defrocked monks were to be liable for prosecution in civilian courts, not ecclesiastical tribunals.
The effort to control the clergy, historian Michael Charney notes, was not entirely successful. Large sections of the clergy played a key role, together with students, in sustaining the protests which eventually overthrew military rule in 2007.
Late in 2001, Wirathu emerged in opposition to pro-democracy monks, spearheading a new movement called 969—so named for the number of special attributes and teachings of the Buddha, in a riposte to the 786 used in Islamic pop-culture. Together with his fellow cleric Ashin Wimala, Wirathu alleged there is a Muslim plot to marry and convert Buddhist women, before taking over the country.
Furious over Wirathu’s less-than-disciplined communal agitprop—which led violence to erupt across Rakhine—the Sangha Council banned 969 in 2013. The organisation was folded into a new, more structured group, called MaBaTha, to carry forward its demand for race laws, which restricted conversions and inter-faith marriage.
Even though the National League for Democracy’s (NLD) election victory in 2017 proved a reverse to MaBaTha, researchers Amara Thiha and Marte Nilsen observe that its ideas had taken hold among numbers of monks, who believed that Buddhism is facing an existential threat from external forces. “Islam is one part of this perceived threat,” they write, but so too is secularisation, modernisation and democracy.”
The resentments of the clergy were fuelled by the growing power of civil society, underpinned by the emergence of influential, often foreign-funded Non-Governmental Organisations. These NGOs undermined the traditional influence monasteries and monks had obtained as providers of charity.
For the Buddhist-nationalist clergy, the Tatmadaw, or Myanmar’s armed forces, were a kind of incarnation of the country’s pre-colonial kings, upholders of the sovereignty of its territory, the protectors of the Bamar race, and defenders of what used to be the state religion.
Also Read: India can’t afford to shut its doors to Myanmar unrest. It’s a threat to Indian security
A civilisational dead-end
The political scientists Ihsan Yilmaz and Nicholas Morieson note that movements of the religious right in both Sri Lanka and Myanmar—intensely hostile to the Indian diaspora in those countries in earlier decades—are now beginning to see Hindutva as an ally. Even Nepal’s prime minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, has sought to manipulate India’s domestic politics. He is making high-profile temple visits and advocating for Sanskrit education.
Like Islamist movements in Pakistan and Bangladesh these regional forces seek to draw new civilisational frontier. Even though the idea might seem attractive to some in India, letting faith drive foreign policy would likely prove disastrous. The country’s key allies in the region include Muslim-majority countries in the Persian Gulf, as well as states like Indonesia and Malaysia.
India needs to focus on its national interests—not serve the ethnic-religious agenda of fanatics next door.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)