| Look at a map of Burma and you will see what has shaped that country's history. China sits to the north, India to the west, Thailand to the east and Laos "" window to Cambodia and Vietnam "" to the northeast. As Thant Myint-U tells it in his recent book, these entities have imposed such intolerable pressure on the Burmese that they have been forced to adapt to meet the challenges time after time. Indeed, the history of Burma, and of all the many ethnicities that live within its modern borders (of which the Burmans are the most numerous), is full of fighting, against outside foes or, more frequently, between the various Burmese kingdoms and ethnicities themselves. For centuries there seems to have been scarcely a break in the hostilities. |
| War has an incomparable mixing effect. It brings into violent contact peoples who have incompatible goals, and makes strange allies. It sucks in all kinds of adventurers and profiteers, such as the many Europeans who sold their services to the various Burmese rulers from the 16th century onwards. |
| One of the major reasons to go to war in Burma, apart from land, loot and lese majeste, was people. Right up to the 19th century, the sparse population meant that labour, "the key to economic power", was in short supply. Consequently, the Burmese kings imposed immense levies of labour on their vassals and on conquered territories. "[G]overnment," writes Thant, "was about the proper management of the king's men." |
| With perpetual war came a government built on military values. As the Burmans established an increasingly centralised kingdom, prominent families across the land took pride in sending their sons to fight for the kings; their relationship with and loyalty to the crown deepened and formalised over time. Burmese victories over the Siamese to the east and the Arakanese along the coast, and, in the 18th century, the utter defeat of the Manchu Chinese armies, which invaded through Yunnan province to Burma's north, contributed to placing the military machine at the centre of the Burmese identity and sense of pride. |
| Inevitably, an expansionist Burma rubbed up against the East India Company in Bengal. An extensive Burmese campaign in Manipur and Assam, under the generalship of Thado Maha Bandula, now a hero of Burmese history, worried the British so much that they were forced to respond. In 1824 the British sent a sizeable force up the Irrawaddy. It was a hard-fought and expensive war, but the British comprehensively defeated the Burmese, even under Bandula's leadership. Southern and coastal Burma, with its agricultural and trading wealth, and sizeable population, was lost to the Burmese king. What lost the war for the Burmese, Thant suggests, was Bandula's insistence on pitched battles. Instead of using guerrilla tactics "" no secret to the Burmese "" Bandula fought face to face, and lost. But there are notable signs of Burmese creativity, on the battlefield and off: British soldiers were amazed by one unusual tactic the Burmese used, namely, trenches "" a century before the First World War. The Burmese had also been doing their homework on the British, sending intelligence agents (probably disguised as Buddhist pilgrims) to follow the British course in India. |
| Defeat by the British was a great shock. But it triggered attempts at reform, modernisation and demilitarisation of the state by the king, Mindon. At roughly the same time, monarchs like Mehmet Ali of Egypt and Mongkhut of Siam (the king in The King and I) were embarking on their own modernisation programmes. Mindon, however, merely managed to alienate the ruling class. The crisis of governance led thousands of ordinary people to flee to British-ruled and more prosperous south Burma, further weakening his kingdom. Mindon's efforts came to be the foundation that the British built on, when they took over all of Burma in the 1880s "" by which time the Burmese had veered back towards conservative politics under a weak king. |
| In Britain, another kind of conservative, Randolph Churchill (Winston's father), looking for a foreign war to boost his electoral chances, found it in distant Burma. An excuse was found "" reported contacts with the French "" and Britain went to war again in 1885. The last king, Thibaw, was dethroned and sent into exile in India. |
| The British were left with a state in collapse, with no real administration and no citizens grateful for liberation. Insurgency continued. Even after things quieted down, the province remained one of the most violent and crime-prone in the Indian empire. The Burmese came to associate the British with this deeply painful period. |
| George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Blair) served in upper Burma between 1922 and 1927. His dislike of colonialism, particularly because of what it does to the coloniser himself, show in his writings on this period, including his famous essay "Shooting an Elephant", and the brilliantly-observed novel Burmese Days. |
| The experience of British colonialism influenced the Burmese reception of the Japanese during the Second World War. The Japanese had prepared carefully, sending agents into Burma, teaching the language in their institutes, and picking up likely young leaders including Aung San and his student compatriots for training and indoctrination. Aung San emerged a hero after the war because he had come with the Japanese to liberate Burma from the British, and then, when the Japanese were hated, had turned around to help the British throw them out. Then he impressed upon the exhausted British that holding on to Burma would mean endless use of force, for which he knew the British no longer had the stomach. The British left in 1948 but Aung San and his cabinet were assassinated soon after. |
| Burma went through decades of messy democracy but the constant fighting with the non-Burman nationalities in the east and north, not to mention the Burmese Communist insurgents, and eventually and most destructively, with China itself, in the throes of the struggle between Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, led to the army becoming more powerful and autonomous under General Ne Win. |
| Ne Win became dictator in 1962, and the military has ruled ever since. It cut the country off from the rest of the world, and has taken over the whole administration, so that Thant calls it the "purest" military dictatorship in the world. But he stresses that the simple binary in which world opinion now views Burma "" junta versus Aung San Suu Kyi "" is misleading, because of the degree to which the army is associated with the Burmese identity, and how the army views itself. Sanctions, he and other analysts say, merely weaken civil society and strengthen the military regime. He urges renewed engagement with Burma through trade and society, so as to raise the costs for the military of failing to reform. |
| The implication for India is clear: instead of trying to outdo China in terms of arms and support to the regime, and in the absence of any more activist pro-democracy policy, we must carefully encourage civil society contacts and trade, so as to help the Burmese help themselves, and perhaps look towards India as a friend and example. |
| Books on Burma : |
| |
Top Section
Explore Business Standard