In India’s Northeast, Peace and Foreign Ties Quietly Spread
By SAMRAT
In this three part series, the author, a journalist from the Northeast, looks at the quiet transformation happening in once strife-torn region, which could affect trade and geopolitics throughout Asia.
Suddenly, there’s a flurry of activity between Northeast India and Myanmar, as barriers have started to lift.
On Feb. 22, largely unnoticed by the news media, India’s foreign minister met with Myanmar’s construction minister in Delhi.
The two spoke about starting a bus service between Imphal, in India, and Mandalay, in Myanmar, increasing the number of flights, and opening a highway between Moreh, in India, and the Myanmar-Thai border near Mae Sot, according to Vishnu Vardhan Reddy, an under secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs. A new route from Kaladan, Myanmar, to Northeast India by water and land was also discussed, he said. Officials from India’s Civil Aviation Ministry are expected to visit Myanmar this month. And the first India-Myanmar car rally flagged off from Guwahati on March 11.
Since 1991, India’s central government has had a ‘‘Look East Policy’’ that envisages closer ties with the country’s eastern neighbors. It’s a policy that has made only halting progress, but now the government is clearly looking to ramp up the pace.
Work on the Trans-Asian Railway, which aims to connect Asia from Istanbul to Hanoi, is now under way in Manipur. For months, the United Naga Council, an organization of the tribal Naga people in India’s Northeast, had blockaded this. It was an action imposed to push for autonomous administration of Manipur’s hill districts. These districts remain part of Manipur, but the council said that work on the rail link, a project India joined in 2007, could resume. The crucial section that passes through the Naga-inhabited areas in the hill district of Tamenglong in Manipur will link India with Southeast Asia through Myanmar. Northeast Frontier Railways spokesman S. Hajong confirmed that work on the section of railways from Jiribam to Tupul near Imphal is proceeding.
At a time when connections are being renewed between Myanmar and the rest of the world, peace is threatening to break out in the historically fractious and insurgency-plagued states of Northeast India. These states, which share a 1,640-kilometer (1,019-mile) border with Myanmar, may be quietly transforming themselves from roadblock to bridge, a shift that could ultimately impact the economies and geopolitics of India, China and Southeast Asia.
Several old routes cross the border between Northeast India and Myanmar. Some, like the World War II Stilwell Road, built under the U.S. Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell, had become “ghost roads,” used mainly by Naga and Kachin insurgents to transport weapons and drugs. For the past few years this road has gradually returned to relatively peaceful and legal uses.
The notion that the Northeast could serve as a foundation for regional stability would have been ridiculous until last year. Myriad insurgent groups in the region have battled for ethnic homelands independent of India since the end of British colonial rule 64 years ago. The seven states in the region contain a veritable alphabet soup of insurgent groups at war with India and, often, with each other.
But the insurgencies that have dotted the area since the country’s independence from Britain are suddenly at their lowest ebb in decades.
The reasons for this in the Indian territories are three-fold: A rise in the amount of government and private money flowing into the region, Bangladesh’s crackdown on insurgency and terrorism in recent years, and a young local population that hungers more for the fruits of a strong economy than for independence from India.
The most powerful insurgent group in the region, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah), entered a cease-fire with the Indian government in 1997, and has been in peace talks since.
Then, in 2008, Bangladesh, where many of the leaders of Northeastern insurgent groups were based, got a new government, led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, which started a crackdown on Indian insurgents on its territory.
The first major sign of this crackdown came in December 2009. Arabinda Rajkhowa, the chairman of the United Liberation Front of Asom, the biggest insurgent group from the state of Assam, was caught after 17 years in foreign countries. The official version initially said that he had been found wandering near Dawki in Meghalaya on that state’s border with Bangladesh, and surrendered to the Indian Border Security Force on being challenged.
The real story, though, had already leaked out. Rajkhowa had been detained by the Bangladesh authorities near Dhaka and handed over to India.
Then, in December 2010, Rajkumar Meghen, the chief of the United National Liberation Front, one of the most powerful insurgent groups in Northeast India, was reportedly arrested in Motihari, in Bihar, while waiting for a bus to Nepal. The police in Bihar told reporters that Meghen was on his way from a hideout in Bangladesh to one in Nepal when he was caught.
That would have been like finding Mullah Omar waiting for a bus. Meghen, who had been wanted in India for 35 years, had been picked up by the Bangladeshi authorities in Dhaka in September and handed over to India.
Bangladesh and India still don’t have an extradition treaty, though one is expected soon, according to official statements by the two countries. The problem of extradition without a treaty has been addressed in the recent past by presenting the arrests of Meghen and others as if they’d taken place in India, according to a source familiar with these developments who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak with reporters.
With the capture of their top leaders, the main Assamese and Manipuri groups were now down, if not out. The main Naga group has had a cease-fire with Indian forces since 1997. Most of the other smaller groups had already entered cease-fires and peace talks after the loss of their sanctuaries in Bangladesh in 2008 and 2009.
Now only a few splinter groups remain active in the region. Most of the smaller ones are considered by Northeast residents, and by those from the region like myself, as essentially criminal gangs that profit from extortion and kidnapping.
If borders soften, and roads as ancient as the Silk Road return to life, India and China could link up with the ASEAN bloc here. Mandalay in Myanmar would then become the hub of trade among these three.
The Asian Highway and Trans-Asian Railway are efforts in that direction. In 2014, Myanmar assumes chairmanship of ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations. A reopening of links with India by then would enable the free flow of goods – and, with a tweaking of rules, of services – all the way from Amritsar, near India’s border with Pakistan, to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. India has had a Free Trade Agreement in goods with ASEAN since August 2009, and is working towards extending it to services.
There are reasons for optimism at the moment, experts say. “I think it’s very possible that connections between Burma and Northeast India will greatly intensify in the years and decades to come, not just in terms of trade, but also people and ideas,” said U Thant Myint-U, the historian and author of “Where China Meets India,’’ in a Facebook message.
“To some extent, this is a return to the past, and the reawakening of centuries-old ties, especially between places like Manipur, Assam, and Burma,” he said. But it is also a deepening of existing contacts.
“It once took weeks if not months to travel from Assam to Burma,” he added. “Today it takes days. Soon it may take hours.”
Next: The Northeast’s people, once considered “ungovernable,” embrace modernity.
The writer is editor of the Mumbai edition of The Asian Age and author of The Urban Jungle (Penguin, 2011). He can be found on Twitter asmrsamratx.
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