Wasbir Hussain | B’desh, Myanmar power shifts may hit N-E India

Factor this -- for the first time after the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, that is 53 years after Bangladesh broke out of Islamabad’s grip, a Pakistani cargo ship docked at Chittagong Port. And now, the interim government of Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has invited the Pakistani Army to train Bangladesh Army soldiers. The training is to begin as early as February 2025, and all the 10 commands of the Bangladesh Army are going to avail of this training.

One is not surprised that the Yunus regime has invited the Pakistani Army into Bangladesh, the same army the Bengali masses in Bangladesh fought in 1971 and defeated with active help from the Indian Army and Indians in general. The Yunus government invited the same Pakistani Army that had carried out the genocidal rape of up to 400,000 Bengali and Bihari women in what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh. One is not surprised that many in Dhaka, including the Yunus government, are choosing to forget India’s role in Bangladesh’s freedom because there are elements in that country who can kick, vandalise and bring down the statues of their father of the nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. In India, anyone doing such a thing to the Mahatma’s statues or other symbols will be seen as nothing short of carrying out a blasphemous act.

If we look at our other eastern neighbour Myanmar, the anti-junta resistance forces, under the umbrella of the Brotherhood Alliance, has overrun scores of towns and have taken full control of many. Two developments are of particular interest to Northeast India. One is that the Chin Brotherhood Alliance (an anti-junta alliance of several Chin-Zo-Mara militias and community groups), has taken control of around 80 per cent of Myanmar’s western Chin state that borders Mizoram and southeastern Manipur. The other is the rebel Arakan Army capturing and taking control of almost the entire southwestern Rakhine state, also bordering Mizoram and Manipur. In fact, the Arakan Army has managed to take control of the regional military headquarters of the Tatmadaw, or the Myanmar military.

India’s concerns are on multiple fronts as far as the Myanmar situation is concerned. One is the worry over the easy availability of sophisticated weapons, including improvised militarised drones, across the border in Myanmar and the influx of armed men into Manipur and Mizoram from across.

This is particularly worrisome because of the blistering ethnic conflict in Manipur between the Meitei and the Kuki-Zo communities. Several of the ethnic anti-junta militias comprise fighters from the Chin-Kuki-Zo-Mara communities and their ethnic similarity in the hills of Manipur and Mizoram is something that is causing a lot of concern. The refugee influx of the Kuki-Zo community from Myanmar into Mizoram and Manipur is a big red flag at the moment as Mizoram alone has over 30,000 refugees from Myanmar and Manipur may have an unaccounted number.

Apart from the Kuki-Zo refugees, the fear of a large Rohingya Muslim influx is also on the radar of the Indian authorities. There has been an additional 60,000 Rohingya refugee influx into Bangladesh, which is already sheltering 1.2 million Rohingyas from previous rounds of influx.

New Delhi has responded by announcing the fencing of the 1,643-km Myanmar border and withdrawing the Free Movement Regime (FMR) with Myanmar that allows people along the border to travel up to 16 km into each other’s territory. The decision to withdraw the FMR has been strongly opposed by the Kuki-Zo groups in both Mizoram and Manipur as they have relatives and interests along the border. After that, New Delhi said people along the border can still cross borders with a “pass”, and this now has been strongly opposed by the Meitei groups who fear that armed Kuki-Zo rebels could come into Indian territory and create trouble in Manipur under the guise of tourists or border people visiting their kinfolk.

There are others, though, who see the rebel takeover of states in Myanmar like Rakhine as being advantageous to India. This section feels that India’s mega project in Myanmar, the Rs 2,904-crore Kaladan Multimodal Transport Transit Project located in Rakhine state was not moving at the speed it should have had because of delays by the military junta. India has already spent around Rs 1,000 crores in the waterways part by building the port at Sittwe in Rakhine state, in a bid to gain access through Mizoram, bypassing Bangladesh. India has also spent another Rs 400 crores in building the 109-km road link to Sittwe from Mizoram. But the road within Myanmar to reach Sittwe has not seen much progress. Now that Rakhine state in in control of the Arakan Army, there is a view that India, which has always maintained good working relations with the military regime in Naypitaw, must open channels of communication with the Arakan Army and other resistance forces and increase its influence in the region. China, too, is treading cautiously as Beijing has projects worth $22 billion going on in Myanmar and would, therefore, do everything possible at its command to maintain its hold over Myanmar. New Delhi too must intensify, fine-tune or modify its counter-hedging strategies.

As far as Bangladesh is concerned, the regime there is showing clear signs of a policy that is inimical to India’s interests. Getting the Pakistani Army to train its soldiers, the attacks on the minority Hindus, and, although symbolically, commuting the death penalty of the exiled Assam insurgent leader Paresh Baruah to a life sentence. Paresh Baruah, the leader of the United Liberation Front of Asom-Independent, or Ulfa-I, was accused of getting a shipload of arms and ammunition at the Chittagong Port in 2004, in which several Bangladesh bigwigs were involved and penalised.

The big question now is: will Dhaka under Muhammad Yunus allow Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and other non-state actors owing allegiance to Pakistan to work actively along the 1,879-km-long border that Bangladesh shares with four states in India’s Northeast. If that happens, Bangladesh will be offering beleaguered Pakistan a staging area in India’s eastern frontier. That may become counterproductive to Dhaka in the long run and one only hopes that Mr Yunus, the economist, will calculate his options well.