Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (31 page)

Huge numbers of workers were brought in from other provinces, beginning around the 1870s. By the turn of the century, the number of people in Assam born elsewhere had risen from 100,000 to 600,000 out of a total population of two million. Initially, most came from tribal areas in Bihar that had been stricken by widespread famine. They included Mundas, Santhals and Oraons, peoples who had long existed on the margins of Indian civilization; many were now forcibly brought to Assam, in what was one of the largest organized forced migrations in history. The tea planters were almost all Scotsmen. In the scramble for land that followed, literally nothing was kept sacred as even the burial mounds of the
swargadeos
and other high-ranking Ahoms, as well as those of defeated Mughal generals, were appropriated as especially good for cultivation.

Poor and landless Bengali Muslim villagers were also encouraged to migrate to Assam, and for decades they would toil away, their back-breaking labour transforming forest and wasteland into rich farming land. In the 1920s, 200,000 Bengali immigrants had settled in one district alone (Nagaon). Others came as well. British-educated Bengalis helped to run the tea plantations and held middle- and lower-ranking civil service positions and (as in Burma too) became local teachers, lawyers and doctors. In 1905, Bengal was briefly partitioned into a Hindu-majority West Bengal and a Muslim-majority East Bengal. It was part of a ploy by Lord Curzon to ‘divide and rule’ and thereby tamp down growing nationalist dissent. The effect, though, would be the opposite; the outburst of anti-colonial sentiment that followed soon forced a British about-turn. As part of this scheme, Assam had been casually merged with East Bengal. This stirred local feelings and anxiety about the future existence of a distinct Assamese identity.

And, as in Burma, the later decades of British rule in Assam would witness the emergence of complex and sometimes contradictory opinions about ethnic belonging and nationalism amongst the array of peoples that called Assam home.

Not long after I was there, on 30 October 2009, a series of coordinated bomb blasts shook Gauhati and three other towns in Assam, killing sixty-one people and wounding at least another 300. The culprits were later believed to be a splinter wing of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (or NDFB), which had been formed in 1986 with the stated objective of securing a sovereign ‘Bodoland’ along the north bank of the Brahmaputra River. The Bodos are one of Assam’s many different peoples and their language, related to several others in the Northeast, is ultimately related to Tibetan and Burmese as well. The NDFB see themselves as heirs to an ancient and indigenous tradition. They are also more than willing to kill innocent civilians in order to push forward their agenda.

The decades after independence have not been very good for Assam. Wartime links to Burma and China dissipated with the end of fighting. And ancient trade and transport routes to Bengal, over the lower reaches of the Brahmaputra River, were snapped by Partition. For a year after Partition, even the narrow rail link across the Chicken’s Neck was severed. A long period of neglect by the central government was followed by the Chinese invasion of 1962. Isolation led to growing poverty and a sense that policy-makers in Delhi and the general public in other parts of the country cared little for Assam’s plight. Assam’s per capita GDP had been slightly over the national average at independence; today it is one of the lowest of any Indian state. And since independence, both the Brahmaputra valley and the adjacent upland areas have been rocked by tribal rebellions.

There has also been a large and continuous (and illegal) migration of people from what was first East Pakistan and then Bangladesh, the continuation of trends that existed for centuries and then accelerated in colonial times. East Pakistan/Bangladesh has experienced one of the highest rates of population growth anywhere in the world, and its population has soared from around 40 million in the 1940s to over 150 million today, placing tremendous pressure on land and other resources. And as there are no natural barriers between Bangladesh and India, millions of people have moved there in search of opportunity, as others had during British times. In Assam, many were registered on the voter rolls by political parties looking for new sources of support and this sapped local confidence in democratic institutions. The All Assam Students’ Union came to prominence in 1979 with an ‘Assam Agitation’ campaign aimed at purging illegal immigrants from the voter rolls and deporting them. The old struggle against the Mughals was explicitly evoked.

