Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (29 page)

There is no doubt that many in the Indian government, then and now, would prefer a democratic regime in Burma. In the world’s biggest democracy, supporting and being seen to support a popular movement for democracy would have been an easy sell, both at home and abroad. Many journalists and scholars I have met in India have appeared genuinely concerned by the stories of political repression in Burma and want to know how best India can help. There were Indian politicians like George Fernandez, who served as a defence minister in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and who remained a staunch advocate for democratic change in Burma, for many years even providing shelter to Burmese dissidents at his own south Delhi home. But few believed that India could simply follow an idealistic policy that produced no results, at least not in its immediate neighbourhood. In India, as in China, analysts were often scathing in their assessment of Western government policies towards Burma, seeing them as hypo critical at best and deeply damaging to the Burmese people at worst.

There was apprehension about China but there were other concerns as well. With India’s economic rise, access to foreign markets and future energy security were much higher on the agenda than before. Burma was a potential trading partner and the country’s economic importance had increased with the discovery of offshore natural gas fields in the 1990s. But perhaps much more important than this were concerns related to the long common border and the situation of the country’s Northeast. This region has been the site of violent unrest for decades and rebel militias, many demanding secession from the Indian union, have found sanctuary within Burma’s western forests. For Indian security officials, there was not only the distant threat of a Chinese-dominated Burma, but a more immediate need to secure the Burmese army’s cooperation against these insurgent hide-outs. In 1993 the Indian government had seen fit to bestow on Aung San Suu Kyi the prestigious Nehru Award for International Understanding. But by 1995, after a two-year policy U-turn, the Burmese and Indian armies were mounting a joint military operation, Operation Golden Bird, against the border insurgencies.

Since then relations have warmed still further, with visits by top leaders, rising trade, and major Indian investments in Burma’s developing energy sector. India has decided to move closer to Burma in part to offset China, but the Burmese regime too wants better ties with Delhi to balance Beijing.

In July 2010, Burmese supremo General Than Shwe made a high-profile visit to India and was welcomed with open arms. He travelled first to Bodh Gaya, the place of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, and Sarnath, where the Buddha preached his first sermon, went on to Delhi to meet the President and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and then toured an IT centre and high-tech pharmaceutical plant in Hyderabad and a Tata car factory near Calcutta. Both sides declared the importance of strengthening ties, and settled on several new economic deals. India’s long-standing project to rebuild the port at Akyab, or Sittwe, on Burma’s western coast, was now moving ahead. So too were plans to build a system of roads and waterways linking the port to the Northeast. Tata Motors would start a factory in Burma to build its new ultra-cheap Nano cars. A project was even begun to jointly renovate the medieval Ananda temple at Pagan. All this did not, however, mean a new tilt towards India. General Than Shwe had recently hosted Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and two months later would travel himself to China. Burma’s army chiefs were clearly attempting to balance their relationship with the two Asian giants and in this way gain maximum leverage and maximum benefit.

In 1958, Pandit Nehru had told American journalist Edgar Snow that ‘the basic reason’ for the Sino-Indian dispute was that they were both ‘new nations’, in that both were newly independent and under dynamic nationalistic leaderships, and ‘in a sense were meeting at their frontiers for the first time in history’. In the past ‘there were buffer zones between the two countries; both sides were remote from the border’. He was referring primarily to Tibet, lost as a buffer zone to the People’s Liberation Army. But Burma too has long been a buffer zone and a clear-cut Chinese domination of Burma in the future could well lead to far greater tensions between Delhi and Beijing. In 2010, it was still uncertain whether Indian influence in Burma could even come close to matching what the Chinese had on offer. Much would depend not only on Delhi, but also on people and events in India’s melancholy Northeast.

On a map, Northeast India looks like a nearly severed hand, reaching eastward from the rest of the country. ‘Northeast India’ is a relatively new term. It normally refers to Assam as well as to the other six of the ‘seven sister’ states: Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura. These are places few people outside India even know exist and, indeed, it’s hard to think of a part of Asia less well-known than Northeast India.

