Like some malign god, Border Pillar 78 manifested itself one morning. No one can exactly remember handing the lush green lands and one gate of the Sri Angala Parameshwari Sri Muneeswarar temple to Burma. The earlier pillar, the local Tamil community insisted, had been sited some eighty metres to the east. The Tamils had been compelled to hand over an older temple to Burma, after the demarcation of the border in 1964. This time, armed with land records, the community demanded that work to fence the border come to an end.
Empires draw their boundaries with blood and steel, but with magical realism, too.
This week, the home ministry announced plans to fence 100 kilometres of the 1,643-kilometre India-Myanmar border—large parts of it still un-demarcated, decades after both countries became independent. The government, home minister Amit Shah said, is also considering ending the Free Movement Regime instituted in 2018, which allows members of hill tribes to cross the border with a pass.
The shuttering down of the border, an admission that India’s so-called Look East policy is floundering, comes amid rising violence. Forces operating around the border town of Moreh, where ethnic Meitei have been driven from their homes and lands, have come under sustained fire on multiple occasions, leading to police fatalities. The state government claims ethnic Kuki insurgents housed in bases across the border are responsible for the violence.
Also Read: Why white elephant democracy will fuel civil war in Myanmar, instability in India’s Northeast
Delhi’s security concerns
From New Delhi’s point of view, the case for closing the border is a strong one. Insurgents fighting the military regime in Myanmar have overrun key positions along the border. Khampat, a key town just south of Moreh, fell late last year, allowing insurgents to choke traffic from Mandalay along the ambitious India-funded Asian Highway 1. The insurgents earlier took control of Rikhawdar, sited across the border from Zokhawthar in Mizoram, the only other legal trading post.
India’s junta-obsessed policies in Myanmar rested on the assumption the military was a partner of necessity to fight insurgency and narcotics trafficking. Now, New Delhi is confronted with the real prospect insurgents might be able to operate from safe havens located across the border from Nagaland to Mizoram and Manipur.
Few experts, though, say ending the Free Movement Regime will help the situation. Fencing even a small part of the border—much of it mountainous, punctuated by dense forest—will take years, and monitoring professional weapons and narcotics traffickers through the jungle terrain will be challenging, even advocates concede. The violence in Manipur, moreover, is driven by the deep ethnic divisions nursed by Chief Minister Nongthombam Biren Singh, and has little to do with transborder tensions.
The emphasis on hardening the border might, instead, only serve to create bitterness among hill communities like the Mizo and Kuki, who see their relationships with kin in Myanmar as key to their identity.
Lalduhoma, Mizoram’s chief minister, has said the state government has no power to stop fencing work, but noted that the Mizo do not accept the borders imposed by the British. Exactly that claim gave birth to a savage insurgency which climaxed, in 1966, with air strikes on Aizawl, and a brutal military campaign which included the forced internment of large sections of the population, the burning down of villages, and mass rape.
Also Read: Manipur is India’s gateway to East. But doesn’t get even half the political focus as Kashmir
Looking East
For centuries before diplomats began using the term, Indians and other Asians were Looking East. The kings of the great central Thai city of Ayutthaya—which in the sixteenth century, historians Raymond Scupin and Christopher Joll remind us, had a population of 300,000, more than contemporary London—observed Theravada Buddhism, as well as Hinduism, inherited from the Khmer. They also patronised the mosques and festivals of their Shi’a Persian expatriate merchants, as well as Malays and Cham Muslims from Cambodia.
European records from 1683, scholar M Ismail Marcinkowski notes, reveal an Ambassador from Ayutthaya arriving in Persia, with “extremely precious gifts, among them golden vessels, Chinese porcelain, and Japanese lacquer work and furthermore rare birds of all kinds.”
The regime of General Phibunsongkhram, who ruled from 1938-1944, introduced a fascist-inspired ethno-nationalism and tried to stamp out this diversity. Yet, descendants of the Ayutthaya Persians can still be found in Khlong Bangkok-Noi and Khlong Bangkok-Yai in Bangkok’s Thonburi. Gujarati and Bengali speakers, Tamils, and Pashtun all have communities in the city.
Large numbers of Sikhs, researcher Swarn Singh Kahlon has written, also established communities stretching from Burma to Thailand and Singapore. Although some Sikhs arrived in the region serving as police and military personnel, others were traders.
Even though migration from India to East Asia diminished after 1947, many communities maintained their presence. Tamils were evacuated from Burma in large numbers ahead of advancing Imperial Japanese troops in 1941, anthropologist Stephanie Ramamurthy recorded. The Tamil enclave at Moreh was first established by refugees who made the tough hike across the hills. Even though some Tamils returned to Burma, the large-scale nationalisation programme of military ruler General Ne Win led to a second exodus in 1962.
The problem of trafficking and criminality, built around the implosion of state authority in parts of East Asia, isn’t just an Indian one. Entire cities have emerged built around cyber-scams and gambling, like the notorious Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos. From being the economic powerhouse some had imagined, the route from Thailand to India’s Northeast funnels heroin and weapons.
From the time of Ayutthaya to the British Empire, though, South East Asia was also home to multi-ethnic trade networks of a very different kind. It’s around that ideal that the Look East policy was built—and India shouldn’t be giving up just yet.
Also Read: Myanmar crisis has put India in a difficult situation. Can it balance competing interests?
The China challenge
Among the countries that aren’t giving up on the region is China. Instead of spending its resources building easy-to-bypass fences, China has renewed plans to build a railway that connects its southern province of Yunnan with Mandalay—thus giving the superpower reliable access to an Indian Ocean port. There is also a railroad snaking through Laos into Thailand, and a growing network of gas pipelines. Where India gambled all on the junta ruling Burma, China proved adroit at cultivating both the generals and insurgent groups.
The real question for India is why it has allowed politics to mire strategically important states like Manipur in ethnic conflict, sabotaging its hopes of completing Asian Highway 1 from Moreh and building connectivity with countries like Thailand.
Even if the Generals in Burma remain in office, it’s certain a long war lies ahead. The junta is reported to have sacked five of six Brigadiers responsible for its defeats in Kokang, along the border with China; to the west, growing numbers of regime soldiers are fleeing into India.
Like the Sri Angala Parameshwari temple, India needs to find a way to keep one gate open into Myanmar, even as the crisis unfolds.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)