Analysis: Democracy means Burma and India share more than a border

ISOLATED and impoverished by decades of international sanctions, Burma has emerged in recent months as both a beacon of hope and a potential new Asian flashpoint.

With Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi freed from two decades of house arrest to campaign vigorously for a seat in parliament in the special election to be held on 1 April, Burma’s commitment to rejoining the international community appears to be genuine.

So no-one should be surprised that Burma is of interest for great powers. After all, it is larger than France and with a similar population size.

Burma’s strategic importance reflects, first and foremost, its geographic location between India, China, Thailand, and South-east Asia. Ringed in the north by the southern ridges of the Himalayas, to the east by foothills of dense teak forests, and to the west and south by the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean, Burma’s geography has always shaped the country’s history and politics.

The end of British rule in 1947 gave Burma its freedom, but did not end its travails. The assassination of Aung San (Suu Kyi’s father and the leader of Burma’s independence movement) destabilised the country, paving the way for the army to take over. Under its long-serving military junta, Burma shut itself off from the world.

It was to this Burma that I journeyed from Imphal some ten years ago, the first Indian foreign minister to travel overland to its neighbour since independence.

China, too, has endeavoured for centuries to bind Burma to itself, mostly in search of a southern route to India and the Indian Ocean. In recent decades, China took advantage of the international community’s shunning of Burma to secure its own strategic interests, building highways, railways, ports, and pipelines that connect southern and western China to the Indian Ocean.

Reflecting its fears about the potential for Chinese encirclement, democratic India, after early hiccups of doubt, set aside its scruples about Burma’s military regime. India’s cultural, economic, social, and sometimes military ties with Burma are older than China’s. So, for reasons of realpolitik, India expanded its activities and investments in Burma throughout the last two decades of the junta’s rule.

Sometimes the competition with China is direct. At the Shwe gas fields along the Burmese cost, two pipelines are to be constructed: one to China from the nearby port of Kyauk Phru, and the other to India from the port of Sittwe.

While China seeks strategic depth in Burma, India’s interests there are now reanimated by the international community’s opening to a country that appears to yearn for the same democratic freedoms that Indians possess. And, in Aung San Suu Kyi, who studied in New Delhi, Burma possesses a charismatic moral leader who reminds Indians of their country’s own founders.

• Jaswant Singh is the only person to have served as India’s finance minister (1996, 2002-2004), foreign minister (1998-2004), and defence minister (2000-2001)