The region is far from insignificant in size and population, being about as big as England and Scotland combined, with over forty million people. And it’s a place of remarkable ethnic and linguistic diversity, with at least twice as many distinct languages as all of Europe, with Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Animist, and Buddhist peoples, peoples who by appearance could be mistaken for anything from Spanish to Siberian. There are the Meitheis, the Nagas, the Abors, the Miris, the Bodos, the Garos, the Kukis, and dozens of other communities. Areas of Northeast India are also incredibly remote, not unlike adjacent areas of Burma. Just recently, in October 2010, a team of linguists working for
National Geographic
’s ‘Enduring Voices’ project ‘discovered’ an entirely unique language, Koro, spoken by only 800 people in a valley in the foothills of the Himalayas, as distinct from the languages around them as Persian from Portuguese.

The Northeast is essentially landlocked. Partition in 1947 and the creation of East Pakistan cut this region off from its natural access to the sea and also from the major cities such as Dacca and Sylhet with which the region had traded for centuries. Only a long thin corridor, less than twenty miles wide in places, known as the ‘Chicken’s Neck’ connects the Northeast to the rest of India. And the region is not in a particularly enviable neighbourhood. Bangladesh, poor and densely populated, is to the south and west. To the north are the Himalayas, and to the east is Burma, poor as well, and isolated internationally for decades. And at the other side of the Chicken’s Neck is not the India of software companies and call centres and Bollywood block busters but rural West Bengal and then Bihar, the poorest and arguably most lawless backwater in the country. Few Indian and fewer foreign tourists visit; a special ‘Inner Lines’ permit is needed even for Indian citizens to visit certain areas. And because international journalists are only very rarely allowed, Northeast India is almost never in the news

The Northeast is a mix of valleys and highlands. Millions of years ago, before what became India smashed into Asia, the ancient Brahmaputra River ran straight southward from Tibet into the Tethys Sea. But with the rise of the Himalayas, the great river, one of the longest in the world, was forced to make a dramatic U-turn, first heading east and then bending west, skirting around the edge of 15,000-foot-high mountains, finally rushing down through steep jungle gorges, and then emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

Before reaching its delta, the river flows through a long valley. This valley, about the same size as all of Ireland, is Assam, the main state of the Northeast, a low-lying landscape of rice fields and tea plantations, with little towns and villages, a countryside very similar to that of Upper Burma, but with the added splendour of the Kaziranga National Park, home to two-thirds of the world’s great one-horned rhinos and with the largest density of wild tigers anywhere in the world. And in the way that Burma’s Irrawaddy valley is surrounded by a horseshoe of hills and mountains, Assam’s Brahmaputra valley is similarly encircled by upland areas. In both places the majority people of the plains (the Burmese Buddhists and the Assamese Hindus) are distinct from the largely Christian peoples of the hills.

Gauhati (also spelled Guwahati) is the capital of Assam and with a little under a million people, it’s the largest (and more or less only) Indian city east of Calcutta, about 400 miles away in a straight line. In China, an equivalent trip on a newly tarred expressway or air-conditioned train might take only a few hours, but from Calcutta to Gauhati such as trip is not possible as it would mean crossing Bangladesh. Instead, the journey overland today involves a very circuitous route, taking no less than eighteen hours by train, and even longer by car or bus, first heading north and then through the Chicken’s Neck, before heading east, parallel to the Brahmaputra River.

The trains are often delayed, and sometimes attacked by bandits and militant outfits of various stripes. Not long before I was there, a Rajdhani Express train had been ripped apart by a bomb blast on the approach to Gauhati. It was the handiwork of an obscure group known as the ‘Adivasi National Liberation Army’. In September 2010, a train travelling through the Chicken’s Neck rammed into a herd of elephants trying to cross the tracks, killing seven. There are also frequent landslides. And so, after studying my options, I chose to fly. In Calcutta I purchased a ticket on Jet Airways, a relatively new private airline. Their in-flight magazine offered pictures of lavish first-class service to New York: each passenger had his or her own little cabin, with a proper bed, endless food and drink, a flat-screen TV, and hundreds of movies to choose from. My flight from Calcutta to Gauhati had none of these things but was comfortable nonetheless. Half the people in the cabin looked as if they could be from Burma. But I knew that they were almost certainly not Burmese, but people from Assam or the states beyond. I doubt anyone took me for anything other than a local.

