Modi In Myanmar

Modi In Myanmar

If you do nothing, you get nothing- Aung Sun Suu Kyi

Prime Minister Narendra Modi  is India’s most attractive economic salesman ever. This, on the back of the BJP’s majority Government. The majority gives his Government a stability, freedom of action and international attractiveness, not seen in the Indian calculus for decades. And his reputation for being articulate, efficient and business-friendly, honed during his years in Gujarat, acts to make the current Indian narrative even more compelling.

India has a hungry market for goods, services, technology, infrastructure, a large and young work- force, highly skilled engineers and managers, natural resources, growth. But it lacks capital, and sophisticated technological expertise in many areas.

Leaders from other countries have never fought shy of promoting their nation’s commercial interests. But in India, this business-like attitude is decidedly a new emphasis.

India has, in the past, generally muted its promotion of commercial concerns. Our former leaders were perhaps abashed by their Socialist notions, combined paradoxically with an upper class hauteur, that deemed commerce as vulgar.

So we didn’t exhort other countries to ‘Come, make in India’ like Modi has. Instead, we took upon ourselves to deliver pronouncements when abroad in a high moral tone. Indian leaders, particularly the long-serving Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi , were dreaded for their penchant to lecture  others.  Modi, with his humble origins and self-made determinism, is therefore viewed as a breath of fresh air.  

Modi’s office has received scores of meeting requests from other leaders at ASEAN, the East Asia Summit, both being held in Nay Pyi Taw, the new capital of Myanmar, 320 km north of former capital Yangon or Rangoon; and at the G-20 at Brisbane, thereafter.

Myanmar is a kind of Sleeping Beauty, coming awake after an interminably long rest.  Like Cuba, it has been lost in a time- warp, run by rigid Generals, with scant respect for political freedoms, disengaged from the rest of the world.

China has managed to breach this reclusiveness, and through massive investments made, has coaxed and drawn Myanmar out and back towards acknowledging the 21^st Century.  Myanmar has resumed its place as an important part of South Asia, abutting, as it does, China, Bangladesh, Thailand and India.

Anirban Ganguly recalls that former Education Minister U Win of Burma spoke of the ‘Arch of the Bay of Bengal’ sixty years ago, and Burma’s strategically located place in it. And also of the ‘Circle of South East Asia’, evolving from that notion, that has perhaps led President U Thein Sein and his Government to host the ASEAN and East Asia Summits back-to-back.  

India’s trade with Myanmar stood at a miniscule $2 billion in 2013. But now, there are direct flights between the two countries, and plans to link Imphal with Mandalay by a bus service.

Besides, going to Myanmar is not just bilateral. Modi will meet the leaders of almost all of ASEAN and the East Asia Summits, for the first time in many cases, and the Premier of China, Li Kequiang, in a formal bilateral meeting.

Myanmar has been loosening up of late, and drawing on its early post-colonial past, when legendary UN Secretary General U Thant of Burma, who helmsed the World body for a decade (1961-1971), wanted : ‘To make the world safe for diversity’.

The Indian connection with Burma is long and deep. As part of British-India, it hosted many ethnic Indians who lived and worked there. Burma teak beams and pillars adorn many old Kerala homes. Four-poster beds and other furniture are scattered through the middle class inheritance of many families in Bengal and Bombay, ports one and all. Exquisite lacquered boxes and artefacts sit in glass-fronted showcases. Burmese diamonds and rubies are prized possessions in family jewellery boxes. Intricate cane-work screens draw exclamations of admiration even after a century of adornment. This is the heritage of many Indian families with ancestors who lived in Rangoon, or further up the Irrawady.

Mandalay, Burma’s fabled predecessor of a name, was immortalised  by Rudyard Kipling. And it was to Rangoon, that the Last Moghul, Bahadur Shah Zafar was banished. And it is there he died and is buried.  It was there again, that Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the Lokmanya, was exiled for famously declaring Swaraj was his birth-right.

And Burma’s last Emperor, Thibaw, was, likewise, exiled at Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, living there from 1885, till he died in 1916.

Today, the globally celebrated Aung San Suu Kyi, a long-standing friend of India, is no longer under house arrest. She is a member of parliament as of 2012, and will stand for President in the 2015 general elections.  Narendra Modi has an appointment to meet her too.

Ironically, the Chinese may have brought back democracy along with development to Myanmar in their quest for the ‘New Silk Route’, and their dream of an interlinked, mutually beneficial, and powerful Asia, albeit led by China .

India under Modi, it appears, is willing, at last, to play its multilateral part, not only in relations with Myanmar, but in terms of its ‘Look East’ Policy, in the entire region.

(846 words)

November 12^th, 2014

Gautam Mukherjee