An armed group–the United Liberation Front of Asom (or ULFA)–was formed around the same time with the declared intent of ending what its members termed the Indian ‘colonial occupation of Assam’ and establishing a ‘sovereign socialist state’. In the 1980s contact was established between ULFA and other rebel outfits further east including the Kachin Independence Army in Burma, who sold arms and helped with training. Links were also established with intelligence services in Pakistan, keen to exploit weakness on India’s eastern flank, and, ironically, with Bangladesh, despite the group’s origins as a movement against Bangladeshi illegal immigration. ULFA set up bases in Bangladesh and in the western forests of Burma, in areas beyond the government’s control. ULFA even maintained bases for many years in Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom to the north of Assam, until 2003 when the Bhutanese army, in Operation Clear Out, forcibly expelled them.

By then, long-standing grievances, coupled with opportunities for money-making, had spawned dozens of armed groups of varying size. There was not only ULFA and the NDFB, but also the United Liberation Front of the Barak Valley, the Karbi Longri North Cachar Hills Liberation Front, the Bodo Liberation Tigers, and many more that have waxed and waned over the years, some agreeing to ceasefires with Delhi, often only to see break-away groups continuing attacks on their own. Thousands of innocent people have been caught up in the violence. And many of the militant groups, however heartfelt their initial grievances, have tended to become extortion rackets and have often resorted to terrorist tactics as well.

Several of ULFA’s bases are presently in Burma, approximately 250 miles northwest of Mandalay, in the hill areas away from the Burmese army’s control. The thousand-mile-long border between India and Burma is extremely porous and practically unguarded. A shadowy network of Chinese, Wa and other arms dealers and brokers, conniving with corrupt local officials, bring in arms, either from Yunnan or from the areas of Burma controlled by the United Wa State Army. They include old AK-series and Type 56 rifles, discarded by the Chinese army as part of its modernization drive, but then sold illicitly to various middlemen, and then finally to ULFA and other militant groups in northeast India.

For many years, ULFA also had bases in Bangladesh, where its leader ship was headquartered. This changed soon after the Bangladeshi elections of December 2008 and the coming to power of Sheikh Hasina and her Awami league. Sheik Hasina was keen to improve long-strained ties with India and in January 2009 she and Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh signed a broad-ranging communiqué on trade relations and improved transport links. More dramatically, she cracked down on ULFA militants operating from within Bangladesh. In December 2009 her government ‘facilitated’ the arrest of ULFA leader Arabinda Rajkhowa, who had been living in Bangladesh, and in May the following year, top Bodo separatist Rajan Daimary was similarly turned over. Both were sent to jail in Gauhati. ULFA’s ‘commander-in-chief’ Paresh Barua, however, is still at large and almost certainly somewhere along the Burma–Yunnan border, possibly in Ruili.

Governments in India, Bangladesh, Burma and China now routinely talk about the need for improved ‘connectivity’ between their countries and sign agreements pledging new roads and more open borders. But there is already a connectivity of a different sort, of violence and criminality, which in the future may only grow.

It’s hard not to compare the situation of Assam with that of Yunnan in China. There are similarities. Both are on the periphery of their respective countries and far from the main population centres. Both border on Burma and are landlocked and have traditionally been home to peoples somewhat or entirely distinct from the mainstream. And both are poor relative to the rest of India and China. But whereas Yunnan has seen significant development in recent decades and has become an engine of economic expansion into Burma and elsewhere in southeast Asia, Assam remains a troubled place, with continuing violence and an uncertain future. In Yunnan, the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army deployed ruthless means forcefully to integrate the province and stamp out any dissent. And though the Indian army has countered insurgencies with a heavy hand, India is a democracy, has created or maintained representative institutions as well as a free media, and has at times engaged in dialogue with its armed opponents in a way entirely alien to Beijing.

For China, all roads have led to Burma. The opening up of trade between Yunnan and Burma and the strengthening of ties more generally is seen in China as a strategic hedge against over-dependence on the Straits of Malacca, as well as a way of developing a new outlet to the sea for its landlocked interior. There is no downside to a policy of maximum economic engagement. But in Assam and India’s Northeast states more generally, security calculations have remained paramount and this has steered thinking as much towards a closing down as an opening up.

