India’s western frontier with Pakistan may generate more headlines but India’s eastern border flanking both Myanmar and Bangladesh is arguably more complex. Both neighbors have long been unstable and have both at points in their history found their territory being used by rebels waging war against New Delhi. It is not just neighboring countries that pose a challenge: internal borders too are at play. The Indian government for decades has had a complex, often tumultuous relationship with its northeastern states. The inherent complexity of the region means a wider, more expansive approach to political analysis is needed. This is precisely what Avinash Paliwal’s new book seeks to do.
The Near East is a new term for India, created by Paliwal “to impart analytical coherence to the geopolitical dynamics of a partitioned land.” This framing shapes India’s Near East as a collective of northeastern India plus Bangladesh and Myanmar. The book argues we can only understand India’s policies on its northeastern states if we also understand its policy on Burma and Bangladesh, and vice versa. This makes historic sense. There were once no borders dividing India, Myanmar and Bangladesh, as they were both all part of British India. Myanmar split off in 1937 and Bangladesh in 1947 after the bloody events of partition. Yet now, the region has been divided by border: “carved apart by communal and class violence, this is one of the most intricately partitioned lands anywhere on earth.”
Indian foreign policy in this geostrategically important region has primarily been driven by security and electoral concerns. Security considerations saw India support the military regime in Burma multiple times. This explains India’s quiet acceptance of the 1962 coup by General Ne Win, even as the regime was harassing and abusing Burmese Indians. Paliwal points out that as India was at that time undertaking operations inside Burma to attack and defeat Naga rebels who held bases inside Burmese territory, India needed the continued co-operation of the Burmese state. Then later in the 1980s, amidst a communist threat in both nations, India was quick to support the Burmese junta when it crushed the 1988 democracy movement. It then supplied arms for the junta to use against the communist movement in northern Burma that was then threatening to overthrow large parts of the Burmese state and threatened India’s own security.
It was security concerns around in India’s northeast and its wider geostrategy that also saw India help to liberate Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, in 1971. As Paliwal explains,
India didn’t proactively seek to break Pakistan—but with the situation in Assam and West Bengal worsening, Pakistan’s dismemberment became a serious, viable option.
The linguistic and cultural repression of Bengalis by Islamabad, plus a growing anti-Hindu sentiment, was causing mass migration to India from Bangladesh. With the Indian state unable to stop people from crossing the border, the government came under immense domestic pressure to address the cause of this migration.
These concerns were also key to domestic politics. When the Indian government carved several new states out of Assam, it did so in an attempt to buy the loyalty of ethnic minorities and weaken the power of secessionary movements in the region. It also hoped to facilitate easier administration and help boost the ruling Indian Congress’s electoral progress by taking the wind out of the sails of communist groups and limiting China’s ability to exploit domestic fault lines. Despite the birth of many new states, India still faces an uphill battle in its aim to expand state control of the northeast. For decades India didn’t build roads or transport infrastructure in the northeast, fearing they would be used by an invading China. Now it’s trying to reverse this policy and undertake road building to shore up its own connectivity to the isolated region and harness the area’s vast economic potential. Yet the government’s attempts to develop a significant cross border trade from its northeastern states to Bangladesh and Myanmar has been slow. Indeed the largest and most successful cross border trade between India’s northeast and Burma and Bangladesh, is in direct contradiction of the state aims, the illegal trades in drugs.
Present concerns aren’t just related to rural connectivity, Paliwal argues that under the BJP that the interplay between geo-strategy and electoral concerns has started to become untenable and risks severe side effects :
The BJP’s majoritarianism feeds division in an ethnically stratified regions it goes against Modi’s rhetoric of uniting the northeast under the BJPs banners.
This is most evidently seen in the recent explosion of violence in Manipur between Meitei and Kuki minorities. The security force implemented a temporary partition of Manipur to separate to quell the violence, but this has then contravened and hindered the infrastructural development and connectivity the BJP has promoted and congratulated itself for. In such a volatile region, the BJP should heed Paliwals warning that “Communal passions are easy to spark and difficult to contain.”
It is no surprise then that India’s success in achieving its aims in its Near East over the last few decades has been “sub-optimal”. Despite decades of work trying to develop ties within the strategically important and potentially economically lucrative region, it has struggled to make real progress. The fact remains that the countries that make up the Near East are far less connected to each other than they were before 1947.
It is difficult to make such a complex region, and mixture of regional, and domestic politics, easy to understand. The myriads of actors and interplays between different conflicts and political battles could be overwhelming but Paliwal manages to keep a cohesive narrative and an intelligible argument which runs clearly throughout the book. The Near East concept is a useful tool to analyze a volatile and increasingly important region. As a result, the book is required reading for those looking to understand the complexities and competing foreign and domestic tensions that underpin India’s foreign policy.