The world has been horrified by graphic images of
the latest crackdown by Burma’s military junta.
But the bullets and clubs unleashed on Buddhist
monks have worked. The monks have retreated, and
an eerie normalcy has returned to Yangon
(Rangoon), Burma’s principal city and former
capital.
That crackdown continues under cover of darkness.
When the sun sets in Burma, fear rises. Everyone
listens half awake for the dreaded knock on the
door. Any night, the military’s agents can come
for you, take you away, and make sure you are
never heard from again.
In recent nights, the junta’s henchmen have burst
into monasteries, lined up sleepy monks, and
smashed their shaved heads against the walls,
spattering them with blood. Scores of others,
perhaps hundreds, have been carted off for
interrogation, torture, or execution. The
nighttime assault on a United Nations employee
and her family made international news, but
hundreds of less well-connected Burmese have been
similarly abused.
For 45 years, Burma’s people have been subjected
to the junta’s reign of terror. My father was
born in Rangoon long before the 1962 coup that
brought the current regime to power. Afterwards,
many of my relatives, prosperous Indian merchants
who had been settled in Burma for generations,
abandoned homes and businesses in order to save
their skins as chaos enveloped the city, later
renamed Yangon.
A relative who now lives in Bangkok, but who
returned part-time to Yangon in response to
overtures from Burma’s cash-starved rulers,
recalled those days: "We lived through hell. We
never knew when we woke up each morning what
would happen. People were being denounced left
and right. They could just come and take you away
and take everything away from you." Those who
couldn’t leave Burma, or didn’t want to, have
lived with this fear ever since.
The United States and Europe have issued strong
statements condemning the crackdown and calling
upon Burma’s neighbours, especially India and
China, to exert their influence on the regime.
The response from both has been muted (as it has
from Thailand, which also has strong economic
ties with Burma).
China balks at interfering in the "internal
affairs" of a neighbour from whom it gets
precious natural gas and potential access to the
sea. India, which “normalised” bilateral
relations a few years ago, is reluctant to
alienate Burma’s military, with which it has
worked closely to counter rebels in India’s
northeast who had been using the common border to
tactical advantage. To this end, India has
provided aid, including tanks and training, to
Burma’s military.
But the main reason for India’s good relations
with Burma’s ruling thugs is the country’s vast
and still largely unexploited energy reserves,
which India desperately needs to fuel its
economic boom. India has invested $150m in a gas
exploration deal off the Arakan coast of Burma,
and India’s state-owned Oil and Natural Gas
Corporation and Gas Authority of India Ltd have
taken a 30% stake in two offshore gas fields in
direct competition with PetroChina, which has
also been given a stake.
India and China are simply doing what the US and
European countries have done for so long: trump
rhetoric about democracy and human rights with
policies that serve their strategic and energy
security interests. US relations with Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia are two examples, and America’s
Chevron and France’s Total, two of the world’s
oil giants, continue to do a brisk business in
Burma, thanks to loopholes in the sanctions.
But the rise of India and China means that the
time-tested posture of western democracies toward
emerging states to “do as we say, not as we do”
will become less tenable. If the EU and the US
want democratic India to act according to its
stated moral values and not its vital national
interests when these appear to conflict, they had
better be prepared to do the same.
Feeling the heat, including threats from some US
senators to link America’s nuclear deal with
India to its actions in Burma, India has
announced that it is asking for the release of
Burmese democratic opposition leader and Nobel
prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest.
But the credibility of all democratic regimes,
not just India’s, is at stake in what unfolds in
Burma.