INDIA’S call Wednesday for national reconciliation and political reform in Burma has been rather late in coming. That India was thoroughly isolated from Western and Asian opinion on Burma, where the repressive military junta has begun a crackdown on a non-violent popular protest, was an undeniable fact. Equally significant is the reality that for more than a decade and a half, India has chosen to elevate its interests above values in Burma.New Delhi’s decision to sign petroleum contracts with the Burmese government earlier this week when people on the streets of Burma were demanding democracy did not necessarily imply venality. It underlined the inertia behind the old policy that that had become increasingly insensitive to shifting ground realities in Burma. Above all India’s passive policy in Burma had become counterproductive from the perspective of the national interest.For India, international political isolation on Burma was not a problem in itself. India has often ploughed a lonely furrow on major international issues — from its opposition to the near universal Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to its support to Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia in the late 1970s to end the genocidal ultra-Marxist Pol Pot clique. India was also isolated when it was the lone supporter of the Burmese pro-democracy movement two decades ago when the army crushed a popular uprising in 1988, ignored the results of the general election in 1990 and put the winner Aung San Suu Kyi in prison.The pursuit of realpolitik in Burma was not a political crime on India’s part. Few nations can avoid the relentless pressures to trade off principles against power considerations. Even the most powerful states find it hard to produce a consistent policy on promoting universal values like human rights and democracy. The US, which has announced another set of sanctions against the Burmese generals, is reluctant to work up a similar outrage against Pakistan’s military that is doing everything possible to undermine the democratic aspirations of the people.Even when states use force beyond borders ostensibly for high moral objectives, the outcomes tend to be politically murky. There can be no better examples of this than the current US occupation of Iraq in the name of promoting democracy in the Middle East or the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan to promote socialist modernisation.During his recent travels to East Asia, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee was questioned on India’s silence on the Burmese struggle for democracy. Mukherjee ducked the issue by referring to India’s abiding commitment to the principle of “non-intervention” in the internal affairs of other nations. This principle is indeed an integral part of India’s own self-righteous foreign policy narrative; it is hardly a statement of fact.Ask any one of India’s neighbours, and they will tell you that New Delhi has never respected this norm. After all India successfully conducted one of the world’s first humanitarian interventions in East Pakistan to create Bangladesh; India sent troops to Sri Lanka to promote a peace accord between Colombo and the Tamil Tigers.In dealing with its neighbours, India had to constantly juggle between the occasional necessity of intervention to protect its own interests and the persistent temptation to deal with whoever is in power. High moralpolitik has not been the defining feature of India’s neighbourhood policy; it was always about the difficulty of managing competing imperatives and coping with the consequences of political change within the region.The real policy question for India in Burma is not whether it should intervene in favour of the pro-democracy movement, but how and on what terms. Ending the long silence on Burma, then, should be the first step towards a more vigorous approach towards promoting political change in Burma.India had confronted a similar challenge in Nepal last year when people poured out on to the streets demanding an end to monarchy’s autocratic rule. India was deeply conflicted between two divergent policy options: preserving equities in the ancien regime or aligning itself with the forces of change in Nepal. Despite deep divisions within the government on the appropriate approach to Kathmandu, India eventually called it right and intervened decisively in favour of a democratic transformation in Nepal.The policy change towards Kathmandu involved major risks; but the political will to change course had also generated enduring rewards. India must now embark on a similar policy of nudging the military rulers of Burma towards political reform. The risks of such a policy will be balanced by two important factors.One, the old order in Burma is no longer sustainable. As dictatorships go, the Burmese one has been utterly incompetent in either buying legitimacy by co-opting critical sections of the population or bringing about reasonable economic progress that might have encouraged the popular tolerance of political repression. The Burmese military has just managed to impoverish one of Asia’s richest nations. As the Buddhist clergy take away whatever shred of legitimacy that Burmese rulers could claim, it makes sense for India to be on the right side of impending political change.Two, New Delhi’s passive policy has ceded the high ground to Beijing, which has positioned itself as the agent of influence as well as the principal interlocutor between the international community and Burma. By simply tailing China on engaging the dictators in Burma, India has abandoned its own strong and unique leverages. If India is serious about its regional role and wants to stay in competition with China for influence in Burma, New Delhi must differentiate itself from Beijing, and reestablish itself as an empathetic supporter of the Burmese aspirations for political change.The writer is a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
