As the dust settles from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s groundbreaking trip to Myanmar, it is a good time to take stock of what has been an epochal year for India’s neighbour. There are two competing narratives: one optimistic, and one pessimistic. New Delhi must keep both in mind as it expands its bilateral relationship.
The optimistic view foregrounds the changes that have occurred over the past year, and especially since President Thein Sein took office in March as the first civilian president of Myanmar in nearly half a century. In that time Aung San Suu Kyi, generally acknowledged as the leader of the pro-democracy movement in the country, was released from house arrest. She also travelled to the general’s extravagant and sterile folly of a capital, Naypyidaw, to meet Sein, and announced her party, the National League of Democracy, would end its boycott of electoral politics and that she would run for a seat in Myanmar's parliament herself. Meanwhile, the country's 50-year isolation from the world seemed to be ending too. Japan has announced it is resuming bilateral aid, and Asean even announced that it will allow Myanmar to hold the association's rotating presidency in 2014. Clinton’s visit, in which she urged nuclear non-proliferation, an end to ethnic infighting and greater openness to democracy and the outside world — and movingly hugged Suu Kyi after a meeting in the house that had become the democracy activist’s jail — seemed to cap this gradual process, bestowing on it the approval of the United States.
Yet that is most emphatically not the only story here. Myanmar is rich in natural resources — hydroelectric power, natural gas and high-quality timber in particular. The People's Republic of China, by virtue of lavish investment as well as unstinting support to the military regime, had preferential access to these resources. India, believing that it must engage with its neighbour, had for some years attempted to improve relations with the Myanmar junta, even inviting the former head of state, Than Shwe, to India in 2010. US President Barack Obama, on his visit to India last year, lectured the Indian Parliament on the impropriety of this; but, within a few months, his administration was wooing Myanmar. There certainly might be a pro-democracy element to this new US interest. But it would be naive to suppose that the US’s renewed focus on Asia Pacific, of which outreach to Myanmar is a part, does not also stem from its perceived need to counterbalance China. Myanmar, through its cancellation of a major hydroelectric project that was supposed to supply power to southern China, demonstrated for its new friends its capability to withstand Beijing’s pressure. Yet Myanmar is an ethnically fragmented country with an unpopular, remote government and a history of isolation. It also has tremendous resources and a geographically strategic location, of interest to competing great powers. As the history of Afghanistan so tragically proves, to be the board on which a Great Game is played is not a happy fate. In Afghanistan, India insists that its involvement has been strictly friendly, keeping the interests and independence of the country's people in mind. In Myanmar, even closer, and so crucial for India’s Northeast, it can afford to do no less.