Indo-Myanmar relations and Northeast India: Peace, Security and Development
- Part 3 -

Subir Bhaumik *

*** A lecture delivered by Subir Bhaumik on the occasion of MOSAIC festival in Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Dated January 22, 2016

In January 2002, the six countries – Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and China – set up the 'Joint Special Task Unit 2002' to coordinate the fight against drug trafficking. India is yet to join this initiative, despite clear indications that Burmese drug cartels are increasingly using Northeast Indian states to send their deadly cargo into Bangladesh, mainland India or Nepal en route to regional and global markets. Seizures of heroin and amphetamines have risen in most Northeast Indian states and they are believed to be the tip of the iceberg.

The threat posed by the increased drug trafficking to India and particularly to its sensitive northeastern region are threefold:

(a) Trafficking through the northeast has led to a rise in local consumption. The region's drug addict population is currently estimated at around 1,20,000 by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) . Many addicts use intravenous injections to push drugs and become HIV positive. The number of HIV positive cases in the Northeast has risen to around 20,000 in the last two decades.

(b) Several military and paramilitary officials have been arrested for smuggling heroin or lesser drugs in Northeast India. The drug cartel has sucked in several politicians, bureaucrats and even security force officials to carry on their illicit trade. Unless checked firmly, this trend is dangerous for the morale of Indian security forces.

(c) Ethnic separatists in India's northeast are taking to protection of drug mafias as a quick way to raise funds. Some like the Manipur Peoples Liberation Front continue to fiercely resist the drug traffickers, but other groups, including the NSCN, have taken to the drug trade, as seizures from their camps in recent months indicate. The Burmese drug lords are also encouraging tribal farmers to plant poppy. Unless these new plantations are promptly destroyed and gainful agricultural alternatives provided to the farmers, the India-Burma border will soon be dotted with poppy fields feeding the processing plants in western Burma. A rebel-drug lord-officialdom nexus is emerging in India's Northeast in a repeat of the Colombian scenario.

Early in this millennium, an upcoming drug lab set by the 'Ah Hua' network of Yunnan and North Burma in Calcutta's posh Salt Lake area (in an apartment owned by a senior police official) was busted by the Narcotics Control Bureau. Six Chinese and Burmese nationals arrested from that apartment confessed that it was much easier to get the requisite quantity of poppy into Calcutta and sell the drugs in the Indian market than get tonnes of processing chemicals like acetic anhydride to remote Burmese locations from Calcutta.

India sees a major threat in the rising flow of narcotics from Burma's 'Golden Triangle'. It will have to engage Burma closely to fight this menace. Without further delay India should, and finally perhaps will, join the six-nation task force set to fight narcotics in the Mekong region, but the state of bilateral ties between India and Burma will be crucial to its efforts to keep out Burmese drugs from South Asia. Tackling the drug menace emanating from Myanmar is a major concern for India.

When the Naga rebels started their guerrilla campaign in 1956, they depended on World War II weapons left behind by the Japanese and the Allies. A few years later, Pakistan started arming the Nagas and the Mizo rebels in a big way. Later, the rebels received most of their weapons from China, as Pakistani support waned after the break-up of that country in 1971. As the Chinese weapons were carried back by the rebel groups through Burma, India started cultivating the Kachins to deny the north-eastern rebels the corridor to reach China. Between 1988 and 1994, the KIA developed close ties with the Indian RAW.

By the mid-1980s, however, as China stopped backing these rebel groups and Pakistan was too far away for direct help, the rebels of Northeast India turned to black markets of southeast Asia for weapons. The long conflict in Indo-China created a thriving arms bazaar that the LTTE was the first to access through the 'Karikal Muslims' (who hailed from the Tamil-speaking French dependency of that name and had settled down in Indo -China during French rule).

Subsequently the rebel groups from the Northeast gained access to this black-market through different sources. Most of the weapons were received in Thailand, loaded in ships and brought to the coast of Bangladesh, from where they would find their way into Northeast India through land routes, with guerrillas doubling as porters.

