By Arijit Sen
It was unbearably hot in Kolkata in May last year when 31 Arakanese and Karen men walked out of Presidency Jail. It took them a little time to spot the TV cameras waiting to record their acquittal, their free walk. Once they knew where to look, they posed with victory signs.
Yet, most were too tired to flash a smile or even realise that they were free. Three of their comrades were still in jail. Two others had died over the years. The tiredness was not surprising. It had been 13 years since February 1998 when these men had been allegedly backstabbed by the Indian Army. It was a vicious 180-degree turn on India’s part that had falsely turned these men engaged in a freedom struggle into a group of international gun-runners.
The rebels were members of the National Unity Party of Arakan and the Karen National Union. They had worked closely with the Indian Army Intelligence since 1995. They supplied information on training camps of North-eastern Indian insurgents inside Burma. In return they had the assurance of support from the Indian intelligence for their struggle against the Burmese military junta.
It was with this promise and invite, in 1998, that these men set sail from Thai waters on two boats for Andaman’s Landfall Island. The idea was to set up a base for their struggle. India, however, had a bigger game plan. It wanted them to monitor Chinese movements in the region. India had reason enough to believe that there was Chinese presence in the area. The Chinese were being helped by the Burmese junta.
For the Burmese rebels, it was an unexpected welcome at the little, uninhabited island. They were arrested as soon as they reached and their leader Gen Khaing Raza and five others, allegedly, were dragged inside the jungle on the island and shot dead. In a press briefing, the Indian Army informed the media that international gun-runners who were trying to supply arms to North-eastern Indian rebels had been caught in the operation codenamed Operation Leech.
There were no doubts that the Arakanese and Karen men had been used and dumped. Some Indians blamed the incident on a ‘rogue agent’. But it was unlikely that an operation of this level was driven without the knowledge of others. It was one of many examples of India’s recent Burma engagement that has been one of false promises, false starts, myopic engagements that turned deadly for others.
***
Ten years before Operation Leech, in September 1988, the streets of Yangon were witnessing one of the world’s most spontaneous outcries against the repression of democracy. The National League for Democracy headed by the magnetic Aung San Suu Kyi had won over the hearts and minds of each and every one in Burma. But the army generals in Burma had other plans. They would not let go of power so easily. So NLD workers were jailed, students shot and Daw Suu Kyi, daughter of the legendary General Aung San, the founder of an Independent Burma, was put under a virtual house arrest.
In 1990, her party won 80 per cent of the seats for a committee that was to draft a new constitution. The results were rejected by the generals.
In 1987, year before Yangon’s democracy wave, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had visited Burma. It was a time when a lot was happening in this corner of the world. Mr Gandhi had successfully signed a peace treaty with the rebels in Mizoram in June 1986. He had signed the Assam Accord in 1985 with Prafulla Mahanta. His engagement with North-east India and the 1,600 kilometre long border it shared with Burma was knowingly and unknowingly gathering pace and evolving. In 1988, as Bertil Lintner pointed out at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library talk (in 1992), “Daring anti-military broadcasts over All India Radio’s Burmese language service became extremely popular and many Burmese undoubtedly saw India as an ideal once again, as it had been in the fifties.”
India it seemed was ‘looking east’ and ‘acting east’ much before the ‘master of public speaking’, Harvard-educated American President Barack Obama, would dare the Indian Government to do so in his famous speech in Indian Parliament in 2010.
And yet, to outdo and erase it all, India would soon put blinkers and start its turnarounds on Burma.
How did it suddenly happen? By 1990, the Indian army had moved into the plains of Assam leading counter-insurgency operations against the United Liberation Front of Assam. The National Socialist Council of Nagaland (I-M) faction was reframing its strategies for the Naga cause. Militancy in Manipur was at its peak. Most of these groups had set up their bases in the Chittagong hill tracts of Bangladesh and inside Burma. This was also a time when militancy in Kashmir was taking violent turns. India decided to abandon its pro-democracy moves and court the military regime in Burma to its advantage. Tacit support was extended to the junta which would many years later, allegedly, lead to hardware help extended to the Burmese army by the Indians.
The ‘look east’ policy, a buzzword for engagement with this region also came up during this time when Narasimha Rao was the Prime Minister. It still hangs around Indian policymakers’ neck. By the time Atal Bihari Vajpayee became the Prime Minister, military diplomacy was the key driving focus of India’s Burma policy. The belief was that it would reap dividends when it came to controlling insurgents in North-east India. That belief stayed on and so did militancy in the North-east. Burma, even now, remains a safe haven for militants. Later, India would also force itself to believe that its thumbs up to the Burmese army would help India get investments in Burma. Ironically, when India was changing its Burma tracks, India would honour Aung San Suu Kyi with the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding in 1992.
This month, twenty-five years after Rajiv Gandhi’s Burma visit, Dr Manmohan Singh and his band of tweeting and ipad carrying new age Indian Foreign Service and Indian Administrative service officers decided it’s time to hop on to the Burma bus. In November 2010, Burma had witnessed a heavily rigged election that had allowed the military regime to embrace democracy. General Thin Sein and his military men, who are remembered for their brutal repression of pro-democracy movements by Buddhist monks in Burma in 2007, are now ‘elected’ ministers. For India and the rest of the world, Burma’s Berlin Wall Moment had happened with its elections. Subsequent by-elections that elected Suu Kyi as the leader of the opposition had given a green signal to the diplomats across the world. For all of them, Burma’s papers are certainly now in order. It was all okay to engage with Burma’s new democratic avatar. In that all-okay-with-Burma euphoria, on the morning of the PM’s visit, one Foreign Ministry officer started pulling out nuggets from history and tweeting about it. Almost all that could be put in various instalments of 140 characters except India’s volte-face on the democracy movement in Burma.
When we landed with Dr Singh and his team in Burma, we were actually in the middle of nowhere. The capital city Nay Pi Taw
