Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (28 page)

In August 1947, Bengal was partitioned. In the early 1940s as the British began seriously to contemplate withdrawal from India, the contest between the India National Congress, long the main nationalist force, and the Muslim League, which claimed to represent the country’s biggest minority, heated up, and the Muslim League veered towards demands for an entirely separate Muslim homeland or ‘Pakistan’. In 1946, Hindu–Muslim riots in Calcutta left approximately 4,000 dead and 100,000 injured, as the Muslim League’s leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah called for a day of ‘Direct Action’ and as Hindu feeling rallied around anti-Pakistan slogans. Different schemes were produced by the British, including ones that would have created a very loose federal system, but in the end the British agreed to break up the empire, with the new Pakistan incorporating Muslim-majority areas on two different sides of the subcontinent. In the west, nearly fifteen million people–Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs–were uprooted and well over a million died in the ensuing confusion and mass violence. In Bengal, the partition was less traumatic, with far less violence, but the consequences were dramatic and enduring nonetheless. Calcutta was granted to India and made the capital of the new state of West Bengal, whilst a big part of the countryside that depended on Calcutta’s factories and ports was made East Pakistan with its new capital at Dacca (now spelled Dhaka).

The British partitioned the country along demographic lines, between Muslim- and Hindu-majority districts, meaning that little thought was given to the economic or future security ramifications of the new border. Colonial policy-makers assumed that the newly independent India and Pakistan would get along rather well and that commerce would carry on as before. But with conflict and war ensuing straight away, the ferries and barges that had carried people and cargo every day back and forth from Calcutta to its rural hinterland, now East Pakistan, were halted, the trains and buses stopped running, and millennia-old contacts came to an end. In their place came new animosities and lasting security headaches, and an entirely artificial border (which is today being fenced) snaking across what had been the province of Bengal.

Within a quarter of a century Pakistan was itself then torn in half, and its eastern wing became independent, as Bangladesh. The catalyst was the 1970 general election in Pakistan that had led to a victory for the Bengali National Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. In the years since independence, the relationship between the two halves of Pakistan had developed into a very unbalanced one. The West dominated the East. The Awami League’s campaign was based on Bengali East Pakistan’s sense of victimhood, its anger at the suppression of the Bengali language and the exploitation of its resources by the military rulers based in the other half of the country.

The results shocked the Pakistani establishment. There were worries that the Awami League would insist on a federal arrangement where the central government would be left with responsibility for defence and foreign policy only. And, for many in West Pakistan, the idea of coming under a Bengali prime minister was difficult to accept. The East also had a large Hindu minority (nearly ten million people, including many professionals) and some West Pakistanis seemed to think that these Hindus would also soon be lording it over them.

President Yahya Khan, the army commander-in-chief, postponed seating the new National Assembly. But soon in East Pakistan there were strikes and protests, shutting down the rail ways and airports. Clashes erupted daily between police and demon strators and before long the army was called in, arriving both by air and by ship, attacking the university, a hotbed of agitation, and arresting leading politicians. The Pakistani army then fanned out into the countryside. Ethnic Bengali troops mutinied in several places. Foreign journalists were expelled and the Hindu minority in particular came in for violent harassment. There was a panicked flight from Dacca. Millions of refugees streamed into India.

India did not miss the strategic opportunity, and began hosting training camps for Bengali guerrillas, known as the Mukti Bahini, about 20,000 in all, including former officers of the Pakistani army. The United States, under President Richard Nixon, was sympathetic to the Pakistani side. ‘The Indians are no Goddamn good,’ Nixon had told his national security advisor Henry Kissinger. Yahya Khan was helping Nixon and Kissinger in their secret diplomacy with Mao, Pakistan’s friend. At the same time, New Delhi was entering into closer military and economic relations with Moscow.