Assam was a place I had read about and thought about for many years. For most people, India first means Delhi or Bombay, the Taj Mahal or the desert cities of Rajasthan. But for me, as a student of Burmese history, I learned first about this very different piece of India. In the early nineteenth century, the Burmese general Thado Maha Bandula had led his armies over treacherous passes and vanquished the once mighty kingdom of Assam. Members of the Assam royal family, their officials and retainers were then marched back as captives to the Burmese court of Ava; an Assamese princess was made a consort of the Burmese king and her brother a minister. The Burmese were curious about their different ways and their knowledge of Hindu ritual, and in this way the arrival of the Assamese captives prompted fresh interest in Sanskrit tradition. But within a couple of decades came war with the British, and with the Burmese defeat and the British annexation of Assam, Assam disappeared from Burmese history. Burmese schoolchildren are taught about Bandula’s conquest of Assam, but only in a summary way, as part of a listing of past victories. Nothing is taught about Assam itself or its people, and certainly nothing about the devastation wrought by the Burmese conquerors. Even in the colonial histories of Burma, Assam comes in and out of the picture over a few pages, a supporting actor in a single scene.

No Burmese I knew had ever been to Assam. But would this now change? India’s Look East policy means different things to different people, but to the extent that it means a new overland connection between India and China or from India across Burma to southeast Asia, Assam is critical for its success. Together with Burma and Yunnan, Assam and the other Northeastern states sit between the great population centres of India and China. Once a cul-de-sac, Assam, like Burma, could be at the crossroads of a new Asia.

My first impressions of Gauhati were of a rural rather than urban setting, with the big trees and dirt roads that could have been anywhere around Rangoon, little wooden shacks with corrugated iron roofs, stray dogs and light but chaotic traffic, scooters and motorized rickshaws zigzagging around ramshackle lorries and white Hindustan Ambassador saloons. I checked in to one of the nicer hotels in Gauhati, the Brahmaputra Ashok, and was shown to a pleasant if somewhat musty room, with a balcony looking out onto a vacant lot. Outside, boys in shorts were kicking around a football, creating little clouds of dust, whilst a brown cow munched on a few tufts of grass to the side. And beyond was the Brahmaputra River itself, very wide and majestic, with sandy beaches and a ridge of low blue-green hills lining the far shore.

The hotel room service menu was not very appetizing. One of the large sections was titled ‘Fluid Starters’ and offered a choice of ‘Noodle Soup’, ‘Cream Soup’ and ‘Canadian Cheese Soup’. A folder with facts about the hotel explained that downstairs there was also the Ushaban, a ‘restaurant cum coffee shop’ where one could enjoy ‘the choicest & mouth watering dishes from Indian, Chinese & Continental Cuisines…widely known in the city for offering the best “
SIZZLERS
” in town’. I put that down as a possible evening option, together with ‘Silver Streak: The First Lounge Bar of the entire North East India’. On television was a news report on the visit of a government minister from Thailand and a programme about local sweets that took many days to cook. Other channels showed people in tribal costumes dancing in a studio.

Most of Gauhati is on one side of the river and along the water front is the older part of town, with a few colonial-era bungalows, now belonging to high officials. The British had made Shillong, a hill station several hours’ drive away, their administrative seat in the region, and so there were few (if any) of the big Anglican churches and Victorian or Edwardian office buildings one associates with the more important centres of the Raj. Instead, there was a more recent and unattractive urban sprawl, with many new and shoddy-looking concrete buildings, interspersed here and there with green areas. There were also several Hindu temples in the distinctive style of Assam, oblong structures with peculiar lemon-squeezer-shaped tops.

Not far from the hotel was the Pan Bazaar, with heaps of open rubbish and great masses of tangled electrical lines overhead, like a great spider’s web waiting to catch the unsuspecting people below. There were some mobile phone sellers and service providers and shops selling second-hand clothes. Later, I strolled back towards the river and around the Nehru Park close by where there were several statues of people dancing. The people in the statues seemed to wearing some sort of tribal costume, and I thought of Kunming and the statues there showing dancing ‘minority nationalities’. It was a holiday and at the park and along the promenade by the river there were couples holding hands and middle-class families strolling around with their children. More children were running around a playground nearby. Across the street, a sign read ‘Dr Q–First Sexology Therapy in the Northeast’.