And whereas tourism has been a big part of Yunnan’s development, tourism in Assam, whether international or domestic, remains a negligible part of the economy. Some argue for an emulation of the Yunnan approach. An acquaintance in Gauhati said:

A more confident Delhi should allow the North east to become a regional hub, like Yunnan is trying to be. Only this will lead to positive change and real development. But there is a fear of letting go, a fear that greater openness, greater trade with China, a road to China through Burma, will be to China’s advantage.

The wife of a senior politician had made a similar point more prosaically:

Senior army chaps complained that if they allowed a road to China, Chinese forces might one day come down. I asked them–why is it always about the Chinese coming down, why can’t you go up?

From afar, the reports of new roads and new connections across Burma and between India and China seemed straightforward. Perhaps it was a new Silk Road in the making, perhaps the beginning of a twenty-first century Great Game. But an additional element was generally overlooked: Burma would not be connecting the parts of India and China most familiar in the West, the maritime Asia, that runs from Bombay to Shanghai and Tokyo, via the beaches of Thailand and Bali, Singapore and Hong Kong–the Asia that is developing fast, the Asia of high-tech manufacturing, glittering fashion shows and luxury tourism. Instead, Burma would be connecting the vast hinterlands of India and China, much less visible to the outside, poor and with a spine of violent conflict running right through.

‘Burma was for me the missing piece,’ a journalist had told me. He was from Assam and though he had lived overseas and travelled extensively, around Asia and the world, he had only gone to Burma for the first time a couple of years ago. We were in the living room of a small bungalow in Gauhati, the bookshelves slightly bent from the weight of books and papers, the windows open to the cool breeze outside, sitting around a wobbly wooden table and drinking glasses of Johnny Walker Red Label whisky. I understood exactly what he meant, because for me, Northeast India was my ‘missing piece’, together with Yunnan. Though I knew a little about Northeast India and Yunnan’s history before, it was not until the past few years that I had tried to learn more about these regions, regions intimately tied to Burma’s past, present and future.

Part of my time in Gauhati was spent at a conference attended by scholars, students and activists from around Northeast India. I had probably met no more than two or three people from Northeast India until this time, and what struck me immediately was how similar they seemed, in appearance and manner, to people in Burma. At the conference, there was discussion of China and China’s plans, in Burma and towards India. There were mixed views and many arguments. Some believed it could be a good thing if properly managed. Others believed the opposite. There were heated debates on the future of Northeast India generally, its place within the Indian Union, Indo-Burmese relations, and the future of ethnic minority rights. ‘I bet the Chinese are not having a seminar like this and just debating endlessly,’ said one participant. All agreed on the speed with which China was changing the landscape next door and that Northeast India itself was fast approaching a watershed.

In Assam I felt there was a degree of interest in Burma I had not felt anywhere else in India. People followed the politics closely, and there was sympathy both for the democracy movement and for the efforts of ethnic minorities to find some measure of self-determination. It wasn’t a memory of Burma, as in Calcutta, but an intuition that Burma’s future and Assam’s future were intertwined.

The feeling of shared connections would be even stronger in Imphal, at the very edge of the republic.

Imphal is the capital of Manipur, India’s easternmost state, and both Imphal and Manipur have a bad reputation. A ‘Protected Areas Permit’, not easy to get, is required for any foreigner to visit, and few bother because of the area’s history of violence and instability. ‘When I went I had to have a company of Indian soldiers protecting me,’ a Western diplomat had remarked by way of warning. I would have liked to have travelled by road from Gauhati. It would have meant a day by bus going over the Khasi and Jaintia Hills, past the old British hill station at Shillong, and then through Cachar, once a small independent kingdom. These names will mean nothing to most foreigners and little even to people in India, but they are names of places deeply associated with Burmese history. But I learned that foreigners were not allowed anywhere in Manipur other than Imphal itself. And so I flew, again on Jet Airways.