By October 1971 the conflict had escalated, with shelling along the border. Twelve Indian divisions were now massed near East Pakistan. The Pakistanis decided to strike first, attacking Indian positions in Kashmir. The Indians responded with massive air strikes. The Indian navy shelled Karachi. The end result–an Indian victory–was a foregone conclusion and took only took weeks to reach. The Indian army was much bigger than the Pakistani army and better equipped. The Indians rolled towards Dacca from four different directions, helped by the Mukti Bahini. The timing was advantageous. With the onset of winter, it was impossible for the Chinese to intervene across the Himalayas, something the Pakistanis may have been hoping for, whilst the terrain in East Pakistan itself was excellent for a mechanized push. On 6 December the government of India formally recognized ‘The Provisional Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh’.

Given this background, one would think that the new Bangladesh would have enjoyed excellent relations with India ever since, but instead the two states have had only the frostiest of dealings. Ties were reasonably cordial to begin with, but soon resentment by the smaller neighbour set in. Many Bangladeshis point to India’s Farakka Barrage, a giant dam on the Ganges River, as a special cause of animosity, saying that this dam, which was completed in 1974 and which diverts water from the Ganges, has dramatically and negatively affected their water supply. With the onset of military rule in Bangladesh in the late 1970s, relations soured further and Bangladeshi nationalism took a decisively anti-Indian turn. Links between the Bangladeshi and Pakistani armies and intelligence services grew closer and over the past twenty years Bangladesh has even provided support and sanctuary to Indian insurgent groups such as the United Liberation Front of Assam. In 2004, Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha described relations with Bangladesh as being at their lowest ebb ever, and even worse than with Pakistan.

Partition and its aftermath have thus left a troublesome and enduring legacy in this part of Asia. From Burma, I had seen the approach of Chinese power and influence and wondered why from India there was not a similar energy, a similar dynamic. The unique geography that was created to the east of Calcutta, the unfinished ethnic conflicts and Maoist insurgency, and the fraught relationship between Delhi and Dacca were certainly among the reasons. In this region at least, India’s posture was mainly a defensive one, its strategists and security officials eyeing Chinese moves, especially into Burma, with unease.

In the middle of Calcutta, along the Hooghly River and across the
maidan
from the Victoria Memorial, sits Fort William, an imposing star-shaped complex built by Robert Clive in 1781 and for over a century a symbol of British power in the East, the Pentagon of its time. Today it is the headquarters of the Indian army’s Eastern Command, responsible for eight of the army’s thirty-four divisions and nearly a quarter of its more than one million men and women under arms. From Fort William British strategists plotted their wars against an array of foes from the Emir Dost Mohammed of Afghanistan, to the Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Punjab, to King Thibaw of Burma. Present-day security preoccupations are perhaps not nearly as colourful as those of the Raj, but equally complex. And though the old British fixation on tsarist intrigues is long gone, there is in its place a not altogether dissimilar anxiety about China’s intentions and China’s reach for the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

Whereas the British worried about a possible Russian presence in Tibet, Beijing is now firmly ensconced across the entire Tibetan Plateau, from the borders of Kashmir in the west to Yunnan in the east. China also maintains a very good relationship with Pakistan, and since the early 2000s Chinese state companies have been building a big new port at Gwadar, not far from Karachi, that will be linked over the Karakoram mountains to China’s far west. China has also worked to deepen ties with Bangladesh and over the past few years has agreed in principle on a highway that will eventually tie Kunming to Chittagong, Bangladesh’s main port. Beijing has even reached out across the Bay of Bengal to Sri Lanka, building a port there too, and started discussions with Nepal on the idea of a Lhasa to Kathmandu train.

What from one perspective is a welcome increase in intra-Asian ties is from another a harbinger of more aggressive Chinese designs to come. A US Army War College paper in 2006, entitled ‘A String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China’s Rising Power Along the Asian Littoral’, questioned whether China’s attempt to secure its sea lanes, from the Straits of Malacca to the Arabian Gulf, would soon translate into a bid for regional supremacy across the Indian Ocean. Indian analysts too began to worry that China’s rapidly expanding trade ties and civilian infra structure projects could very soon become military ones as well, directly threatening India’s security.

