Burma's Afflictions Seen Through History
  Baladas Ghoshal
THE RIVER OF LOST FOOTSTEPS: HISTORIES OF BURMA
By Thant Myint-U
Faber and Faber, London and New York, 2007, pp. 384, Rs. 450.00
  The abandoned former campuses of Yangon and Mandalay universities, at one time leading institutions of higher learning in Asia and which produced distinguished Myanmarese from all walks of life, typically symbolize the state of things in Myanmar today. A country rich in natural resources and intellect has degenerated into economically poor and intellectually mediocre through misrule and ill-conceived social engineering. The ruling junta has devised an ingenious way of retaining their power and was control over the society. The university campuses have all been moved away from the cities to the outskirts and dispersed so that no effective mobilization of students and teachers can take place against the regime. Teachers and students have been made to double as security agents reporting to their bosses in Tatmadaw of any activities detrimental to the interests of the regime. The destruction of the universities and lack of job opportunities have led to an exodus of talents from the country. All worthy young people in Myanmar want to leave the country; of those who cannot, some make good by joining the Tatmadaw and others join the monastery.

    Those who choose to adopt Buddhism as a career often do so for financial reasons, as donations collected by the monks are shared with their family members. As a result, there is an almost equal number of monks as soldiers (400,000 to 500,000 approx.) in the country. Their sheer number and their participation in the protest movement against the military junta offered a glimmer of hope to the democratic forces both within the country and in exile. Ostensibly against rising food and fuel prices, the protests undoubtedly showed the (political) exasperation of a long-suffering populace. The ground realities in the country, however, go against the grain of hope.

  First, the junta’s complete control over the means of violence to intimidate and instil fear in people leads to political passivity; second, it has succeeded in emasculating opposition leadership through a systematic campaign of misinformation and debilitating the civil society through its curb on the universities. The junta’s ability to stay in power is partly due to the failure of its opponents to form a solid coalition with a long-term, common strategy. In the recent protests more than 100,000 people were drawn onto the streets of the country’s cities, but the protests lost steam after the authorities took action. Anti-junta activists inside and outside the country failed to capitalize on the momentum of the protests or prolong and push the monks’ initiative further and channel it into major national and international movements. At the same time the emergence of new leadership from the student community was stifled. The ethnic-based desire for independence further complicated the national movement, with these ethnic groups having their own military wings that resist the central government. From a domestic perspective, unless the national democratic movement can reconcile its goals with the ethnic uprising’s leaders and people’s aspirations, it is unlikely that the campaign against the junta will find success in the near future. Neither is there any hope for the international, and a large Burmese-in exile, community’s attempt to bring about a freer and more democratic Burma through sanctions and tourist boycotts. They have not only failed to nudge the regime to any prospective change, but in fact have pushed it toward even harsher dictatorship and isolation, cocooned in their xenophobic nationalism arising out of a deep suspicion of the West and anything foreign.

  How does one understand and explain the tragic state of affairs in Burma? Can Burma be helped unless its afflictions and causes are properly understood by the international community? Can Burma’s history be a guide to an understanding of its current crises? In an exceedingly readable, brilliant and thought-provoking narration in The River of Lost Footsteps: History of Burma, the book under review, Thant Myint-U authoritatively argues that Burma’s past influenced the present and will do so even its future. To put it in the words of the author: ‘Since 1988 uprising, Burma has been the object of myriad good-faith efforts, by the United Nations, dozens of governments, hundreds of NGOs, and thousands of activists, all trying to promote democratic reform. But the result had been disappointing at best and may very well have had the unintended consequences of further entrenching the status quo and holding back positive change. And, given that result, I think it is no coincidence that analysis of Burma has been singularly ahistorical, with few besides scholars of the country bothering to consider the actual origins of today’s predicament.’