Here in the town centre was also Cotton College. It had been founded at the start of the twentieth century and named after the chief commissioner at the time, Sir Henry Cotton. It must have been a fairly modest place then, as Gauhati was a small provincial town. The archway leading into the university read ‘Cotton College: 100 Years of Excellence’ and the campus itself was made up of many small buildings in a British-Indian style. I read later that the university now offered postgraduate courses in a range of disciplines from Persian to physics.

Across the way was an archaeological site. Recent excavations had found remains of settlements dating back to the sixth century. A small house stood by the entrance and when I peered in I saw three or four men watching the Australian Open tennis on a little television set. No one asked me to pay a fee. I walked around the ruins, the sound of tennis balls being thwacked in the background, tracing the old brick foundations that were still visible across the site. There was no one else there. A board explained that the ancient city of Pragjyotishpura stood where Gauhati is today.

In the evening I had dinner on the outskirts of town and on my way back passed by a little Baskin-Robbins ice-cream shop, all lit up along an otherwise dark and poorly paved road. A single car was parked in front and I could see a family inside, a man in a polo shirt, his kids in shorts, in a sort of facsimile of American suburban life. I imagined a middle-class life here in Gauhati, a house beyond the squalor, children at one of the church-run English-speaking schools, with occasional visits to Delhi or Calcutta or perhaps even Singapore or London to shop, bringing back books and clothes and toys, a generator helping at home when the electricity failed, the television and DVDs providing a continuous glimpse of the wider world, and here, an occasional treat at the Baskin-Robbins. It was a life not unfamiliar to me.

In ancient times, western Assam, including the area around Gauhati, was known as Kamarupa, the land ‘Where love regained his form’. The story goes something like this. The god Daksha had a daughter who married another god, Shiva. Daksha hated Shiva and disapproved of the marriage. One day Daksha hosted a great sacrifice, and invited everyone but Shiva. His daughter attended, but was so distraught with her father’s treatment of her husband that she killed herself. Shiva then became mad with grief and anger, dancing a terrible dance around the world while clutching his dead consort’s body, which then fell to the earth in fifty-one pieces.

The other gods became worried and finally sent Kamdeva, the Cupid of India, to make Shiva fall in love again, forget his wife, and end his dance of death. The plan worked. But Shiva then became so angry at Kamdeva that he turned him to ashes with a fiery glance of his eyes. Kamdeva eventually regained his life and form. The place where this happened was called Kamarupa.

Many believe that one of the pieces of Shiva’s consort’s dead body–her
yoni
or genitalia–fell to the earth just outside Gauhati at a hill-top where there is a temple to the goddess Kamakhya. All the fifty-one places where the pieces fell, spread over India, Nepal and Bangladesh, are places of pilgrimage and worship; Kamakhya is one of the more important, a powerful centre of Tantric practice. On my third day in Gauhati, I went with a friend to the Kamakhya temple, taking a taxi up a winding road and then walking across a big car park full of buses to the late medieval complex. There had been human sacrifices here in the past, and these days there are still goat sacrifices as well as the occasional sacrifice of a monkey. I saw people leading in goats on a leash as well as a little boy carrying a live chicken. A facilitator first took us to perform a
puja
for the god Ganesh. As a Buddhist, I’m not entirely unacquainted with Hindu rituals but I needed a little guidance. Hundreds of the faithful were making their way towards the centre of the temple, ready with flowers and butter and incense, their foreheads smeared with red powder. Signs read ‘No Not Offer Coconut Inside Temple’, ‘No Mobile Phones’ and ‘Electric Control Room’. There was a long queue and I was told this was to descend into the temple body itself. We paid some extra money to join ‘Special Queue No. 5’ but for twenty minutes the line barely moved. We politely complained, and after some discussion we paid 500 rupees more and went straight in through the VIP entrance.