[Assam] World’s largest TWO FACED demon democracy showing true her color and crafty overt expansionism towards the East is now evident from the words and actions of the RSS too. Assam is fighting for survival to the last Myanmar, are you going to sit tight?

[Bartta Bistar]

*South Asia*

    * Nov 14, 2007 *


    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IK14Df02.html



    *Page 1 of 2*
*India stands by Myanmar status quo*
By Bertil Lintner

CHIANG MAI - Myanmar's principal foreign ally China has shown in the wake of
the military junta's recent armed crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators
that Beijing is more interested in maintaining stability than pushing for
democratic regime change. So then could India, Myanmar's other key regional
ally, be persuaded to use its influence to facilitate political change?

The United States, the European Union and even Myanmar exiles in New Delhi,
who have recently demonstrated outside the Indian
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Parliament, have all appealed to what Indian politicians proudly proclaim is
the world's largest democracy to live up to those ideals and push for change
in Myanmar.

India and Myanmar share a complicated and delicate history, one marked as
much by mistrust as amity. In recent years India has shifted its diplomatic
support from Myanmar's hamstrung pro-democracy movement towards the ruling
military junta, driven by realpolitik imperatives including greater access
to Myanmar's untapped energy resources and its support in putting down
ethnic insurgent groups active in remote border territories.

India's still delicate rapprochement with Myanmar means that New Delhi will
no time soon answer the West's call to take a more assertive policy position
with regard to the military junta. Indeed, India's foreign policy has never
been guided by promoting democracy in other countries.

On the contrary, "democratic" India was the Soviet Union's main ally in Asia
during the Cold War, because it suited the regional security interests of
both countries. India has not even pushed for democracy in one of its
closest neighbors and allies, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, one of the
world's last remaining absolute monarchies.

India's relations with Myanmar are even more troubled and delicate than
China's. During the British colonial era, Myanmar, then known as Burma, was
made into a province of British India, which it remained until 1937 when it
became a separate colony. During that time, large numbers of Indians
migrated or were brought in by the British as laborers. The railways, post
and telegraph, the police and the civil service were also staffed with
people of Indian origin.

Just before World War II, the Indians numbered over 1 million of a total
population of about 16 million at the time and 45% of the former capital
Yangon's population was of South Asian origin - Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.
Their numbers were reduced when the Japanese invaded in 1941 and many of
them fled to India. But many also remained until the war was over, and even
after independence in 1948.

The role Indians played as intermediaries between the colonial British and
the native population gave rise to sometimes fierce anti-Indian sentiments.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Myanmar nationalist movement had strong
undertones of communal tension. Even today, people of South Asian origin are
often looked down on in Myanmar, popularly referred to as *kala* a Burmese
language pejorative meaning "foreigner" or "Indian". Curiously, Caucasians
are still called *kala pyu*, which translates from the Burmese to "white
Indians".

Still, Myanmar's relations with India were in the main cordial after
independence. Myanmar's first prime minister, U Nu, was known to be a close
friend to his Indian counterpart Jawaharlal Nehru and both leaders were
prominent figures in the Cold War-inspired Non-Aligned Movement. Indeed,
India helped Myanmar survive its first difficult years as an independent
state, including crucially when various political and ethnic insurgent
groups threatened to break the new country apart. Without India's massive
military and economic aid, U Nu's government would most probably have
collapsed.

*Xenophobic backlash*
However, Indo-Myanmar relations chilled after General Ne Win's military coup
and seizure of power in March 1962. After a few years in power, his
revolutionary council moved to nationalize privately owned businesses and
factories, of which an estimated 60% were owned by people of Indian origin.
Thousands lost their property and livelihood and during the four-year period
spanning 1964-68 some 150,000 Indo-Burmese left the country.

Many leaders of the formerly democratic Myanmar also fled, among them U Nu,
who went into exile in India. The Indian government put him up in a stately
residence in Bhopal, where he remained for well over a decade before
returning to Myanmar under a general amnesty in 1980. Bilateral relations
between India and Myanmar remained more or less stagnant until Myanmar's
1988 uprising for democracy, which was brutally crushed by the military.

In an official statement issued in the wake of the violence, India expressed
its support for the "undaunted resolve of the Burmese [Myanmar] people to
achieve their democracy". The Burmese language service of the
state-sponsored radio station All-India Radio (AIR) became even more
outspoken in its criticism of Myanmar's military government, which made it
immensely popular with the population at large.

In response, Myanmar's state-run Working People's Daily newspaper began
publishing outright racist articles and cartoons against AIR and ethnic
Indians in general, attempting to revive the anti-*kala* xenophobia of the
1930s. But even then it was clear that India's hard diplomatic stand was not
driven by illusions of serving as a regional guardian or promoter of
democracy.

India shares a 1,371-kilometer frontier with Myanmar and ethnic insurgents
fighting against New Delhi have long used under-administered territories in
Myanmar as sanctuaries to conduct cross-border raids into India's sensitive
northeastern areas. Myanmar's only reaction to this situation had been to
mount half-hearted and essentially futile military operations against the
insurgents, mainly ethnic Nagas.

It was widely believed in New Delhi in the late 1980s and early 1990s that a
new democratic government in Myanmar would likely take a more tactful
approach. India's sympathy for Myanmar's pro-democracy movement was further
strengthened by the fact that until December 1989 its prime minister, Rajiv
Gandhi, was a personal friend of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Their acquaintance dated to the early 1960s, when her mother, Daw Khin Kyi,
served as Myanmar's ambassador to India. Suu Kyi's father, national
independence hero Aung San, had also known Rajiv's grandfather, Nehru
personally. But at the time it was also clear that India's support for
Myanmar's pro-democracy forces was also guided by an Indian desire to
counter its main regional rival China's growing influence with Myanmar's
internationally isolated generals.

