BURMA’S TOP military ruler began his official visit to India yesterday amid protests by human rights groups over New Delhi hosting the junta chief whom they blame for inflicting wide-ranging atrocities on the Burmese people.
Gen Than Shwe will hold discussions over five days with Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and other senior leaders. They are likely to conclude an agreements to combat drug trafficking, smuggling and terrorist activities across the porous India-Burma frontier.
After years of supporting Burma’s democratic movement led by incarcerated Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, Delhi switched tack a decade ago to enlist the military regime’s help in tracking insurgents active in India’s restive northeastern states who operate from dense jungles straddling the common border.
Thereafter, it has striven to forge deep economic and military ties with Burma’s military claiming engagement to be a better approach than the sanctions policy favoured by the West.
“India’s desire to do business with Burma, reported to have large reserves of natural gas and precious stones too, had outweighed previous concerns over human rights” a western diplomat, declining to be named said. Gen Shwe’s Delhi visit will accord him some legitimacy, he added.
By forging closer ties with Burma, India also expects to dilute well-established links between the Shwe-led junta and Beijing and to a limited extent, with Pakistan. “India has long ignored China and Pakistan’s growing influence with Burma’s military government at its peril and it is now seeking to neutralise it” a senior defence official said in Delhi.
China is seeking access to the Indian Ocean via Burma by investing heavily in numerous projects and bolstering the military junta with arms.
Meanwhile, the United States urged India to “send a clear message to Burma that it needs to change its course”.
The International Federation for Human Rights, which represents 164 organisations across the world, wrote to the Indian prime minister recently maintaining that the junta’s “well-documented human rights abuses includes acts that may amount to war crimes”.