A Telling Silence

DELHI fiddled while Aung San Suu Kyi sat in her car for six days. This poignant expression of civil disobedience by the Burmese dissident leader who was prevented by the military junta from driving 100 miles west of Rangoon to meet with her political allies went almost unremarked by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). While the whole western world as well as some member-states of ASEAN protested, no statements were made, no press release issued by Delhi. The silence was underwhelming. Instead, an MEA source said: "This is not a time for hectoring and lecturing—our core interest is to manage the post-Pokhran scenario, not to show any sympathy for any international move to democracy."

The MEA spokesman was clear that India considered the recent incident an internal matter. "We don't normally comment on them." No surprises here but for the fact that there's an alternate view doing the rounds in the ministries. The most voluble expression of this comes from defence minister George Fernandes' Samata Party. "This is namby pamby diplomacy," says party general secretary Jaya Jaitly. "We seem to forget our own democracy movement...it was world opinion that helped to restore it as it did during the Emergency." Jaitly believes that constructive engagement is being eroded. "We are not being able to soften these Burmese generals by doing business with them."

Fernandes is unwilling to go on record about the recent events in Burma because he says his personal views contradict those of other ministries. But he emphasises that the Samata Party reflects his own views. The party believes that China is helping to build Burma's military and "it makes no sense to say that our security concerns are being met in any way by cooperating with Burma," says Jaitly. This chimes with Fernandes' stated line that China sold weapons worth more than $1.4 billion to the Burmese, and the Chinese are building roads with the object of gaining access to the Indian Ocean via Burma.

In a convention on Burma in 1996, Fernandes had said: "The Chinese and the Burmese generals have developed a special relationship, which will last till the generals are in control." Referring directly to the defence minister's views, one MEA source said that "despite what has been said about the Coco islands (that China provides surveillance equipment here) we have a well-managed relationship with Burma." Jaitly believes that to be more in the realm of wishful thinking. "The MEA is still stuck in the old Congress mindset. They are still mouthing the same things." But the MEA source, saying that diplomatic pressure is better than public acrimony, admits India can't possibly ask the junta to 'throw all the Chinese out'. "That would be a non-starter. You can't foreclose their options."

바카라 웹사이트The MEA cites infiltration, gun-running and checking the inflow of drugs along the 1,500 km long border as some of the concerns that both share. It plumps for a cooperative approach to solving these problems—but to what effect, asks the Samata Party.

The party has alleged that part of the drug trade is controlled by Burmese officials and some of them were inadvertently exposed when a truck carrying heroin was caught last year. The MEA has not denied the possibility of a link. Admits an MEA official, "individual incidents might not always fit a policy pattern". Small laboratories have reportedly been set up in some border areas where opium is processed to produce heroin. In the 1996 Burma convention, Fernandes had mentioned the drugs-AIDS problem too. He said a lot of the heroin that Burma produced passed through the overland route between Burma and India via Moreh (Manipur) from where it was despatched to different countries. In fact, it is being said that Manipur could possibly become the next AIDS capital of the world, where almost every family has an infected member.

The Samata believes that rather than serving our interests, India may inadvertently end up helping the junta. And that while Burma has used both China and India, it has benefited more from China through greater economic activity in the border areas. The Northeast is not a hub of economic activity and doesn't generate influence in the same way. So are India's core interests being served by cooperating with the military regime, asks the Samata Party?