Myanmar News Articles: Sushma Swaraj's Myanmar Visit: Gauging Response To Modi Regime

By South Asia Monitor

By Obja Borha Hazarika

India's neighbourhood diplomacy has gained fresh vigour with the swearing in of a new government at the helm of political affairs in the country.

The new government is making the countries bordering India a major priority in its foreign affairs agenda, and this is manifested in the rise in the number of high-level visits being made to these states, among other initiatives.

In the latest in such overtures, India's External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj was on her maiden visit to Myanmar Aug 8-11 for bilateral talks, as well as to attend ministerial meetings connected with Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), East Asia Summit and ASEAN Regional Forum. Myanmar was the first Southeast Asian country Swaraj visited after trips to three important neighbours in South Asia: Bhutan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

Swaraj also had bilateral engagements with her counterparts from 11 countries during the Myanmar visit. These visits gave the minister an opportunity to interact with the leaders of a range of countries and provided a forum for India to enunciate its position on several issues of major strategic concern. Swaraj's visit also set the stage for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the Southeast Asian country in November for the India-ASEAN summit.

Commenting on her impressions after the multilateral and bilateral engagements in Myanmar, Swaraj said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision has significantly increased India's stature among foreign governments as they felt that the new government will be able to deliver on its promises and boost trade and investment, due to its clear majority in parliament.

In her meetings with the President of Myanmar U Thein Sein and Foreign Minister U Wunna Maung, Swaraj raised India's serious concern over certain militant outfits of the northeastern region having bases inside its territory and asked the country to take action against them. Myanmar's cooperation is crucial to tackling the insurgency situation in India's north-eastern states. Incremental steps such as border fencing and intelligence sharing have already begun, which are a promising start towards meeting the requirements for controlling and abating the menace of insurgency in northeast India.

The Indian delegation took the opportunity provided by the international forums of the many meetings in Myanmar to voice India's major security and connectivity concerns. India is interested in ensuring that countries cooperate in a transparent and mutually beneficial manner to tackle trans-boundary and cross border threats to overall security of the region. During the Intervention by the Indian external affairs minister at the 21st ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) Meeting in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar, it was stressed that the Asia-Pacific security architecture in general and the ARF in particular should be open, transparent, inclusive and evolutionary.

In the remarks by Sushma Swaraj at the 4th EAS Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar it was emphasized that the East Asia Summit can become a very powerful instrument for building an open, transparent, inclusive and egalitarian architecture in East Asia. It was also stressed that non-traditional security threats such as international terrorism, piracy, transnational crimes, drug-trafficking, maritime security and proliferation of sensitive items require a more comprehensive response from the international community. Cooperation was the key theme being pressed by the Indian side in the forums during the Myanmar visit.

During the opening remarks by the Sushma Swaraj at the 12th India-ASEAN Meeting in Nay Pyi Taw it was mentioned that the ASEAN-India strategic partnership owes its strength to the fact that India's 'Look East' to ASEAN meets ASEAN's 'Look West' towards India. It was also mentioned that the government of India wishes to take forth its relations with ASEAN via Tradition, Talent, Tourism, Trade and Technology, and Connectivity in all its dimensions, geographic, institutional and people-to-people.

ASEAN countries and especially Myanmar are crucial for India's strategic concerns. Not only are these countries important for India's economic vision but they are also key to realizing India's security concerns. Cooperation and transparency from these countries can go a long way in enabling India to tackle many of its security related issues ranging from cross-border terrorism to drug and human trafficking in its border states. Larger security issues like the South China Sea impasse were also discussed at all the meetings in Myanmar and India agreed with the stand that the Law of the Seas ought to be respected by all parties irrespective of their historical claims over large swathes of the water body in question.

India's conception of the neighbourhood has undergone shifts with the change in its perception of itself and how it is perceived by other states. The neighbourhood is no longer limited to just the nations immediately surrounding India but extend to encompass the entire Asian continent, the Indian Ocean, the eastern border of the Africa continent and the islands in the South West Pacific. Although this enlargement lends some incoherence with regard to formulation and identification of particular neighbourhood policies of India, nonetheless, the refashioning of the neighbourhood has been timely with the revolution in technology and the rise in India's global stature, especially its role as a veto player nation.

Sushma Swaraj's thrust in the meetings in Myanmar were aimed towards voicing India's position on the many important strategic issues which the world is facing and also to ensure that India's particular concerns are heard by the larger world community and India's extended neighbourhood. Another important facet of these meetings were to test the waters in order to gauge the response of the international actors to Narendra Modi's regime, which according to the external affairs minister herself were largely positive, which is a great opportunity for India to capitalise on.

(Obja Borah Hazarika is an Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Dibrugarh University, Assam, and can be contacted at [email protected])