In an essay posted on the website of the China International Institute for Strategic Studies, a writer using the pseudonym Zhan Lue (or ‘Strategy’) argued that Beijing should work to break up India into twenty or thirty independent states, with the help of ‘friendly countries’ such as Pakistan and Bangladesh. Written in Chinese, the article says, ‘If China takes a little action, the so-called Great Indian Federation can be broken up.’ China should, he contends, join forces with ‘different nationalities’ like Assamese, Tamils and Kashmiris and support them in establishing independent nation-states of their own. In particular, the article asks Beijing to support the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), a militant separatist group in the Indian northeast, in its efforts to achieve independence for Assam from India. Bangladesh, says Zhan Lue, should be given support to unite with West Bengal into one Bengali nation. The article was dismissed by many as representing a lone voice; others, though, had a nagging sense that it echoed more widespread if still marginal thinking.

And it is partly from a common mistrust of Chinese power and Chinese intentions that New Delhi and Washington have drawn closer together, burying Cold War animosities. The administration of President George W. Bush saw India as a potential bulwark of democracy against China and pushed hard for an agreement on nuclear cooperation, signed in 2006 and ratified by Congress two years later. In 2007, India, the US, Singapore, Japan and Australia joined together in what was the biggest ever wargame in the Bay of Bengal. Code-named Malabar 07, it was a five-day exercise that saw seven Indian warships in action alongside thirteen from the US, including the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier the USS
Nimitz
, another aircraft carrier, the USS
Kitty Hawk
, and the nuclear submarine USS
Chicago
.

And as China beefed up its own armed forces, India was doing the same, with heightened attention to its eastern flank. By 2010, India had stationed no fewer than three army corps or a hundred thousand soldiers in Assam, together with a full squadron of advanced Sukhoi 30 fighter planes, and was building up its naval capacity in the Andamans, the little islands south of Burma that Delhi had inherited from British India.

China’s nightmare scenario is of the US or India blocking the Malacca Straits. But India’s nightmare is Chinese naval supremacy across the Indian Ocean. And as thoughts of China grow, Burma veers towards centre stage.

Sixty years ago, India’s Home Minister and Congress leader Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in a letter to Prime Minister Nehru wondered whether India should not ‘enter into closer relations with Burma in order to strengthen the latter in its dealings with China’. A similar feeling motivated India’s policy-makers in the 1990s as they watched their smaller eastern neighbour being drawn fast into the Chinese orbit.

In the years immediately following the failed 1988 uprising in Burma, the Indian government took a very hard-line position against the Burmese military government, perhaps the hardest line anywhere in the world. The West was then just starting to impose sanctions, but India was already actively financing Burmese opposition groups, including exiles and militant groups based along the Thailand–Burma border. This was during the government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of Pandit Nehru, and there were generations-old personal ties that linked the Nehru family to Burma and to two of its most prominent families: the family of independence hero General Aung San and the family of 1950s Prime Minister U Nu. Pandit Nehru had known Aung San and had travelled many times to Burma as a guest and friend of U Nu. Aung San’s daughter Aung San Suu Kyi had gone to school in India (when her mother was the Burmese ambassador to New Delhi) and she had just emerged as a key leader in the nascent pro-democracy movement. Rajiv Gandhi wanted to be seen on the right side of history and sincerely believed that India should assist the Burmese in the fight for democracy. Declarations of support were coupled with more clandestine efforts at political change.

By the mid-1990s, however, this hard-line approach had been replaced by an all-out effort to cosy up to the Rangoon government. There were many reasons for this, but perhaps the most important was a very simple one: the old policy had failed. The Burmese junta had recovered from its near overthrow in 1988 and Indian support for pro-democracy activists was doing little or nothing to move the country in a liberalizing direction. What the policy had done instead was leave the field entirely open to the Chinese, who were quickly becoming the military government’s best friend and ally. Delhi’s Look East policy had originally meant improved commercial ties between a liberalizing Indian economy and the ‘Asian Tigers’. But by the mid-1990s, the Indian government was increasingly mindful of China and eager to solidify relations in the Far East. An all-out rupture in relations with Rangoon, and the emergence of a Burma dominated by China, seemed intolerable.