India doesn’t like the view as Myanmar policy stalls

7DAYS - The four Indian states sharing the country’s 1,640km border with the former Burma were supposed to be India’s gateway to Southeast Asia. Instead, the area has become India’s Wild East.


As resource-rich Myanmar emerges from decades of isolation under military rule, India should be a natural partner, with ties stretching back to the 3rd Century BC and, more recently, a shared experience of British colonialism and World War Two.

Myanmar sits at Asia’s crossroads. It has a western border with India, a northern one with China, and is also neighbours with  fellow Asian nation Thailand.

“Myanmar is India’s only bridge to Southeast Asia,” Myo Myint, Myanmar’s deputy foreign minister, said last week, adding: “India needs to come forward with assistance.”

Yet spend some time in the restive state of Manipur at the eastern tip of India, and you’ll see small groups of men with machetes on their belts in the winter twilight, openly climbing steep paths through the poppy fields, where valuable seed heads are taken to Myanmar to be processed into heroin.

This is not what India had in mind when it launched its “Look East” policy 20 years ago to link its markets to those of booming Southeast Asia.

But despite a recent flurry of high-level visits between the two countries, India appears ill-placed on the ground to exploit Myanmar’s opening.

The sleepy border town of Moreh had dreams of being a major international trading centre, a key station on the ambitious Trans-Asia Railway that will enable containers from East and Southeast Asia to travel overland across India to Europe.

But work on the $900 million, 125km stretch of the railway is already two years behind schedule and has only progressed a short distance. Moreh is a major smuggling centre where outlaws move around freely. Heroin, guns and gemstones go westward; raw opium, tiger bones and rhino horn move east.

“Since 1995, nothing substantial has taken place. The border area is like a 17th-century tribal village,” said N. Mohindro, an expert on trade in the state.

“The Look East policy is no more than power-point presentations in Delhi,” concludes Lunminthang Haokip, a state government official for Moreh’s Chandel district.

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