|
 |
S P E C I A L R
E P O R T S
Flowerless Insein
The Indian policy to view
Aung San Suu Kyi's incarceration in a dreaded
prison as an "internal matter" of
Burma will backfire.
28 June 2003: Daw Aung
San Suu Kyi, the hope of Burma and the most
famous wearer of jasmine flowers in the world,
has been interred in the dreaded Insein prison
after a violent clampdown launched on
pro-democracy activists by state-sponsored
militias in May. Insein is Burma’s "Lubyanka",
a "special jail" outside Yangon where
political prisoners are systematically tortured
and broken down by the military junta, the dead
house where hundreds of National League for
Democracy (NLD) workers have perished from
starvation, disease and abuse for the last
twelve years.
Believed to be crammed with as many as ten
thousand inmates at any given time, Insein is
perennially short of bare essential supplies.
Paucity of syringe needles has generated
repeated HIV AIDS-epidemics. Paucity of clean
water has led to mass dysentery deaths. Paucity
of space is an incentive to daily rapes and
stabbings. If at all anything is available in
plenty, it is barbed electric wire, iron chains,
manacles and other diabolical weapons to inflict
physical pain on detainees.
I doubt if Daw Suu Kyi will be allowed to adorn
her hair with fragrant jasmines in Insein
because everything in this confined penitentiary
runs by writ of bribes and espionage. Perform a
favour for the guards and maybe you can get
three square meals a day. Since oiling the palms
of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC)
would lower the dignity of democracy fighters,
the latter have universally preferred death to
ingratiating jailers. But then, Razali Ismail,
the UN Secretary General’s special envoy, says
that she is “well and in good spirits.”
Compared to the rank-and-file NLD workers, the
junta has tended to treat her like a VIP
throughout her decade-long house arrest ordeals.
Ismail “did not see any signs of injury on
her…no scratches on her face, no broken
arm”.
The coarse and inhuman conduct reserved for
ordinary captives will obviously not be meted
out to someone as high profile as Daw Suu Kyi,
but then it would be a lie to claim she has not
suffered much for standing up to dictatorship
and injustice. In 1999, her husband Michael Aris
was in the advanced stages of prostate cancer in
England. He requested permission to visit his
wife one last time, but the military rulers
denied entry, arguing that there are no
appropriate facilities in the country to tend to
a dying man. They suggested instead that Suu Kyi
visit him in England, hoping to exile her
permanently and stoke propaganda that she is a
“foreign woman” who leads a scandalous
lifestyle in the West. She refused, fearing that
leaving the country would result in banishment.
Aris passed away without seeing her. Sacrifice
is in her blood, made votive by the scented
jasmines that symbolically defy Burma’s harsh
fate and her own.
In his spare time, prime minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee pens Hindi poetry hailing heroic women
studded with aromatic flowers who will inherit
the earth and bring peace. Not unaware of the
tribulations Daw Suu Kyi and the Burmese people
are being subjected to right in India’s
immediate neighbourhood, he and his foreign
office have failed to issue even a murmur of
protest on the latest grotesque twist at Insein.
Navtej Sarna, the Indian external affairs
spokesman, laconically commented, “we are
watching the situation in Myanmar
carefully…solutions to internal problems must
come from within”. Poetry and politics don’t
mix for Vajpayee. Poetry and so-called national
interests are even more incompatible in
"realist" India.
Trade and cultural exchange between Burma and
India date back to the age of Emperor Ashoka
(Third Century BC). Buddhism traveled through
eastern India to Burma. From 1885 to 1937, Burma
was a province of British India, a period of
administrative harmonisation between the two
countries. During the freedom struggle against
colonial rule, the national leaders of the two
countries developed close political links which
stood the test of time for years after
Independence. Jawaharlal Nehru and U Nu shared a
common worldview of nonalignment and India
helped the newly-independent Burma tide over
crisis after crisis. In the Fifties, Nehru
extended military assistance to U Nu, saving his
"Rangoon Government" from advancing
insurgents. Daw Khin Kyi, Suu Kyi’s mother,
was ambassador to India in the 1960s and her
daughter studied at Delhi’s Lady Shriram
College. Over the years, Burma has acquired in
the Indian mind an emotional nostalgic image
immortalised by the 1949 Bollywood classic Patanga,
where the hero croons into the telephone to his
beloved- Ham Burma ki galiyon mein, aur tum
ho Dehradun (I gallivant the lanes of Burma
while you stay unhappy in Dehradun – an Indian
hill station).