About 1993 India began to re-evaluate its strategy due to concerns that its
policies had achieved little except to push

*Continued 1 **2 <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IK14Df03.html>  *





 **





    *Page 2 of 2**
India stands by Myanmar status quo
*By Bertil Lintner

Myanmar closer to Beijing. The result was a dramatic policy shift aimed at
improving relations with Myanmar's generals, as it was also becoming clear
that the pro-democracy movement would not achieve power within the
foreseeable future.

At that time, Myanmar's military government had effectively cowed Suu Kyi's
National League for Democracy party into submission and the exile community
seemed to have little to no impact on

political developments inside the country - even as some of them actually
stayed in the personal residence in New Delhi of senior Indian politician
George Fernandes, who served as defense minister from 1988 through 2004.

By January 2000, Indian army chief General Ved Prakash Malik paid a two-day
visit to Myanmar, which was followed with a reciprocal visit by his Myanmar
counterpart, General Maung Aye, to the northeast Indian city of Shillong.
The unusual nature of this visit, by a foreign leader to a provincial
capital, was accentuated by the arrival of a group of senior Indian
officials from the Trade, Energy, Defense, Home and Foreign Affairs
ministries to hold talks with the Myanmar general.

In the aftermath of those meetings, India began to provide non-lethal
military support to Myanmar troops along their common border. Most of the
Myanmar troops' uniforms and some other combat gear now originate from
India, as do the leased helicopters Myanmar uses to combat the ethnic
insurgents who operate from sanctuaries along the two sides' common border.
In November 2000, the Indian government felt confident enough about the
improvement in bilateral relations to invite Maung Aye to New Delhi, where
he headed a delegation that included several other high-ranking junta
members and cabinet ministers.

In 2004, junta chief General Than Shwe also visited India, followed in
December 2006 by the third-highest ranking officer in Myanmar's military
hierarchy, General Thura Shwe Mann, who toured the National Defense Academy
in Khadakvasla, India's premier officer-training school, as well as the Tata
Motors plant in Pune, which manufactures vehicles for the Indian military.

*Leveraged cultural heritage*
About the mid-1990s, AIR's Burmese language service conspicuously ceased
broadcasting its anti-junta rhetoric; it is still on air today, but
programming consists almost exclusively of Myanmar pop music. A strange kind
of "cultural diplomacy" followed.

In the early 2000s, the Indian right-wing Hindu organization, Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) , renewed its presence in Myanmar. The RSS first
came to Myanmar in the 1940s to provide social and religious services to the
country's ethnic Indian minority, but it lay dormant after the military took
over in 1962 and commenced nationalizing Indian private companies.

The renewed effort to build up the RSS's Yangon branch was made apparently
with the blessings of Maung Aye, a staunch Myanmar nationalist who has been
reported to frown on the country's recent economic and military reliance on
China. The RSS, which in Myanmar is referred to as the Sanatan Dharma
Swayamsevak Sangh, appears to have convinced some of the Myanmar generals
that Hinduism and Buddhism are "branches of the same tree" - and that "the
best guard against China is culture", to quote a Kolkata-based RSS official.


Although the RSS is the parent organization of the Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party, which in alliance with several other parties led the
Indian coalition government from between 1998 and 2004. It is not certain
that the Hindu fundamentalists' new mission in Myanmar had the blessings of
the Indian government, but cultural ties between the two countries have
definitely strengthened in recent years.

So, too, has cross-border trade. Before 1988 there was scant commercial
activity along the two countries' shared border, apart from smuggling
activities. In February, Sanjay Budhia, vice president of the Indian Chamber
of Commerce and Industries, said in a speech in Kolkata that India and
Myanmar "have set a US$1 billion trade target in 2006-07, up from $557
million in 2004-05".

He noted that principal exports from Myanmar to India include "rice, maize,
pulses, beans, sesame seeds, fish and prawns, timber, plywood and raw
rubber, base metals and castor seeds". In return, India exports machinery
and industrial equipment, dairy products, textiles, pharmaceutical products
and consumer goods. India-Myanmar trade now rivals that of the booming
cross-border trade with China, which has been brisk for almost two decades.

India has also shown a competitive interest in purchasing natural gas from
Myanmar and to build a 1,200 megawatt hydroelectric power station on the
Chindwin River across from India's underdeveloped northeastern region. New
Delhi is also actively involved in several infrastructure projects inside
Myanmar, including major road construction projects. Myanmar is viewed from
India's perspective as a "land bridge" to Southeast Asia and as such a vital
link in its new business-driven "Look East" policy.

In January, Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee became the first senior
leader from a major democracy to visit Myanmar's new capital Naypyitaw,
where the junta moved its administrative offices in November 2005. Even in
the midst of the recent tumultuous anti-government demonstrations in
Myanmar, where soldiers fired on protesters, senior officials from the
Indian state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, led by Petroleum and
Natural Gas Minister Murli Deora, flew to Naypyitaw to sign an agreement to
explore for gas in three new blocks in the Bay of Bengal off Myanmar's
southwestern Arakan coast.

To be sure, India has successfully weaned Myanmar away from its near-total
dependence on China for economic and military support. And the strong
position the US, the European Union and Myanmar dissidents are now calling
on New Delhi to take would risk - to China's benefit - the precious foothold
it has achieved in Myanmar over the past decade.

Like China, India is unlikely to go beyond statements of tacit support for
the United Nations' latest - and likely futile - mission to push the
military junta towards national reconciliation with the pro-democracy
opposition. In essence, New Delhi's interests are also in the preservation
of Myanmar's political status quo.

*Bertil Lintner** is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic
Review. He is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific Media Services. *



*1* <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IK14Df02.html>* *
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