Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (33 page)

After a couple of weeks elsewhere in India, I felt in Manipur that I was back in southeast Asia. Other than the traditional saris that many women wore, there was really nothing in the scenery or in the appearance of the people on the streets that was different at all from most places in Burma, Laos or northern Thailand. Imphal was a thousand miles from Delhi, but only about 400 from Mandalay. An acquaintance said:

If you dropped a chap from here in the middle of Mandalay he could learn his way around within a few days. Everything works in the same way. If you dropped the same chap in a town in Uttar Pradesh [India’s biggest state, near Delhi], it would take him months.

What was different were the heavily armed police and army patrols; the soldiers, who were drawn from the Punjab and other faraway places in India, with their different complexions and aquiline faces, looked alien, swirling around in their armoured personnel carriers, automatic weapons on display. Another difference was the fluency in English of nearly everyone I came across, including ordinary shopkeepers and restaurant staff, a testament to the excellent Christian-run schools throughout the North east. Indeed, the only Western-looking people I saw in Imphal were an American family I saw at a restaurant, clean-cut and led by a white-haired patriarch, who I assumed was a missionary, as he had with him a loose-leaf binder with the words ‘Faith Walk’ on the cover, and a big hardcover book entitled
Lead Like Jesus
.

The violence in Manipur may have had its roots in a local patriotism against New Delhi, but in the decades since independence it has changed into something much messier, blurring the line between political violence and mafia-style racketeering, and setting one local ethnic group against another. Only a little more than half of the people of Manipur are Hindus speaking Meithei, the traditional language of the Imphal valley. In the hills are other peoples, mainly Nagas (who, as noted, now also have their own state, Nagaland, further north) and Kukis (closely related to the people of Mizoram state to the south as well as the people of the adjacent Chin Hills in Burma). These hill people are almost all Christians and are divided into innumerable tribal groups and sub-groups, each with their own dialects. There are also the Muslims, called the Pangals, who are about 7 per cent of the population and live mainly in and around Imphal. It’s an ethnic complexity that only a courageous newspaper editor elsewhere would want to explain.

It was like a mini-Burma. The Meithei have always felt superior to the hill peoples, in the same way that the lowland Burmans and Shans have felt superior to the upland Karens or the Kachins. Between the different groups in Manipur there are rival visions of the future. None were happy with their place in India, but this shared feeling did not lead to common action. Instead, many different militant groups sprouted up and began fighting with each other as well as with the state authorities. Many Nagas, for example, would like to see independence from India not only for what is now Nagaland, but for a ‘Greater Nagaland’ incorporating parts of Manipur. This notion is hotly resisted by others. In early 2010, the Manipur government decided not to allow a visit by the Naga separatist leader Thuingaleng Muivah to his birthplace in Manipur, for fear this would serve only to underline Naga claims to part of their state. In protest, Naga groups blockaded roads to Imphal bringing the economy to a stand still. The blockade was only ended weeks later after New Delhi intervened and sent in paramilitary units. To make a long and complex story short, in this little corner of the republic, with only about two and a half million people, there are no fewer than forty different insurgent militias. Some fight the Indian state; nearly all fight each other.

There are several checkpoints along the way, but people in Imphal can cross the border to the town of Tamu in Burma, about fifty miles away. And some have received permission to travel onwards, through the Kabaw valley, all the way to Mandalay. This is a recent thing. I spoke to a man in Imphal who had recently gone as part of a group tour, sightseeing, visiting all the places in and around Mandalay linked historically to Manipur, and meeting members of the Manipuri communities that still exist in the area, descendants of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century captives and immigrants. He and his tour companions dressed up and took photographs of themselves in the costumes of
ponnas
or ritualists of the Burmese court, the majority of whom had originally been from Manipur. He said he was happy in this way to reclaim a lost heritage.