After the post-1988 pro-democracy uprising
caught the Burmese military in a bind and led to
the annulment of NLD’s election victory, India
was the first and only neighbour to clearly and
openly take the side of Daw Suu Kyi. Rajiv
Gandhi, who knew Suu Kyi from her student days
in Delhi, instructed border troops to not deter
genuine Burmese refugees and dissenters seeking
asylum in India. Ubiquitous ‘Burma colonies’
appeared in major Indian cities and public
sympathy for the NLD was on prominent display on
the streets.
Around 1992, foreign-policy pundit J.N.Dixit
initiated a new "Look East policy" for
India that would steer the locus of Indian
external interests from the problematic
northwestern side towards the
economically-promising Southeast Asia.
Geostrategically, India was announcing to China
that its interests stretched into the hitherto
neglected Asia Pacific and that it will compete
with Beijing’s predominance in that region.
China was inching ever closer to India’s
sphere of influence in South Asia via friendly
Burma and Indian intelligence was rife with
reports that Pakistan and China were
infiltrating arms, drugs and insurgents into
Northeast India through the Burmese border.
Under these circumstances, India reasoned that a
"working relationship" with the
Burmese State Law and Order Restoration Council
(SLORC) was essential, no matter what the moral
qualms were.
Dixit’s initial foray paved the way for
India-Burma cooperation in border controls,
resumed trade, business joint ventures and even
extradition of anti-junta figures resident in
India (in 1997, twelve Burmese defectors who
joined with pro-democracy groups based on the
Indo-Burma border were secretly deported by
Indian military intelligence agents). In 2001,
Jaswant Singh, Vajpayee’s first foreign
minister, inaugurated the "India-Myanmar
Friendship Road" linking the town of Moreh
in Manipur to central Myanmar and then Mandalay.
This year, India, Burma and Thailand are
discussing a road that would connect all three
countries as well as a deep-sea port in Daiwe,
southern Burma to facilitate Indian and Thai
ships to refuel here instead of waiting to cross
the Malacca Straits. A pro-India faction within
SLORC has been identified in the Burmese junta,
led by Vice-Senior General Maung Aye and foreign
minister U Win Aung The deepening of such
political ties was hailed by the Indian
government as a step that would “earn a lot of
goodwill from this part of the world”.
Would it really? Far from a "working
relationship" premised on indefinite
continuation of SLORC rule in Burma, India seems
to be getting into "thick relations"
department with Yangon’s bloody regime,
thereby strengthening its internal terror
apparatus, of which Insein is the apotheosis.
Tibetans were sacrificed by Nehru in 1954 in
return for Beijing’s hand of friendship, a
move that ricocheted in 1962. The
long-suppressed democratic aspirations of the
people of Nepal have also felt betrayed by
India’s recent “cautious policy” that has
not questioned monarchical usurpation of power.
As a reward for its ambivalence, India is being
accused by the monarchical government in
Kathmandu of aiding the Maoist insurgency! For
Bangladeshi Hindu minorities too, India’s
lackadaisical interest in the fundamentalist
violence unleashed by Islamists tied to the
ruling Khaleeda Zia government has come as a
shock.
What kind of “goodwill” is being earned for
India in Burma that will be long lasting? Can it
match the goodwill of the Nehru-U Nu era? The
Indian government may have awarded the
Jawaharlal Nehru Peace Prize in 1995 to Daw Suu
Kyi as a token, but the substantial policy trend
in the last decade has been a colossal let-down
of the Burmese people by a myopic Delhi. In the
lure of short-term benefits, India has forgotten
that when democracy triumphs in Burma, its
legitimisation of and connivance with SLORC will
rankle and affect relations. India’s size and
economic potential (twenty-three per cent of
Burmese exports reach India) are often
considered permanent interests that will
override sentimentality when there is regime
change in Rangoon, but it is instructive to note
that like in most democratic polities, Burmese
public opinion will inform foreign policy when
Daw Suu Kyi takes over. Burmese people do not
have a say in the current set-up, but one day
they will, and India may have to pay a heavy
price.
Nonintervention in internal affairs of other
countries is a word of faith in Delhi and for a
medium world power, it should be so. But
nonintervention should not be translated into
apathy when crimes against humanity are
happening in India’s backyard. The realism
that nods at flowerless Insein as an “internal
affair” will boomerang.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
