Recalibrating India’s Approach to Myanmar

More than two years after the military coup in Myanmar, India’s longstanding approach to the country needs to change – at least, that was the argument put forward recently by Gautam Mukhopadhaya, a former Indian ambassador. 

In a two-part op-ed published in The Wire last month, Mukhopadhaya, who served as ambassador from 2013 to 2016, took aim at India’s “near silence and pro-forma expressions of concern” about the situation in Myanmar, “both in terms of violence, suffering, displacement and lives lost, and the security, stability and future of a country of strategic importance to India in its immediate eastern neighborhood.” 

He went further, accusing Indian strategic thinkers – and presumably the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi – of being “stuck in a post-1990s policy correction.” In the late 1980s, Myanmar’s military crushed the nationwide pro-democracy movement – a movement that the Indian government had to some extent supported. Since then, Mukhopadhaya argued, India has resigned itself to the primacy of the Myanmar armed forces, or Tatmadaw, engaging it pragmatically for want of any alternatives. 

On the surface, there are rational, if cold-blooded, reasons for India to have done so. The two nations share a sensitive and porous 1,600-kilometer border that frames four states in India’s Northeast. The region is home to a number of active insurgent groups. The Indian military views the Myanmar military as a key partner in containing these rebel groups, which in many cases are active on both sides of the border. 

Indian officials also have misgivings about the growing influence of China in Myanmar, and fear that taking too moralistic a stance on the country’s internal conflicts would simply open up a vacuum for Chinese influence. 

This policy has largely conditioned India’s response to the military coup of February 1. New Delhi has disappointed many in Myanmar’s resistance by engaging with – and seemingly according de facto legitimacy upon – the military administration. As per Mukhopadhay, this has stemmed from a “misplaced faith in the Myanmar Army as the best guarantor of India’s security interests vis-à-vis both IIGs [Indian Insurgent Groups] and China.” Further on, he argued that New Delhi “should not and cannot compete with China in Myanmar by being a pale imitation” of Beijing.

Doubts about India’s Myanmar policy have been a subject of contention for years. In her 2009 book “Rogue Agent,” the prominent Indian human rights lawyer Nandita Haksar questioned “why India, a democracy, supported a dictatorship in its neighborhood.” Haksar was prompted to ask the question when she was appointed to represent 34 Rakhine and Karen rebels from Myanmar who were arrested in February 1998 during a notorious Indian Army crackdown known as Operation Leech. During the operation, the Indian Army crushed an embryonic ethnic Rakhine rebel group after encouraging it to establish a base at Landfall Island in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The 34 detainees were held without trial for more than six years, and remained in Indian prisons until 2011.

As Kyaw Hsan Hlaing noted in The Diplomat recently, the incident, though mostly forgotten in India, is remembered very keenly in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. That history is now a potential complicating factor in India’s relationship with the Arakan Army, the successor of the small ethnic resistance force that was smashed during Operation Leech, which now controls extensive territories in Rakhine. This, Kyaw Hsan Hlaing argued, “demonstrates that New Delhi’s strategy toward the current junta is serving neither its national interest nor the interests of the Myanmar people.”

In the second of his two articles, Mukhopadhaya mounted a sustained and convincing argument that despite China’s more or less open recognition of the coup government, New Delhi should move in the other direction and counter the perception that it fully supports the military. This new approach should be based on a “realistic assessment of where the conflict is heading” and a hard reckoning about whether India’s interests are best served by the Myanmar military. India can do this by “discreetly” ramping up its engagements with the National Unity Government and the ethnic armed organizations with which it is loosely aligned. 

“Just as India benefited in the popular mind in Afghanistan by being the antithesis of Pakistan, in Myanmar, India should position itself as the antithesis of China,” he wrote. “It can do this by playing to its own democratic and economic strengths which correspond with the needs of the people of Myanmar, not its repressive military.”

Mukhopadhaya’s recommendation stopped short of a high-risk gamble on the victory of the Myanmar opposition and thus confined itself largely to the bounds of the Indian foreign policy mainstream. He also said that any durable solution must include the Myanmar armed forces – a recommendation that will not earn him much love from the country’s resistance forces.

But he is right in arguing that India should be engaging with the country more flexibly and doing more than passively reacting to the stream of atrocities from Myanmar’s conflict zones. Among the measures he recommended are accommodating temporary refugees, offering homes for scholars at risk and scholarships for displaced students, and providing medical and humanitarian assistance to those in need. 

More interestingly, he called for the formation of an ASEAN Plus mechanism through which India could have some influence on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is currently trying (and failing) to implement its five-point consensus peace plan.

Interestingly, Mukhopadhaya argued that recalibrating its approach toward Myanmar would actually serve India’s strategic interests, in addition to aligning with its sense of its own higher self: “If the prospects of a total breakdown of authority and Balkanization in Myanmar are real, and China is likely to capitalize on the anarchy and push its economic and strategic interests in Myanmar and towards the Bay of Bengal, Gulf of Martaban, and the Andaman Sea, India can hardly sit back and watch.”

Indeed, it can’t – and shouldn’t. The former ambassador’s recommendations may fall short of the maximalist support that many in the resistance demand, but Myanmar’s future is ill served by an Asian giant punching well below its diplomatic weight.