Great Research, Pity About the Conclusion

Renaud Egreteau provides a sober, comprehensive record of how India’s relations with Burma changed over 1990s. But his analysis falls short. Nearly a decade ago as a Bangkok-based correspondent for an Indian news service, I received a tip-off from New Delhi about a small scoop on India’s rapidly changing foreign policy priorities. The Indian Foreign Secretary JN Dixit was in Rangoon on a clandestine, unprecedented trip and nobody knew the reason. I caught up with Dixit in Bangkok on his return from Burma. The interview that followed yielded details of the top Indian diplomat’s rendezvous with the generals: negotiations on curbing the movement of ethnic rebels from India’s Northeast into Burma, an agreement on policing cross-border trafficking in narcotics and some talk of expanding bilateral trade. But the most interesting aspect of the Dixit visit to Rangoon was that it happened at all. Just six months before, such a meeting would have been inconceivable given India’s then very vocal opposition to the Burmese military dictatorship. In 1988, as the generals in Rangoon brutally crushed a nationwide pro-democracy uprising, India had been among the regime’s most outspoken critics and was widely seen as championing the return of civilian rule to Burma. By 1992, however, the newly elected Congress government headed by Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao sprang a surprise by doing an about-face in its Burma policy. Gone was the rhetoric of democracy and human rights and in its place the realpolitik of economic and geo-strategic issues. It is this sea-change in the Indian government’s approach to Burma during the nineties that is the subject of Renauad Egreteau’s book, Wooing the Generals: India’s New Burma Policy. It is over a decade since the shift in policies began—long enough to measure the tangible results. Egreteau has researched well and compiled a comprehensive record of the political, economic and military developments over the period. The book covers events related not just to relations between India and Burma but also to other players—China, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Unfortunately, for all the information, Egreteau’s analysis is basically a rehash of the usual theories put forward by "defense analysts" to explain relations between any two countries anywhere: theories that boil down to a very narrow geo-strategic perspective. According to this view, India’s approach to Burma can be divided into "idealist" and "pragmatic" phases. The "idealist" phase dates from when Indian Prime Minister Nehru and his Burmese counterpart U Nu were close friends and decided policies based on trust and cooperation. After U Nu’s ouster in a military coup in 1962, successive Indian governments opposed the dictatorship on principle. This phase lasted into the 1990s and is regarded by the "defense analyst" camp as having been foolish. The "pragmatic" phase of Indian foreign policy toward Burma meant throwing principles out the window and doing anything required to further Indian strategic and economic interests. Egreteau heartily commends this approach throughout his book. But he fails to provide any evidence that India’s long-term interests were better met by "amoral pragmatism" than the "muddled idealism" that had prevailed in the past. In fact, what emerges on a close examination of current Indian policy is that, for all its realpolitik gloss, the only beneficiary is the regime in Rangoon. Take the myth of India countering China by tango-ing with the Burmese military. According to Indian defense analysts approvingly quoted by Egreteau, China in the last decade has gained a significant foothold in Burma, setting up military installations targeting India and wielding considerable influence on the regime and its strategic thinking. They say that India’s strong pro-democracy stand in the wake of the 1988 Burmese uprising provided a window for countries like China and Pakistan to get closer to the Burmese generals. This line of argument rests on the flawed assumption that had India taken a softer stand, the Burmese military rulers would have desisted from getting closer to China or Pakistan. The truth is that the Burmese generals, because of their political proximity to the authoritarian regimes in China and Pakistan, would probably have favored these two countries as allies over an "unreliable" partner like India, a democracy. Indian and other defense analysts, with their blinkered view of the world as a geo-political chess game, forget that the then Indian government’s decision to back the pro-democracy movement was not a "mistake" borne out of ignorance, but an official reflection of the support for the movement among Indian citizens. The second myth that propels the Indian foreign ministry to cozy up to the Burmese generals is that by doing so India can get Burma’s support in curbing the arms and drugs trafficking that fuel the insurgencies in the Indian Northeast.