It is difficult for me to talk about Burma without a deep sense of nostalgia. My earliest memories are all of Burma, where I grew up between the ages of three and six. My father was a visiting professor at the Agricultural College in Mandalay, on leave from Dhaka University. My first memory of striking natural beauty is that of sunrise over the Maymyo hills seen from our wooden house at the eastern edge of Mandalay. It was a thrilling sight even for a young boy.
My first recollections of warm human relations stretching beyond my own family are also of kindly Burmese society. Mandalay was a lively city in the 1930s, and Burma a magically beautiful country. The richness of the land and the enormous capacity of the Burmese people to be happy and friendly shone brightly through the restraining lid of British colonialism.
After a short period of independence from British rule and a brief experience of democracy, Burma has been in the grip of a supremely despotic military rule for almost half a century now. There were initially some ups and downs. But over the last couple of decades, there have been nothing other than downs and downs. The country has steadily fallen in the economic ranking of poor countries in the world, and it is now one of the absolutely poorest on the globe. Its educational and health services are in tatters. Medicine is difficult to get and educational institutions can hardly function.
There is viciously strict censorship, combined with heavy punishment for rebellious voices. The minority communities — Shans, Karens, Chins, Rohingyas and others — get particularly cruel and oppressive treatment. There are shockingly plentiful cases of arbitrary imprisonment, terrifying torture, state-directed displacement of people, and organised rapes and killings. And when the population faces a catastrophe, like in the hurricane Nargis in May 2008, the government not only does not want to help at all, its first inclination is to ban others in the world from helping the distressed and destituted people in the country.
The military rulers have renamed Burma as Myanmar, and the renaming seems perhaps understandable, for the country is no longer the Burma that magnificently flourished over the centuries. New Myanmar is the hell-hole version of old Burma.
What is striking is that tyranny has grown steadily in Burma precisely over the decades in which democracy has made major progress across the globe. When the great leader Aung San, who led Burma to independence, was gunned down on the 19th of July in 1947, there was no democratic country in Asia or Africa. India became independent next month and established a flourishing multi-party democracy soon thereafter, and one by one a great many countries moved from authoritarian rule to democratic forms of government.
China, even though it does not have a multi-party democracy, gives plentiful evidence of being deeply concerned in a systematic and dedicated way with the well-being of its population. Burma, on the other hand, has moved exactly in the opposite direction. Ne Win, the military leader, began with a care-taker government in 1958, and then seized power in 1962, and Burma has had a continuous sequence of military rules since then, with the grip of uncaring oppression steadily growing in its reach and enforcement, with comprehensive neglect of the well-being of the Burmese people.
Individuals and groups act on the basis of reasoning in undertaking reflected actions. The reasoning can be primitive or sophisticated, and the wisdom of actions and the resulting consequences cannot but depend on the quality and reach of such reasoning. These reasonings often go by the name of “incentives” to which reflective agents tend to respond.
When we are concerned with changing behaviours and policies, we have to examine carefully what incentives the different agents involved — the Burmese government, the citizens, the neighbouring countries and the world at large — have in contributing to changing things in Burma.
(Excerpts from a lecture by Amartya Sen at a conference organised by Human Rights Watch and Johns Hopkins University, at the SAIS Kenny Auditorium, Washington DC, on October 20)