 Thant Myint-U fills that important gap in the understanding of Burma by providing a historical perspective in the elucidation of its afflictions and their causes and to its present conundrum. He tells the story of modern Burma, in part through a telling of his own family’s history, in an interwoven narrative that is by turns lyrical, dramatic and appalling. The author has descended from a long line of courtiers who served at Burma’s Court of Ava for nearly two centuries. His maternal grandfather was U Thant, who rose from being the schoolmaster of a small town in the Irrawaddy Delta to become the first Asian UN Secretary General in the 1960s. Through their stories and others, he portrays with utmost clarity, balance and objectivity Burma’s rise and decline in the modern world, from the time of Portuguese pirates and renegade Mughal princes through the decades of British colonialism, the devastation of World War II, and a sixty-year civil war that continues today and is the longest running war anywhere in the world.

   The author deplores the myth created by some analysts who write about Burma that it is a ‘rich country gone wrong’. The truth is that Burma in 1950, the year the civil war ebbed away, was in shambles, and war had been replaced in many parts by anarchy. Communications were down nearly everywhere, and the trains and steamers that operated did so only under heavy armed escort. The countryside was held by a patchwork of rebels and government loyalists, ‘islands of governments control in a sea of uncertain authority’ (p. 270). In reality, no government has governed the entirety of Burma since 1941. Few border regions are even today free of rebel control. Some of the very same groups that first took up arms in the 1940s are still fighting it out today. ‘Perhaps a million dead, millions more displaced, an economy in ruins, and a robust military machine designed to fight the enemy within,’ to quote the author’s prophetic words, ‘have been the main stuff of Burma’s post independence history’ (p. 258-9). The author gives credit to two men for saving the country from an all-out disintegration—Prime Minister U Nu and the armed forces Commander in Chief General Ne Win, who ‘together, and in entirely different ways . . . would shape the Burma of the next century’ (p. 285). He also reminds us how Burma once connected to the world and how it reached its predicament that is so wasteful, so unnecessary, and so sad. Burma was held in high esteem internationally in the 1950s, as its leaders were active on the world stage, promoting its views, engaging in international politics through the United Nations, sending soldiers on peace-keeping missions overseas, and trying to play the part of a good global citizen. It is almost unbelievable now, ‘given how low it has sunk in the opinions of so many’ (p. 277).

   Any transition to democracy is always difficult. Burma’s transition will be especially difficult. This is a country that has already been at civil war for sixty years and where that civil war is not yet concluded, where there are hundreds of different ethnic and linguistic groups, many inhabiting remote mountain areas, where poverty is endemic and where a humanitarian crisis is looming, where there are hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the fighting and tens of thousands more who are refugees; and where there is a resilient narcotics industry and where some of the richest businessmen (always the most likely to be influential in a democracy) are tied to the drugs trade.

   Added to these are two especially difficult factors, legacies of Burmese history. The first is what the author calls the long history of failed state building. He argues that the 19th century kings Mindon and Thibaw attempted to remake traditional institutions and create new ones to deal with the fast changing world, but these initiatives in the end went nowhere because of the steady approach of British imperialism. The traditional order collapsed entirely. The British Raj then tried to transplant familiar institutions—a civil service, a judiciary, a professional police force and army, and eventually an elected legislature—but these remained largely alien institutions, unwedded to local society, and the abrupt end of colonial rule meant that they did not long survive the British withdrawal. Any institution requires time and nurturing to take root. There was some attempt in the U Nu days to fashion a democratic state, but these efforts were crippled from the start by the civil war, the Chinese invasions of the 1950s and the consequent steady growth of General Ne Win’s military machine, which further decimated

 whatever remained of the civil society in Burma.