The interest in Burma is considerable. On the morning of my third and last day in Imphal, I received a telephone call in my hotel room. The voice on the other side asked to see me, introducing himself as an avid historian of Burma. ‘I have read your books and would like to meet you, to discuss Burmese history and share with you some of my writing,’ he said. I thought he might have been someone from the Burma Studies Centre. I was packed up and ready to head for the airport and so at first declined. He phoned a second and then a third time, each time very polite but more persistent. ‘I would really like to see you! I am now only a few minutes away from your hotel!’ I finally agreed and walked downstairs and waited on the front steps.

Just then, a big convoy of armoured personnel carriers pulled up, heavily armed soldiers in full armour jumping out and taking position around the hotel. An officer and a few men walked briskly past me through the entrance and then up the flight of stairs. I thought there was going to be a raid on the hotel; perhaps a militant was holed up inside. But the officer, a small wiry man in green fatigues, suddenly reappeared and reintroduced himself. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you right away! Thank you so much for agreeing to see me!’ It was the man on the phone. He was, he said, a colonel in the security forces but also an amateur Burma historian and head of the local Manipur–Burma history association. Over the next half hour we sat down over tea, looking at the papers he had written, and talking about the importance of renewing links between our two countries. He then apologized for having to leave, saying he had to join an anti-insurgent operation on the outskirts of town, and jumped happily into his waiting jeep, before his convoy of APCs raced off in a cloud of dust.

I had noticed the billboards advertising Manipuri films when I was coming in from the airport and saw them as well all around Imphal. The men and women on the billboards looked like Burmese actors, with their slightly plump faces and elaborate hairdos. One evening on TV I saw a Manipuri film awards ceremony, and later learned that Imphal actually had a long tradition of local cinema, going back to the 1930s. In 2000, a rebel group called the Revolutionary People’s Front had banned the screening of Hindi-language films as well as the distribution of all Hindi satellite channels (rebel groups in Manipur can make and enforce these kinds of edicts), saying that these Bollywood imports were a corruption of local culture, obscene, and a vehicle for the ‘feudal values’ of India (rebel groups in the Northeast tend to have a left-wing and puritanical bent, as in Burma). They had already banned pornography, recreational drugs and alcohol and threatened to bomb any cinema screening these wicked imports.

This has had a curious if unintended consequence: a craze for Korean soap operas. The Korean satellite channel Arirang TV is widely available and I was told thousands of people in Imphal are glued every night to the screen. People say the Koreans resemble them (the Manipuris) in appearance and that they see cultural bonds not present with ‘India proper’. This may be fanciful, but these shows have become a cultural phenomenon, with young people looking up to the Korean actors and actresses, listening to Korean pop songs, and copying the latest Seoul fashions.

There is no similar trend towards aping fashions from the Indian heartland. And people not just in Manipur but in other parts of the Northeast, especially these most eastern areas, complain bitterly about what they see as discrimination when travelling to Delhi, Bombay and cities further west. India is an incredibly diverse country, with the differences between north and south India, for example, being as great as between any two parts of Europe, in culture, language, and even the appearance of the people. But people from north and south India will almost certainly be seen as ‘looking Indian’ by each other. People from the Northeast, though, are routinely mistaken for foreigners, as visitors from China or Japan; others say they have found themselves the target of everything from racist jokes to unprovoked violence. Here looking east wasn’t only about economic policy and political strategy, but related as well to issues of identity and a search for fresh connections.

Others looked for connections in another direction. There is a group of people, nearly 10,000 strong, called the Bnei Menashe, from the hills south of Imphal, who claim descent from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. They speak a local language called Mizo and are called the Bnei Menashe because they believe that their legendary ancestor Manmasi is none other than Manasseh, son of Joseph. They also point to a traditional harvest song, in which their enemies chase them across a red-coloured sea, as clear evidence of their Israelite ancestry. They say that their forefathers escaped Assyrian captivity 3,000 years ago and began a long trek to Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet and China, and from there to the Northeast of India. The idea may have started under the tutelage of Christian missionaries, some of whom had millenarian leanings. Many Mizo converted to Welsh Presbyterianism and many others were Pentecostals. There may have also been earlier, forgotten influences, as Christianity and Judaism are not newcomers in Asia.

