Wooing the Generals: India's New Burma Policy (review)

Book Reviews383 The development of the multi billion-dollar Tangguh project will be a test case for post-Suharto Indonesia. It is the largest foreign invested project since 1998 and its success should encourage other foreign companies to return to Indonesia. Interestingly, Freeport was the first western company to make investment in Indonesia after the fall of Sukarno. As Leith writes in her study, this was seen as an endorsement of the Suharto government's much more open policy towards foreign business. What BP's Tangguh project will say about how Indonesia goes about managing the political, social and environmental implications of resources development in the new century will be worth another book. Andrew Symon South Australian Centre for Economic Studies University ofAdelaide, Australia Wooing the Generals: India'sNewBurma Policy. By Renaud Egreteau. New Delhi, India: Authorspress and Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities, 2003. 234pp. This book starts with the premise that Indian foreign policy, until recently, took little or no interest in Burma (Myanmar), a fairly important country on its eastern flank. Since India's preoccupations have been mostly with its western and northern neighbours, Pakistan and China respectively, it exhibited little or no interest in building a better understanding with Burma. Not only the long border but more critically, the instability in the northeastern region that lies close to the Burmese territory should have prompted India to pay more attention to the Burmese connection. But apparently this was not the case. On the contrary, benign neglect followed by outright hostility to the military regime characterized Indian policy for a fairly long time. Burma should have merited closer attention also on account of the China factor for two reasons — Chinese encouragement for the insurgencies rampant in India's northeastern states and the perceptible warming of Sino-Burma relations in the late 1980s. The book discusses these issues at length. It also details the various facets of India's Burma policy starting with the history ofbilateral relations and the geostrategic importance of the region where Burma meets India's northeastern states. The three factors of obvious Indian concern are outlined in the next part under 384Book Reviews the sections on instability in the northeast, the burgeoning Chinese influence in Burma and Burma's importance in the context of India's Look East policy. The sources and tools of India's Burma policy are described in the third part of the book followed by the concluding section which highlights the problems and prospects ofIndian diplomacy towards its eastern neighbour. Although between 1950 and 1988 Burma consciously adopted a policy of strict neutrality by maintaining friendly relations with both India and China, a discernible shift in this policy occurred towards the end of the 1980s when it began edging closer to China. The two countries found much comfort in each other's company as the international pressure against their anti-democratic policies intensified (p. 76). Burma witnessed a spate of student demonstrations against the repressive policies of the regime in 1987 which subsequently drew in other sections of the society. The regime's brutal response to the demonstrations in which thousands were killed fuelled further protests followed by more repression. All this culminated in a coup d'etat in September 1988 when a new military junta called the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) took over. Inexplicably in May 1990 it held an election in which the National League for Democracy (NLD) under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi swept the polls. Unabashedly disregarding this verdict, SLORC declared the results invalid and arrested the NLD leaders thus derailing the democratic process. A strong pro-democracy movement and its consequent repression was similarly witnessed in China. The June 1989 Tiananmen protests and the violent way in which they were put down produced universal revulsion. Much like Burma, China too faced international condemnation for its action. This drove the two condemned states closer in moral and material terms, as some scholars have argued. The SLORC found in China a ready and willing source for its military supplies which were disrupted by international sanctions following the junta's crackdown. Diplomatically too China was of great help to the SLORC given its position...