The Rohingya crisis: Past and present

On the night of December 6, 1992, a cable went out from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to Indian diplomatic missions abroad cautioning them that Pakistan might try to exploit the situation after the demolition of Babri Masjid, especially urging them to be on their guard against violence directed at Indian properties and interests.
 
In two foreign capitals, response to the cable was swift and decisive when the heads of missions conveyed New Delhi’s concerns at very high levels in their host governments. The army, which ruled Myanmar with a firm hand, was extremely sensitive to India’s apprehensions. The uniformed generals in Yangon immediately despatched their most feared enforcers to Sittwe, capital of Rakhine state, which is now in the headlines daily and is featured prominently on television screens the world over because of an exodus of Rohingya refugees to wherever they can find shelter.
 
All over Rakhine state, these trained enforcers, aided by heavily armed back-up personnel in uniform, rounded up Islamic preachers and brought them to Sittwe. In the provincial capital, these mullahs were told by officers what would happen to them if they uttered even a word about Babri Masjid in their Friday sermons. The preachers knew very well from past experience that these enforcers could be true to their word.
 

The common cause attributed to the statelessness of Rohingyas under Myanmar’s 1948 citizenship law and decades of persecution or conflict is generations-old ethnic animosity between migrant Bengali Muslims and native Buddhists. Photo: Reuters

In mosques where Rohingya Muslims gathered in large numbers for Friday prayers on December 11, it was as if Babri Masjid had never existed. This pattern continued for many months under the camouflaged eyes of military intelligence personnel during Friday sermons.
 
The other capital where Indian concerns found a receptive response was Tehran but what Iran did in response to the cable from South Block, the MEA headquarters, is not relevant to the discussions on the predicament of Rohingya Muslims. In any case, the Iranians had been primed for what happened in Ayodhya on December 6 by then prime minister P V Narasimha Rao himself in the first week of September 1992 when he talked to then Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani at a private meeting in Indonesia on the sidelines of the 10th Non-Aligned Summit.
 
The common cause that is attributed to the statelessness of Rohingyas under Myanmar’s 1948 citizenship law — which was subsequently tightened after the army seized power in 1962 — and decades of persecution or conflict is generations-old ethnic animosity between migrant Bengali Muslims and native Buddhists. It is true that this baggage left over by history cannot be made to disappear with prevailing unrealistic formulae or solutions even if they are well-meaning.
 
What is not very well known or adequately appreciated in the West is that Muslims in Rakhine state — previously Arakan kingdom — who are of Bengali origin did not help matters: They petitioned Mohammad Ali Jinnah in the run-up to the subcontinent’s Partition to fight for areas they live in as part of East Pakistan, breaking away from what was then Burma. The mainstream Burmese, especially the Buddhist clergy, is unlikely to ever forgive Rohingya Muslims for this attempt at secession, which might well have succeeded if Jinnah had not refused the entreaties of Rohingya leaders.
 
It would be simplistic to link the Myanmar junta’s eagerness in December 1992 to pay close heed to New Delhi’s concerns about the fallout of events in Ayodhya to any shared worries about radical Islam. Just as it would be simplistic to rationalise the Narendra Modi government’s calibrated approach to the Rohingya influx now to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindutva philosophy.
 
In February 1992, U Wynn Lwin drove to Rashtrapati Bhavan to present his credentials as Myanmar’s ambassador. R Venkataraman received the credentials, but instead of the usual welcome remarks and the customary hopes for good bilateral relations, the then president gave the new envoy a nasty dressing-down to be conveyed to his army bosses in Yangon for keeping Aung Saan Suu Kyi in jail. That evening the anguished ambassador told this writer that Venkataraman “expressed concern over the delay in forming a popular government in Myanmar”.
 
K R Narayanan, then president of the anti-junta, India-Myanmar Friendship Society — who would become the country’s vice-president a few months later — told this writer on background that he had advised Venkataraman to pull up the incoming envoy. In July that year, India allowed the US-based National Coalition Government (in exile) of the Union of Burma, headed by Suu Kyi’s first cousin Sein Win, to open an office in India.
 
Although Narayanan and his Burmese wife, Usha, were influential campaigners for Suu Kyi’s freedom and proponents of a policy of firm opposition to the junta in Yangon, a raging debate on Myanmar had begun within the Narasimha Rao government. New players in South Block favoured a policy of realpolitik towards those who wielded real power in Yangon.
 
These “realists” in the MEA and Rao’s office cited India’s national security stakes along the border with Myanmar and inside with north-eastern rebel sanctuaries to argue for strategic cooperation with the army rulers. The missive from New Delhi about the fallout of Babri Masjid demolition was a windfall for the junta and they used it as a catalyst to turn around Rao’s Myanmar policy.
 
In March 1993, foreign secretary J N Dixit travelled to Yangon, the first high-level visit from New Delhi since Rajiv Gandhi in December 1987. Shortly thereafter, the junta allowed Indian armed forces to enter Myanmar and hunt down secessionists from the Northeast, ensconced in rebel camps, according to those in charge of such incursions. The condition was that these operations should not be made public. Such operations have been conducted from time to time for 24 years since then. It is not at all surprising that the Modi government, like its predecessors, is balancing India’s security interests in Myanmar against humanitarian considerations on the Rohingya exodus out of Rakhine state. 

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The author reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years