    Arguably, if the army had not staged a coup in 1962, U Nu’s popularly elected government even while it faced demand from the Shans and other ethnic communities for autonomy could have possibly evolved certain mechanisms like a federal structure to mitigate some of their grievances vis-à-vis the central authority dominated by the Burmans, the majority community

   U Nu’s problems did not arise just from the army which did not give him any chance to try the autonomy plan, but also from his own party, the APPFL (Anti Fascist people’s Freedom League) which were badly split around the time, in which Ne Win and his cohorts also played an important role. From the early 1950s the army was already stepping into a huge institutional vacuum left behind by the collapse of old royal structures, incomplete or ineffective colonial state building, years of war, and then a sudden colonial withdrawal. And this military machine slowly but surely came under the control of just one man, General Ne Win. Now after the army captured power in 1962, it spread its tentacles everywhere emasculating all other institutions. Today the military machine is all there is, with only the shadow of other institutions remaining. So the problem in Burma is not simply getting the military out of the business of government. It is creating the state institutions that can replace the military state that exists. And the military state exists not just in governance and administration, but has entrenched itself in the economy of the country having large stakes in its continuance.

   The second factor, according to the author, is more in the realm of ideas. The collapse of the royal institutions led to the fast disappearance of many earlier notions of kingship and the relationship between government and society, including an entire tradition of learning, subtle and complex, based on centuries of court and monastic scholarship. In its place a militant nationalism came forward, merging at different times with different visions of the future. There is also a strong utopian streak, going back to the Student Union days of the 1930s, ‘a proclivity for absurd debates, on communism, socialism, and democracy, endless conversations about diverse constitutional models and long-term political schemes, which never see the light of the day. What is altogether missing is a history of pragmatic and rigorous policy debate, on economics, finance, health care, or education as well as a more imaginative and empathetic discussion of minority rights and shared identities in modern Burmese society’ (p. 346).


    Thant Myint-U’s essential thesis in the book is that shorn of institutions and visions of new Burma based on the ground realities in the country, any political change even with a new civilian government will be meaningless, for the army would still be there, lurking in the wings and waiting to overturn everything through a coup as it was in 1962. For the author, only a multifaceted path of institution building, social change and economic development can lift Burma from a long history of ills. And this can begin with breaking down Burma’s isolation, reviving connections with the outside world, bringing in new ideas, providing fresh air to a stale political environment and, in the process, changing long-festering mentalities. The author is critical of the West’s policy of boycott and sanctions against the regime, for the result has been just the opposite of what the international community wanted. Instead of balking under pressure, it has only hardened the regime’s attitude toward both the democratic movement and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. In almost every way, the policy of isolating one of the most isolated countries in the world, where the military regime isolated itself for the better part of thirty years, and which indeed has grown up and evolved well in isolation, according to Thant Myint-U, is both counterproductive and dangerous.

    The author is convinced that the West’s policy is a result of wrong assumptions about the military machine and ignorance of Burma’s history of civil war. To quote the author again: ‘Almost no one, though, is aware of the civil war or the reasons why Burma’s military machine developed and the country became isolated in the first place. The paradigm is one of regime change and the assumption is that sanctions, boycotts, more isolation will somehow pressure those in charge to mend their ways. The assumption is that Burma’s military government could not survive further isolation when precisely the opposite is true. Much more than any other part of Burmese society, the army will weather another forty years of isolation just fine’ (p. 342).


   Sanctions (and isolation) can work only with a regime that is eager for maintaining interactions with the outside world. The military junta in Burma would rather prefer to keep the international community at arms length, and the attitude of the international community gives it further justification for isolation and repression. The author is eloquent in making the penultimate point in his study of the intractable problems in his country: ‘What is sometimes hard to perceive from the outside is just how damaging forty years of isolation—in particular from the West and the international scene—has been to those trapped inside. Trade with China and a few other (still developing) economies is no substitute for renewed contacts with people and places around the world. It is this isolation that has kept Burma in poverty, isolation that fuels a negative, almost xenophobic nationalism; isolation that makes the Burmese army see everything as a zero-sum game and any change as filled with peril; isolation that has made any conclusion to the war so elusive, hardening differences; isolation that weakened institutions—the ones on which any transition to democracy would depend—to the point of collapse. Without isolation, the status quo will be impossible to sustain. This is not to say that the problem will disappear overnight, but rather that solutions, so elusive today, will become more apparent and easier to reach’ (p. 347). In isolation the army will simply and quite confidently push forward its agenda, as it has declared recently—a guided referendum next month on a military-dominated constitution, to be followed by elections in 2010.