The NSCN, the ULFA, the Bodo and the Manipuri rebels as well as the Tripuri guerrillas have all brought in huge quantity of arms through this route. But the Indian Army's Operation Golden Bird in April-May 1995 and a mysterious explosion in a weapons carrying ship next year, exposed the risks involved in bringing huge quantities of weapons over such a long route. By the end of the 1990s, the rebels of the Northeast had turned to the Yunnan mafia. In an attempt to turn the state-run ordinance factories into profit centres, Chinese state-run Norinco started selling huge quantities of weapons to even mafia groups based in Yunnan

– groups such as the Blackhouse. By 1999-2000, these mafia groups had become the prime source of weapons for the Northeast Indian rebel groups like the ULFA. A top leader of ULFA, now surrendered, told this writer that the weapons from Yunnan are at least 50% cheaper than those in Thailand.

In November 2001, the Burmese army raided five Manipuri rebel camps in and around Tamu and recovered 1600 pieces of weapons including mortars and rocket launchers. Investigations have revealed these weapons have been purchased from the Yunnan mafia.

Even after losing close to a thousand pieces of weapons in Bhutan, the ULFA military wing chief Paresh Barua told this writer that 'weapons were no cause of worry, loss of men was.' Indian intelligence reports suggest that the ULFA has become the major conduit for these weapons for a whole host of rebel groups from the Nepal Maoists to the Peoples War in the Indian mainland. The ULFA has 'been frying fish in its own oil' – buying weapons from the Yunnan mafia and selling it to the Nepali and the Indian Maoists or the Islamic jihadis in Bangladesh at double the price, good enough to pay for their own acquisitions.

From Bogra in Bangladesh to Calcutta in West Bengal to Chittagong in April 2004, huge quantities of weapons meant for the ULFA or for forwarding to its many clients have been seized. The quantities varied from a few truckloads in Bogra in western Bangladesh to a whole shipload good enough to arm a whole army division in Chittagong. A regional expert, however, asserts that the huge quantities of weapons seized at Chittagong port on 2 April 2004, had originated in Hong Kong, 'which was shipped to Singapore where more weapons were added.'

The easy availability of cheap weapons from China, either transported through the land route by the Yunnan mafia through Burmese territory, or brought by sea on trawlers through the Bay of Bengal, will remain a major source of worry for Delhi. These are routes it will have to block to control insurgency and militancy in the country's Northeast and in neighbouring countries like Nepal and Bangladesh.

The latest disclosures by NSCN's chief of procurement Anthony alias Nikkhang Shimray and Thai gunrunner Willy points to a $ 1.2 million deal to land a huge consignment of Chinese weapons that would have been loaded on a ship at Beihei in South China sea and unloaded near abeach in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar in 2010 to be brought into Northeast. The NIA has already secured concrete evidence of the money trail for the deal.

Ever since the Chinese stopped official help to the insurgents of Northeast India, these rebel groups have remained in a position to access and buy huge quantities of weapons at very affordable prices. That would mean they can raise more recruits and arm them.

Indian military officials say unless this new weapons route is blocked (a) the northeast Indian rebel groups will have much more arms to fight with; ( b) they will have much more money raised through weapons trafficking to other groups; and (c) they will have close fraternal ties with these groups and have access to their support networks in the subcontinent and abroad that may have a direct bearing on their potential to make trouble.

To be continued...

* Subir Bhaumik is a veteran journalist and author on India's northeast. Both his books " Insurgent Crossfire: Northeast India" and "Troubled Periphery: Crisis of India's Northeast" have been well acclaimed. His next book " Agartala Doctrine: Proactive Northeast in Indian foreign policy" is being published by the Oxford University Press. Bhaumik is a former Queen Elizabeth House fellow of Oxford University, a Senior Fellow at East-West Centre (Washington) and an Eurasian fellow at Frankfurt University. He was BBC's bureau chief for East and Northeast India for 17 years and worked for Reuters, PTI and Ananda Bazar Group of Calcutta before that since 1980. Now he works as senior editor for the Dhaka-based bdnews24.com and doubles up as Consulting Editor for Myanmar's Mizzima Newsgroup. He writes Opinion pieces in leading Indian newspapers like Hindu, Telegraph, Times of India and Hindustan Times and also for Al Jazeera and BBC. He is also involved in full time research as Senior Fellow of the Calcutta-based Centre for Studies in International Relations & Development (CSIRD) and has written detailed policy papers for Observer Research Foundation, Calcutta Research Group and Singapore's ISAS