B.RAMAN
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is presently on a visit to
India where she grew up and studied as a teen-ager. Her widowed mother was
posted as the Myanmar Ambassador to India. She delivered the Jawaharlal Nehru
Memorial Lecture at New Delhi on November
14,2012. She was interviewed on November 15 by Barkha Dutt of NDTV and Karan
Thapar of CNN-IBN. Before her arrival, she gave a detailed interview to
Nirupama Subramanian of “The Hindu”.
2.Her lecture and three interviews have made a
positive impact on public mind and highlighted her affection for India and her
understated regret that during the long years she was under house arrest, India
avoided taking up vigorously the cause
of the human rights of the Myanmar people. India’s security and power
considerations and not our concerns over the rights of her people influenced
our policy priorities and options. In her reply to one of Barkha’s questions,
she stated that she understood that Indian interests influenced Indian
decisions towards her country and its military Government.
3. There is no need for us to have a guilt complex
for having allowed realpolitik considerations to influence our priorities and
decisions when she was under house arrest. Suu Kyi herself is a practitioner
par excellence of realpolitik.
4. After she was released following an agreement with President Thein
Sein and got elected to her Parliament, her priorities in respect of foreign visits have been
Thailand, European Union, the USA and India. She intends going to China last.
As between India and China, her priority is to India. As between the West and
India, her priority has been to the West. Recent reports from Myanmar speak of
a certain disillusionment in sections of the Myanmar political class over her perceived
preferences for the West as against
Myanmar’s Asian neighbours.
5.Since she became politically active, she has been
focussing on two issues---- keeping up the pressure on President Thein Sein and
his Government to keep moving on the road to internal democratisation and
external opening-up and keeping up the pressure on the West to remove the remaining
economic sanctions and the curbs on
Western investments in Myanmar.
6. One can’t help forming an impression that in the
matter of investments, she prefers investment flows from the West. She has no
objection to investment flows from India but is concerned that this could lead
to pressure from China for more Chinese investments.
7. In matters of interest and concern to India, her
policies and pronouncements have been marked more by discreet silence than
clear articulation. She has avoided a
clear articulation of her views regarding the human rights of the Rohingya
Muslims. This is an issue that in the medium and long term could have an impact on our Muslim community in the
North-East. She has not uttered a word on the question of compensation for
Indian businessmen who were driven out of Myanmar in the late 1950s and 1960s
after seizing their property.
8. What I have enumerated above would show how she
has had no qualms over taking decisions and advocating policies on the basis of
her perceptions of Myanmar’s national interests and the interests of herself
and her party.
9. If we had taken realpolitik decisions in the
past on the basis of our perceptions of our national interests, there is no
reason to let a gnawing feeling of guilt affect our future policies. Myanmar is
an important buffer state between India and the Yunnan Province of China. If there
is another military conflict with China due to the pending border dispute, the
policies and attitudes of the Myanmar Government will have an impact on our
ability to counter the Chinese designs.
10. We have two important national interests in
Myanmar---- the security-related interests arising from the counter-insurgency
situation in the North-East and our border dispute with China and our economic
interests arising from the need for connectivity with Bangladesh and the ASEAN
countries.
11. We have to identify those sections of the
Myanmar society and administration which will be favourably inclined towards
paying attention to these interests and strengthen our links with them. At
present, only the Myanmar Armed Forces and the Government dominated by them
have a positive comprehension of our interests and have been inclined to take
notice of them.
12. Suu Kyi and her National League For Democracy
have not shown such comprehension and such inclination. It will be unwise on
our part to dilute the links that we had built up with the Armed Forces and the
Government dominated by them just because of our affection for Suu Kyi and our
tendency to romanticise her.
13. We must strengthen our relations with her and
her party and build on the emotional links of the past without allowing the
realpolitik links with the Armed Forces to rust. (15-11-12)
(The writer
is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi,
and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate
of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com Twitter @SORBONNE75)