    So what of the future? Thant Myint-U is frank in admitting that there are no easy solutions to the intractable problems in Burma and any particular one that will create democracy overnight or even in several years. He only hopes that if Burma were less isolated and economically integrated with the outside world and if it were coupled with a desire by the government for greater economic reform, a rebuilding of state institutions and a slow opening up of space for civil society, then perhaps the conditions for political change would emerge over the next decade or two. He knows that the scenario he prefers may not be particularly encouraging to those (though he does not mention that) like Aung San Suu Kyi and thousands of political activists who have sacrificed so much and would like to see results in their lifetime, but he calls it a realistic one. While he sounds optimistic about the future of his country, he does not hesitate to draw a second and a much worse scenario. Sanctions together with international isolation will further undermine institutions of government; a new generation will grow up less educated and in worse health; another addition to the list of failed states, without any prospect of democratic change and with the military no longer holding things together; a return to anarchy and the conditions of 1948, only this time with more guns, more people and strong confident neighbour unlikely to idly stand by. ‘If that were to come to pass,’ he concludes, ‘the remaining years of this century would not

  be enough time for Burma to recover’ (p. 348).
    Thant Myint-U has treated Burma’s present afflictions through the prism of history with utmost excellence. It is engaging and a useful contribution to the understanding of Burma and its growing literature. It is a must read for all who want to know why Burma is what it is today. However, the book was originally published in 2006, and therefore does not include the Monks revolt against the regime which was brutally suppressed.

   As western sanctions in the past have not been able to cripple the regime and international communities pleading for political reconciliation have fallen on deaf ears, the world is now calling on India and China to use their leverage to make the junta see reason. However, neither China nor India has so far shown any inclination to abandon their pragmatic strategic engagement with the regime for moral principles. The UN Secretary General’s envoy to Myanmar, Ibrahim Gambari has also not brought back any good news out of his recent missions. If at all any pressure or persuasion will work with the regime, it will have to come from China, India and ASEAN acting in concert offering certain incentives to the junta in return for their readiness for political reconciliation, in the same way as North Korea was persuaded to give up its nuclear programme. India can mull over the idea of hosting Six-Party talks involving China, ASEAN, USA, EU and Myanmar. As a first step, Myanmar should be urged to free Aung San Suu Kyi immediately in return for lifting of economic sanctions, followed by the beginning of political reconciliation based on a framework whereby the interests of the people and their democratic aspirations need to be matched and reconciled with the legitimate concern of the armed forces. There is need for concessions from Suu Kyi’s side as well. She can possibly do what Ramos Horta of Timor Leste once suggested—dissociate herself from the NLD and emerge as a non-partisan leader, a mediator and a facilitator in the progress toward democracy—a Nelson Mandela of Myanmar. It is a difficult job but worth trying to break the deadlock. Integration of Burma’s economy with its neighbours—India, China, Thailand, and Indo-China countries of the Mekong region is a necessary condition for economic interdependence and breaking Burma’s isolation.

    Baladas Ghoshal is currently Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research and Visiting Professor, Academy of Third World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia. Formerly Professor and Chair, Southeast Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Professor Ghoshal has taught in America, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan.

