Ms Suu Kyi's real test

Three challenges for Myanmar's victorious party

As celebrations and recriminations from the Bihar Assembly elections wane, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government may want to turn its attention to another poll that is riveting world attention in Myanmar. Unlike Bihar, preliminary results of Myanmar's polls hold few shocks: as widely expected, the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by the country's most famous dissident Aung Sang Suu Kyi, is on track to win a landslide in both houses of Parliament and the state and regional parliaments. With this victory, however, Ms Suu Kyi and her party would have crossed only the first, admittedly major, hurdle in Myanmar's rocky transition to democracy. For one, the elections can be described as partial since the military continues to wield considerable power by virtue of reserving a fourth of the seats for itself in all representative institutions and retaining control of key ministerial positions such as defence and home. Thus, even if the NLD wins more than two-thirds of the contested constituencies - to vote in a new president, who will form the government and appoint regional chiefs, her power will be constrained. Ms Suu Kyi, who is constitutionally barred from the president-ship because her children are foreigners, has declared that she will rule by proxy. However, she will be forced to share power with the very institution that placed her under house arrest for nearly two decades but also grudgingly introduced the political liberalisation that has made her rise to power possible.

Another element of her challenge will be to introduce economic reform robust enough to transform this agrarian economy with 26 per cent of its people below the poverty line and 37 per cent unemployment. Western multinationals are keenly awaiting the transition to democracy, however limited, to take advantage of the country's rich natural resource base. The fact that the military dominates the economy through myriad front companies of varying probity, however, makes the country a difficult place to do business. It is no surprise that China, with a similar military-monopolised industrial complex, predominates in the country's big-ticket infrastructure projects. Ms Suu Kyi's third big challenge is bringing the country's minorities into the mainstream. The Muslim Rohingyas, for instance, have been barred from participating in the elections on grounds that they were not citizens, and the country's many minority tribes - Karen, Kachin, Shan - remain alienated from the Barma Buddhist majority. Ms Suu Kyi has attracted considerable opprobrium for her silence on the military's persecution of the Rohingyas; she urgently needs to prove that her government will be inclusive.

As the sole ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) member with whom India shares a border, the opportunities for closer ties are enormous, not least because of close personal ties with Ms Suu Kyi. So far, though diplomatic relations have been reasonably stable, economic ties have been spotty, with incomplete infrastructure projects and promises on the Indian side. This election provides the opportunity for India to correct those missteps too.