As early as the 1950s, some Bnei Menashe were set on what they saw as a God-directed reversion to Judaism as well as a return to Israel. They began petitioning the Israeli embassy in Burma for help. Though many in Israel were dismissive of their ‘Lost Tribe’ beliefs others were keen to facilitate their immigration. In recent years, nearly 2,000 have been allowed to emigrate to Israel and undergo Orthodox conversions; 7,000 more are waiting to go. Most have wound up in the West Bank and (prior to the Israeli pull-out) in settlements in the Gaza strip; and during the 2006 Lebanon war at least a dozen of these men from the India–Burma borderlands even found themselves fighting against Hezbollah.

As along the Yunnan–Burma borderland, local peoples were not just pawns on a map, but actively shaping the landscape, identifying their own interests and, as in this case, looking beyond their immediate neighbourhoods for ideas about who they were and what they wanted to be.

In November 1950, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, then home minister, sent a letter to Prime Minister Nehru warning of the risks posed by China via the Northeast:

We have to consider what new situation now faces us as a result of the disappearance of Tibet, as we knew it, and the expansion of China almost up to our gates. Throughout history we have seldom been worried about our north-east frontier. The Himalayas have been regarded as an impenetrable barrier against any threat from the north. We had a friendly Tibet which gave us no trouble. The Chinese were divided. They had their own domestic problems and never bothered us about frontiers.

China is no longer divided. It is united and strong…All along the Himalayas in the north and north-east, we have on our side of the frontier a population ethnologically and culturally not different from Tibetans and Mongoloids. The undefined state of the frontier and the existence on our side of a population with its affinities to the Tibetans or Chinese have all the elements of potential trouble between China and ourselves…The people inhabiting these portions have no established loyalty or devotion to India.

Sixty years later, there is no indication that people in the North east have any desire to come under Chinese domination. Militant groups have received Chinese training and support, at least in the past, but this was done opportunistically and not out of any special affinity to Beijing. Indeed, in many of my conversations, there was more a sense of dread that, with China’s growing stature and influence, the little nationalities caught between ‘India proper’ and China would find it harder, not easier, to maintain their separate identities and traditions.

The Chinese economic steamroller appeared unstoppable, drawing in natural resources, dominating everything in its path. If even rich and giant economies like the US were wary of China’s growing might, what hope, people said, did places like Manipur have, when, in just a few years’ time, the roads will be complete, and China just a day’s drive away?

It is a line of thinking that is perhaps a little defeatist. After all, as we have seen, China has a raft of challenges of its own and Yunnan, though far more developed now than either Burma or Northeast India, is still poor. And the quiescence of Yunnan’s many minority peoples is at least in part due to the country’s phenomenal economic performance in recent years, something that is not guaranteed to continue. In early 2011, New Delhi began peace talks with both ULFA and the Isaac–Muivah faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, two of the most powerful insurgent groups remaining in the Northeast. What if a peace actually comes to Northeast India, after six decades? The peaceful and democratic Northeast, with its ethnic and cultural diversity, would be a compelling example for others. China has been unmatched at building new infrastructure, and its roads through Burma may well bring an era of Chinese ascendancy. But roads go two ways, and in a slightly different world, it could well be India or even Burma that influences Yunnan’s future, as much as the other way around.

The old frontiers that had long separated India and China were coming to an end and, in their place, a new crossroads was being made.