June, 2008 Contents

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---   Contents :     Salil Misra Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (Second Series), Vol. 38 S. Irfan Habib Bhagat Singh:The Eternal Rebel by Malwinder Jit Singh Waraich Rohini Mokashi-Punekar Dalit Assertion in Society, Literature and History edited by Imtiaz Ahmad and Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay; B.R. Ambedkar: Perspectives on Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policies edited by Sukhadeo Thorat and Narender Kumar Padmini Swaminathan Capture and Exclude: Developing Economies and the Poor in Global Finance edited by Amiya Kumar Bagchi and Gary A. Dymski L.C. Jain Decentralisation, Corruption and Social Capital from India to the West by Sten Widmalm Saman Kelegama Sri Lanka DFCC Bank: One Among the Successful Few by Ranjit Fernando Amiya Kumar Bagchi Economic History of India from Eighteenth to Twentieth Century edited by Binay Bhusan Chaudhuri Leela Fernandes Women’s Livelihood Rights: Recasting Citizenship for Development edited by Sumi Krishna Malavika Chauhan Environmental Issues in India: A Reader edited by Mahesh Rangarajan Dhirendra Datt Dangwal Decentralization, Forests and Rural Communities: Policy Outcomes in South and Southeast Asia             edited by Edward L. Webb and Ganesh P. Shivakoti Kuldeep Singh Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedow Nandini Vaidyanathan The Case of the Bonsai Manager: Lessons From Nature on Growing by R. Gopalakrishnan Shukla Sawant India 20: Conversations with Contemporary Artists by Anupa Mehta Sanhita Gupta Bhowal Banaras Eternity Watches Time by Manu Parekh Urmila Bhirdikar A Rasika’s Journey Through Hindustani Music by Rajeev Nair  Divya Raina From Raj to Swaraj: The Non-Fiction Film in India by B.D. Garga Rosinka Choudhury The Nation Across the World: Postcolonial Literary Representations edited by Harish Trivedi, Meenakshi Mukherjee, C. Vijayasree, T. Vijay Kumar Arshia Sattar The Shattered Thigh and Other Plays by Bhasa. Translated by A.N.D. Haksar     Tales of the Ten Princes by Dandin. Translated by A.N.D. Haksar                                                    The Courtesan’s Keeper by Kshemendra. Translated by A.N.D. Haksar                                                  The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry from the Gathasaptasati of Satavahana Hala.             Translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra     The Book of Demons by Nanditha Krishna Anup Beniwal Meera: Ek Punarmoolyankan edited by Pallav Alok Rai The Fiction Collection 2 Volumes by The Non-Fiction 3 Volumes by Ranjana Kaul Hartley House, Calcutta by Phoebe Gibbes Rehana Sen ‘Gardens of Water’ by Alan Drew            The Finger Puppet by Anu Jayanth Saugata Bhaduri Inglistan: A Novel by Rajesh Talwar Simran: A Novel by Rajesh Talwar Gurpreet Maini I Take this Woman by Rajinder Singh Bedi, Translated from the Punjabi by Khushwant Singh Surabi Mittal Dadi Nani: Memories of our Grandmother edited by Subhash Mathur and Subodh Mathur R. Rajagopalan Book of Humour; Book of Verse by Ruskin Bond

 
AFFLUENCE WITH LIBERTY: NEHRU’S CHOICE
Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (Second Series), Vol. 38, (ed. Mushirul Hasan), a Project of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, New Delhi, 2006, pp. 863, Rs. 800. Salil Misra

    As India made its transition from being a colony to an independent nation, Nehru made a transition from being a ‘rebel’ to a ‘statesman’. The two transitions were indeed connected. The primary objective of Nehru’s political life after 1947 was no longer to lead the anti-imperialist national movement but to enable India’s transformation to a fully independent and modern industrial society. Nehru’s major political-intellectual engagement was no longer with anti-imperialism but with trying to create a new space for the young independent India in the new world order. This transition is fully reflected in the second series of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, brought out by the research team of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund under the intellectual leadership of Mushirul Hasan. Volume 38 of the series, covering the period May-July 1957 is an important repository of Nehru’s major national and international priorities as the leader of independent India.