The outskirts of Imphal looked pleasant, with tall trees and well-maintained asphalt roads, the forested mountains visible in the distance. From the airport, I passed a sign advertising an ‘International Tent Pegging Championship’ that had just taken place, with a picture of men on horseback galloping across a green field. Further on was a small amusement park with a Ferris wheel and, at a couple of roundabouts, were billboards with posters for local films. Little houses alternated with open green space. The traffic was light, the sky was blue, and the air was cool and fresh.

Closer to the downtown area, though, the scene was less bucolic. Every couple of hundred yards were soldiers with slung rifles manning checkpoints. Some were in WWI-style steel helmets and surrounded by sandbags, as if expecting an imminent assault along the Somme. There was also rubble everywhere, which made some streets look like a war zone. I was later told that this wasn’t the result of conflict, only that elections were approaching and local authorities were trying to make good on their earlier promises of repairing the sewers, but the overall effect was still disconcerting. The buildings were mainly ugly concrete or brick piles, rudely made, and many seemed to be unfinished. Through the chaotic traffic, cars, old buses and many scooters, I could see skinny men dragging piles of boxes on rickshaws. On top of one tiny shop was a sign that said ‘Fast Food’, another said ‘Pharmacy’.

Stories about Manipur in the Indian media were almost always about violence. In late 2008, the Cobra Task Force of the People’s Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak had attacked the local parliament with a hand grenade. Another grenade had exploded closer to the residence of the governor himself, in what was meant to be one of the most secure parts of the city. Not long after, a different armed outfit, the Kangleipak Communist Party (Military Council), had attached an improvised bomb to a scooter and detonated it in a posh residential area.

On the first night at my guest-house, a spartan but clean place in the middle of town, I could occasionally hear a distant pop-pop-pop of gunfire. On television, the local news featured a story about the police killing some militants. There were inter views with family members who disputed the police story, arguing emotionally that the men had not been killed in a fire-fight but had instead been shot after being apprehended and taken outside. Other killings were shown. The television pictures included close-ups of dead bodies as they were found, with the eyes wide open.

Any nervousness on my part about being in Imphal quickly disappeared, however, after I changed the channel and began watching
Most Shocking
on the StarWorld satellite station. It was an American programme that featured ‘wild riots’ and ‘bedlam and brawls’. There was footage of furious gun battles in suburban California, a brutal no-holds-barred fight in Texas between several escaped convicts and highway police, and a riot at a heavy metal concert that left dozens bloodied. Imphal didn’t seem the safest place in the world, but I doubted I would come across anything even remotely as scary.

Manipur was an independent kingdom for centuries. The core of the kingdom was the little bowl-shaped valley right around Imphal. At times the rulers or rajas of Manipur had not controlled much else; other times their rule had reached further, sometimes as far as the Irrawaddy River, hundreds of miles away. South of Manipur was the rival kingdom of Tripura, today another state in the Indian republic. To the west were even smaller kingdoms, like Cachar, now long gone from the map, and then Assam, the big power in the neighbourhood. And all around were tribal peoples up on the sides of the mountains, such as the Nagas and Mizos, who lived under their own chiefs and were normally beyond the writ of any king. Up until the middle years of the nineteenth century, the region was a patchwork of these modest polities interspersed with highland areas of tribal autonomy; the languages of the different valleys and hills were sometimes as distinct from one another as English from Japanese.

The Manipur kingdom was at the height of its power in the early eighteenth century. Around the time of Louis XV in France and the War of the Austrian Succession, from here in Imphal Garib Newaz had conquered his tribal neighbours and defeated the rival kings of Cachar and Tippera. The valley was then under growing Indian influence and Garib Newaz had become a devout and proselytizing Hindu. With his newly found religious fervour came an interest in all aspects of Indian culture, so pundits from north India were invited to teach the Manipuri ruling elite the proper ways of a Hindu court. New ceremonies were adopted, together with imported caste rules and Indian titles, and Sanskrit texts were eagerly translated into the local language, Meithei (related distantly to Burmese and Tibetan and more closely to the hill dialects nearby). Emboldened by his new faith and early victories, Garib Newaz then led daring cavalry raids deep into Burmese territory, reaching the banks of the Irrawaddy in the 1740s and helping bring about the collapse of Burma’s tottering Ava dynasty.

A few decades later the tables would be turned and the Burmese, under an invigorated and vengeful new dynasty, invaded Manipur, not once but several times, wreaking havoc on the Imphal valley and bringing back several thousand captives. Some were the court pundits and Hindu ritualists and scholars of Sanskrit, and their descendants still live around Mandalay today.

And after the Burmese came the British. Together with Assam, Manipur was one of the prizes of British victory over the Burmese after the war in 1824–6. The British had no real interest in Manipur except for a time as a frontier state against their Burmese foes. When the remnants of the Burmese kingdom were annexed after a final Anglo-Burmese war in 1886, even that minor strategic interest disappeared. Unlike Assam, with its new-found value as a giant tea plantation, Manipur offered little profit-making opportunity.

This did not mean, however, that the colonial rulers in Calcutta would leave Manipur alone and an agent was sent to watch over the local court. In 1891, when the king was overthrown in a palace coup, the British intervened and tried to arrest the offenders. In the ensuing drama, the chief commissioner of Assam, James Quinton (who was visiting and trying to sort things out), was speared to death and the political agent, Frank Grimwood, was beheaded, together with several other British officers. Only Mrs Grimwood (who had trekked out to this lonely outpost of the Raj to be with her husband) managed to escape, protected by an escort of Gurkhas. She would later write an exciting book about her ordeal. The British counter-attacked and the result was a foregone conclusion. The coup leader was hanged on the Imphal polo ground. A new prince was raised to the throne and in this way the British entrenched their presence.

For the next four decades Manipur was an Indian ‘princely state’, not one of the most important like Kashmir or Hyderabad, but on the rung just below. The maharaja of Manipur was allowed to build a big palace, invited to Calcutta and New Delhi for imperial assemblies and coronations, and assured of receiving the appropriate gun salute and place at the viceregal table. There was little unrest and no real development.

Then came the Second World War and Manipur suddenly found itself on the front line between the Allies and the empire of Japan.

The Japanese invaded Burma in early 1942, driving the British up in into the Kachin Hills and then over the jungle passes into Assam. It was the longest retreat in British history. A year of stalemate followed with the front line more or less the current India–Bangladesh–Burma border. But in 1944, as the tide was turning against the Axis powers, the Japanese high command decided for a make-or-break assault on India, through Manipur. No fewer than five divisions were placed under General Renya Mutaguchi and these were joined by the forces of the Indian National Army or Azad Hind Fauj, troops loyal to the politician and independence fighter Subhas Chandra Bose.

Bose was a graduate of Cambridge University and a former president of the Indian National Congress, alongside Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru. But he had little time for constitutional politics or the sort of non-violent campaigns led by Gandhi. He had spent time as a prisoner in Mandalay jail and later sought help, first from Nazi Germany and then from Japan, forming his army in Singapore and then going to Rangoon in the wake of the Japanese invasion. He hoped Manipur would be the first step towards the liberation of all India.

The speed and intensity of the initial attacks surprised the British, who were led by the immensely capable General (later Viscount) William Slim. A mammoth Allied presence had been built up in Assam and the hills between India and Burma over the past year, with new roads linking Calcutta and the tea plantations along the Brahmaputra to the little hill towns along what was now the front line of the war. With the Japanese attack, two British-Indian divisions, the 20th and the 17th, were ordered to retreat from their positions further to the south and back towards Imphal, but whereas the 20th reached Imphal safely, the 17th was cut off and had to fight its way back into the valley. Another division with artillery was quickly flown in from the Arakan sector on the Burma coast.

Weeks of heavy fighting followed. North of Imphal the battle of Kohima would prove decisive. Troops from the Assam Rifles and the 4th Royal West Kents were supplied by air as they engaged in grim and often hand-to-hand fighting against Japanese attacks. Through much of April, the grounds around the bungalow of Kohima Deputy Commissioner Charles Pawsey, including his tennis court, became the scene of some of the most ferocious combat. It would be remembered as the ‘Battle of the Tennis Court’. Meanwhile, despite determined Japanese attacks, the British were able to hold on to the hills around Imphal and by late June Allied forces were able to reopen the road between Imphal and Kohima, effectively breaking the siege of Imphal. It was clear that the back of the Japanese assault had been broken. General Slim’s strategy all along had been to lure the Japanese into a trap, crush them, and then counter-attack. It worked. The Japanese had lost tens of thousands of men and were now compelled to retreat back towards the Irrawaddy, with General Slim’s battalions in hot pursuit. Mandalay would fall to the Allies in early 1945. By May 1945 Rangoon was again in British hands.

I visited the Allied war cemetery in Imphal. About 1,500 soldiers, mainly British, were buried here. Many were men of the West Yorkshire and North Staffordshire Regiments. Some had anonymous tombstones, that had ‘A Soldier of the 1939–45 War’ or ‘Known Unto God’ inscribed. Others were hauntingly personal. One said ‘Treasured Memories of My Husband Reg, Until We Meet Again, Darling, Doris’. On another was written ‘Thinking of you, dear, Mum and Dad. Age 22’. Other tombs belonged to Canadians, Australians, Indians and even a few Africans, like the one of ‘Pvt Sudi Mirazi Chingamba, East African Army Corps (Service Unknown)’. The garden around the cemetery was beautifully attended, like all the Allied war graves I have seen in Burma. There were little kids playing along the far wall and dark grey piglets were squealing just outside. Next door was the KBC or Kuki Baptist Church, the Kukis being a tribal people who were now almost all Christian. There was a service under way and I could hear singing. I saw no other monuments to the war in Imphal, no other sign that for a brief moment Manipur was at the centre of the global stage, the ‘Stalingrad of Asia’. With the end of the war, the spotlight was gone, and the roads that had carried Allied and Axis armies were soon again dirt tracks, the connection again severed between this part of India and Burma and the Far East.

As 1948 approached, Manipur was at a historical crossroads. In August 1947 the British had pulled out of India, dividing the empire into India and Pakistan. As part of an implicit deal with India’s new rulers, the departing Raj had agreed that all the princely states like Manipur would be forced to join one or the other of the new countries. There were hundreds of these states, some really just big landowner estates, others the size of European countries. Conservative voices in London, and within the British officialdom in India, had hoped for a while to retain ties with these princely states, and keep them separate from any newly independent India. There would be a three-way division–‘Pakistan’, ‘Hindustan’, and ‘Princestan’–with the last remaining loyal to the British crown. But as independence approached, the idea of a special deal for the princely states came to naught, not least because this arrangement was entirely unacceptable both to the Congress Party and to the Muslim League. But because in theory they each had their own treaty relationship with the British crown, the voluntary consent of their rulers was still necessary for their states to join India or Pakistan. Whichever they chose, the princes were told, they would still be guaranteed continued autonomy. Most were too small to be able to survive outside a bigger country and their rulers, knowing this, quickly signed the ‘instrument of accession’. Some, though, imagined their states as viable independent nations–states like Hyderabad, as big as France, and ruled by its immensely rich nizam, or Travancore, along the Arabian Sea. Only maximum pressure compelled the princes of these states, so long coddled by the colonial regime, to sign. The ones that found themselves within the borders of the new Pakistan (very few) joined Pakistan, the rest joined the new Indian union. One state, Kashmir, with its Muslim majority but Hindu maharaja, was on the border between the two and was vigorously coveted by both; the dispute over its future would soon result in war, and is at the heart of the tense relationship that exists to this day between the two main successor states of British India.