From Rangoon the road, a good two-lane metalled road, first curves around the Gulf of Martaban, past little towns and villages and seemingly endless fields of rice paddy, then crosses the mile-wide Salween River, before heading straight south, down the Tenasserim coastline. Burma is shaped like a kite and Tenasserim is its long and narrow tail, 670 miles long. On one side are the warm waters of the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Madras is on the far shore. And on the other side of Tenasserim are the lime stone mountains that separate Burma from Thailand, some with peaks over 5,000 feet high. There has been considerable commercial logging in recent years, but many of the mountains and the little valleys in between are still densely forested, with teak and bamboo, and remain home to herds of wild elephants, Malayan tapirs and perhaps even a few dozen Indochinese tigers, on the brink of extinction. During the monsoon, torrential rains soak the region. Most of the rest of the year it’s sunny, hot and humid.

With a population of about half a million, Moulmein is the largest town along the coast, and a five-hour drive from Rangoon. Its setting is spectacular, with the land rising dramatically behind and big and small islands spread across the massive and gently rounded bay in front. In the early nineteenth century, it was briefly the capital of British Burma, a port of some significance, and a starting point for the American Baptist missionaries who set out to convert the Karen tribal peoples in the hills nearby. There are still many churches–Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist and Baptist–as well as a European cemetery that looks like a haunted graveyard from a Hollywood film, darkened from the shade of the overhanging trees, with broken tombstones and the statues of angels, their wings now covered in dirt and mould, peering out from the overgrown vegetation. One tombstone, its engravings barely readable, records the death of one Mary Eleanor Malcolm, who died in 1886, aged 48, as well as her daughter Lucy Harriette, aged 18, who died ten days later. Many others also record young deaths, likely from disease.

Rudyard Kipling stopped briefly in Moulmein in 1889 and it was Moulmein that inspired his poem ‘The Road to Mandalay’. The town was also where George Orwell served as an imperial policeman, in the 1920s, and is the location for his essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’, which begins: ‘In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people–the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.’ And it was to Moulmein that the Japanese army during World War Two built their notorious railway line, across the ‘Bridge over the River Kwai’, from Bangkok over the mountains, an effort that left 90,000 Burmese and Thai workers and over 16,000 Allied POWs dead.

Today it’s a sleepy town, its wide streets, laid out in a grid pattern, lined with fruit trees and tall and slender palms. Several of the colonial-period buildings, with their gabled roofs and white washed and ornamented stucco façades, have been remade into government offices; one is a museum, with a few ancient and medieval artefacts and many more gorgeous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century statues of the Buddha. There is a new hotel, the Attran, and about a hundred yards away a tiny internet café, with half a dozen kids playing computer games. Along the water front, a recent fire destroyed many of the old shops but otherwise the town seems little changed from what I imagine it was like during Orwell’s time. Golden-spired pagodas dominate the higher ground, and there is as well an exquisite nineteenth-century Buddhist monastery, built by an exiled Burmese princess in the ‘Mandalay style’, its teak walls slightly bent with age, its priceless murals fading away. The faces on Moulmein’s streets are Indian as well as Burmese, a product of colonial times when many Indian immigrants made the town their home. At the covered market, fish mongers, all women, sell the day’s catch from big wicker baskets.

Sleepier still is the town of Tavoy, 180 miles to the south. It’s a little town, utterly dark at night from the lack of electricity, and shut off on three sides by high mountains. There are several British-era bungalows, all made of teak, including a fairly grand one, with orchids blooming in the garden, that was once the home of the British district commissioner. Nearby are small farms of cashews and mangoes. And then there is the sea, just a couple of miles to the west of the town centre, with picture-perfect beaches of white sand, the water as still and warm as a bath. Tiny wooden fishing boats float in the distance. About 450 miles to the south is the Thai island of Phuket, crammed with five million visitors a year, from international movie stars and European royalty to gap-year students and backpackers on $5 a day. But here, and in the dozens of islands offshore, the beaches, at least as beautiful, are virtually empty and pristine.

Perhaps not for long. In October 2010, the governments of Burma and Thailand revealed plans for the development of a massive industrial complex along the Tenasserim coast. Some $8.6 billion will be invested in the basic infrastructure. Another $58 billion in investments is meant to follow. The complex will include a deep-sea port, steel, fertilizer and petrochemical plants, and an oil refinery. A new highway will cut through the mountains to Bangkok. There would be tourist resorts as well, on a giant scale. Tavoy would be ground zero.

There are justifiable worries that all this will devastate the environment. And indeed, the Thai government has said that its prime motivation in supporting the project is to move environmentally damaging industries from Thailand to Burma. There are worries too about the fate of local people, especially the small farmers who stand to lose their land, for little or no compensation.

Its backers, though, say that the new Tavoy complex will create ‘millions’ of new jobs. Burmese officials and businessmen hope that it will emulate Shenzhen, China’s first ‘Special Economic Zone’ that in the 1980s pioneered its epic industrialization. The plan is tied to Chinese schemes further east. Over the coming few years, Chinese companies hope to build new railway lines from Yunnan directly south to Laos, Thailand and Cambodia. A highway will then join these railway lines to Tavoy and the Indian Ocean. Container ships, piled high with goods from China’s Pearl Delta, will be able to sail directly to Europe, making unnecessary the long route around the Straits of Malacca. Oil tankers from the Middle East will be able to dock here as well, the refined oil then transported over the mountains to Thailand and elsewhere. There is a link to India too: the highway will continue on from Tavoy to Moulmein, and then across central Burma to Manipur and Assam.

And as new plans are being made, older plans are being realized. Away to the north, off the Arakan coast at Ramree Island, the construction of another deep-sea port has begun, as well as of the oil and gas pipelines that are to run from there to China. Beginning in 2013, up to half a million barrels of oil a day, oil from Africa and the Persian Gulf, will be transported through this pipeline to Kunming. In December 2010, Chinese authorities announced that the Burmese government would be given 50,000 barrels of oil a day as a fee for the pipeline and that China and Burma together would build an oil refinery near Mandalay. By 2015 a high-speed railway line, long discussed, will finally be completed, and will allow people and cargo to travel from Ramree Island, via Mandalay, to Yunnan. Burma will be southwest China’s back door to the Indian Ocean. The Chinese have also started work on repairing the old Stilwell Road, from the Chinese border through the Kachin Hills, right up to the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.

And India too is finally moving ahead with its plans, including the $400 million Kaladan ‘multi-modal’ project, that will link, by river and highway, an upgraded port at Akyab (just north of Ramree Island) to its state of Mizoram. By 2015, goods from Calcutta and India’s other eastern ports, as well as from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, will start to move via Akyab to India’s hitherto landlocked Northeast. Talks have even progressed between China and Bangladesh. During a 2010 visit by Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to Kunming, it was agreed in principle that the new railway from Kunming to Ramree would be connected all the way to Chittagong in Bangladesh, joining up Yunnan and Bangladesh’s 150 million people. With improved ties between India and Bangladesh, there is even the possibility that this new corridor will extend all the way to Calcutta.

What was barely discernible just a few years ago is now a readily visible fact: Burma, long a barrier between the great civilizations of the east, is becoming a new crossroads of Asia.

The hotel was full–the same hotel in downtown Rangoon where I had stayed two years earlier. Then, the only people staying there were UN officials and other aid workers, pulling up in Landcruisers, carrying laptops and folders, together with a scattering of Chinese and other businessmen. Now there were hundreds of holidaying tourists, mainly Asian, but also many Americans and Europeans. The glass counter on the side of the lobby that sold quiche, cakes and croissants had been remade into a sort of gingerbread house, with decorated pieces of cardboard making up the sides the new ‘house’, and the two women inside wore red Santa Claus hats, as did the waitresses at the adjacent café. There was a small Christmas tree next to the reception area, and a special Christmas dinner was offered at the main restaurant, featuring roast turkey and a selection of wines. A ‘Merry Christmas’ banner was draped over the main entrance.

I had checked in together with a coachload of young Spaniards, sunburned and spotty, and noticed later big tour groups of Koreans, Thais and Italians as well. And over the next few days, all around the city, I saw more tourists than I had ever seen before: a group of elderly Australians, the men in shorts, both the men and women in hats, examining the old colonial buildings along the Strand; linen-clad German and French shoppers bargaining for Burmese
longyis
and lacquerware at the Scott Market; and well-heeled Americans, often with their own private guides and cars. Not only were all the main hotels full, but so were the six flights a day from Bangkok. A friend who owned a small travel company said the 2010–11 ‘high season’ was shaping up to be the best ever for Burmese tourism.

There were other signs of a sharp upturn in business. Several new shopping malls had just been completed, and along Prome Road, the main artery into the city, several large apartment complexes were being built. There was construction everywhere, and property prices were shooting up. In the more fashionable parts of town, four-bedroom houses were now selling for over $2 million and buyers were paying in cash. Electricity supplies were also more regular–close to twenty-four hours a day for the first time in decades–thanks to a newly built dam as well as a small natural gas pipeline that had just been completed. The streets downtown were crowded with billboards advertising movies, clothes, cosmetics and household appliances and even the cars on the street seemed slightly improved, with many new four-wheel drives and luxury saloons.

In the cool winter sunshine, with Christmas decorations all around, and New Year parties just around the corner, it was easy to conclude that Rangoon was better off than two years before, just after Cyclone Nargis. But Rangoon on the surface is not necessarily a good indicator of the more general Burmese economy. There was definitely a lot of new money. Some of this was down to just one source–the sale of jade to China, which through 2010 and early 2011 had netted over $4 billion, with some of the money going to the government in taxes, but most going to well-to-do businessmen, Burmese and Chinese, who had then invested the money in property or splurged on expensive new cars. But it was at best uncertain whether the lives of the vast majority of people, beyond say the top few hundred thousand, were improving at all. Income inequality was likely increasing, not decreasing, and by all accounts poverty in the countryside, and even for Rangoon’s working classes, remained dire.

The country’s first election in twenty years had been held on 7 November. It had been a carefully choreographed process, and so, as expected, the pro-junta Union Solidarity and Development Party, or USDP, won by a landslide, capturing approximately 80 per cent of the seats contested. A number of ethnic-minority based parties had done well in their own regions (one actually winning control of the regional legislature), but all the other independent parties had fared extremely poorly.

The USDP had entered the elections with an enormous financial and institutional advantage and had fielded candidates in every constituency, whilst high registration fees kept most independent parties from competing in more than a small minority. There were also widespread allegations of vote-rigging, especially in Rangoon, and no international monitoring except at a handful of polling stations. There were other factors as well. The leadership of the USDP were nearly all recently retired army men, but most of their candidates were drawn from small-town elites, businessmen and others, with their own money and bases of support. And the opposition itself was divided. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy had split over the issue of whether or not to compete in the elections, with those in favour forming a new National Democratic Front and the rest supporting a boycott of the polls. Many who might have voted for the small number of opposition candidates chose instead to stay at home.

And then, on 17 November, just a week after the election, Aung San Suu Kyi was released after more than six years under house arrest. Over the next few weeks, she gave dozens of interviews to foreign media, repeating many of her old messages on the need for ‘unity’ and calling for a ‘peaceful revolution’ towards democracy. Western diplomats, one after another, went to see her to ask her advice on the way forward. But she was now more of a global icon, with an almost cult-like status, than the leader of a political movement within Burma. Her personality and her story of sacrifice, the inspiration she offered and the moral virtues she espoused, seemed to matter more to her supporters, at home and abroad, than did any ability to move facts on the ground. Three months later, she seemed to be still judging the new environment, waiting for the new government to form, undecided about what her strategy should be.