    Nehru showed an acute awareness of the fact that what independent India had set out to achieve was historically quite unique and unprecedented. Developing an affluent modern industrial society within a parliamentary democratic framework was not something that had happened in other countries. Affluence and liberty were both important values but they tended to come successively rather than simultaneously. This indeed was the pattern of all developed countries where democratic institutions developed after necessary conditions for baseline affluence had been created. Independent India, by contrast, had refused to prioritize between affluence and liberty and strove to achieve both at the same time. There was no model available for a development of this kind. What independent India was doing was to in fact constitute a model to be followed by other third world countries, and to be theorized upon by social scientists. A theory did not exist for the unique Indian practice, but the practice needed to be theorized upon.

    It was broadly in these terms that Nehru explained the essence of socialism in a long speech given to Congress women legislators (“Socialism by Consent”, pp. 31-40). The capitalist democracies had made much progress but had ended up creating an acquisitive and competitive society. The Soviet Russia, on the other hand, had used coercion and had forcibly taken away peasants’ land from them. As against both these models, Nehru was convinced that “socialism has to enter the people’s minds and hearts…. The problem is how to change men’s minds” (p. 39).

    Nehru explained further: “The question that poses it self before us is: Should we use force for the achievement of our objectives or is it possible to march towards our goal with everyone’s cooperation? We believe, and our Constitution lays down, that we should not use force and coercion for the achievement of our objective. We have got a democratic system of government and it is evident that if anyone takes recourse to force, this system of government would end and another system of government may be ushered in. It follows, therefore, that we cannot copy some other countries like Russia and get things done through force and coercion.” (p.40) Nehru was aware that building a democratic consensus may slow down the pace of economic development, yet it would be a far more superior development in the long run.

    These were some of the major issues that Nehru was constantly  engaging with throughout the 1950s. He was fully convinced that it was desirable – and possible – to combine the two major values – affluence and liberty, without having to temporarily suspend one to facilitate the other. But it was important to convince others, both Congressmen and other party leaders. The volume under review provides many instances of Nehru trying to create a consensus around this idea.

    Then there were other questions. How to modernize India’s social structure while retaining some of the positive features of Indian tradition? Nehru was uncomfortable with the continuation of some feudal vestiges that had entered the bureaucratic and political structures. He received complaints of bureaucratic red-tapism leading to inefficiency; and he found that many leaders in power were over-using, if not misusing, the facilities granted to them as ministers. Both, the red-tapism and the misuse of resources had entered independent India’s political and bureaucratic culture. Many of our political leaders still persist with these ways and it may be instructive to point out Nehru’s contempt for them. For instance, he totally disapproved of excessive security being provided to political leaders and tried to discourage this practice. In a letter to Home minister Pant, Nehru conveyed his displeasure at the “excessive arrangements made for his security” and emphasized that “security arrangements should be made only when necessary.” (p. 301). Nehru also commented on the bureaucratic red-tapism leading to delay, and often denial, in issuing visas to foreign correspondents wanting to visit India. “We have already got a bad reputation in Europe…. The impression exists that we are constantly pushing out people. Also there is enormous delay in the issue of visas. We seem to look upon foreigners as some kind of enemy agents.” He advised the home minister: “I think that we shall have to consider this problem in a much more liberal way than we have done thus far.” (p. 336). The volume under review also has interesting information on Nehru explaining the principles of Panchsheel to an American academic (pp. 456-7), and also elaborating on the future on Commonwealth in an interview to a foreign correspondent (pp. 599-603).

    Nehru remained a Marxist all his life. Yet he could not get along with Indian Communists. His own explanation for this was that Indian Communists were too busy following Marx literally, overlooking the fact that “what Marx wrote a hundred years ago could certainly not be appropriate for India after a hundred years, or for China, or…for the whole world.” It was therefore important not simply to follow or apply Marxism to Indian conditions, but to creatively develop Marxism so as to retain its relevance for the contemporary world. This is what Marx himself would have done. “I am confident, if Marx were alive today, he would have thought in a different way and written a different book.” (p. 38).

    This is an extremely useful and rich volume tracing the life and activities of one of the pioneers of modern India.

-Salil Misra-

[Salil Misra teaches history at the Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi]