Myanmar’s sorrows have hit me hard. I’ve known many people from that once happy land. Tamil relatives of mine used to live there in the 1920s. Even earlier, in the 1901-02 winter, a 32-year-old Gandhi sailed from Kolkata to visit a dear friend from student days in London, Pranjivan Mehta, who had started a business in what used to be called Burma.
Older than me by nearly three decades, U Nu (his country’s prime minister for many years and one of the few survivors of the July 1947 shoot-out that killed the country’s leadership) treated me as a friend from the late 1950s. I’ve also known the daughters and sons of U Nu, who died in 1995. I’ve known the now imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi, too, and over a long time. I also knew her mother, Daw Khin Kyi, once Myanmar’s ambassador to India.
In the 1990s and later, when official India hesitated to criticize Myanmar’s military rulers, I spoke up for Suu Kyi and others in her land who were asking for the simplest of human rights. In small ways I assisted Myanmar activists who had escaped to India. When, after regaining influence, Suu Kyi failed to acknowledge Rohingya suffering, I voiced disappointment.
But a world shocked by the army junta’s coup against her and her party, the National League for Democracy (which won national elections held at the end of 2020 by a huge margin), and by the cruel crackdown that has followed, has Covid-19 and other matters to worry about.
Luckily a brave CNN crew, briefly allowed inside Myanmar, has captured for the world both the callousness of the Myanmar junta and the astonishing courage of Myanmar’s protesters, who seem to belong to every religion and ethnicity found in their diverse land.
In the past, Myanmar’s ethnically “Burman” (and Buddhist) majority, to which U Nu belonged and to which Daw Suu Kyi and the junta also belong, was often at odds with the country’s numerous ethnic and religious minorities, who are located in large spaces adjoining India, Thailand, and China. This time, all regions and all groups seem to have come together to resist the army’s coup against democracy.
Children in Myanmar have been shot and killed by soldiers. Charges carrying almost life-long sentences have been slapped on Suu Kyi. Independent newspapers and media outlets have been forced to shut shop. However, apart from restrictions imposed by the U.S. and a few European countries on some junta- linked individuals and groups in Myanmar, the world is focused on other things.
I am particularly distressed by official India’s response to the repression in Myanmar. Apart from a couple of mild, indirect sentences of concern recently uttered by minor officials, the leaders who run the world’s largest democracy right across Myanmar’s border have kept their lips firmly sealed.
Worse, New Delhi at first instructed the governments of Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal (four Indian states that have a border with Myanmar), to prevent the entry of Myanmar’s protestors. There even were hints that those who had entered might be sent back to Myanmar. It seemed of no concern to New Delhi that many wanting to flee Myanmar were blood relatives of residents on the Indian side of the border.
Covid-19 is not the sole spectre haunting our world. Also on an ominous march, in nation after nation, is contempt for democracy, and an associated contempt for pluralism.
After 1945, the world witnessed a remarkable movement towards independence for nations and for democracy within them. Rolling for about 75 years, this tide produced an illusion that democracy is the norm in our world, a state to which countries would naturally return after unexpected departures from it.
Now we know better. Recent years have shown that equal rights for all, pluralism, fair elections, and a free media are not standard phenomena. As Myanmar has starkly confirmed, such blessings are rare, and ask to be cherished and guarded when found.
It’s been a mercy for the world that the U.S. remains protected for democracy and for the connected values of equality and pluralism. But we should not forget that Biden’s recent win was hardly a sure thing. Nor can we ignore the Trumpist takeover of the Republican Party. Fortunately, voices from the U.S. (and occasionally CNN reporters) are going out to the world to warn those wishing to silence human cries. And Myanmar’s junta should remember that while democracy may not be history’s norm, autocracy is detested by humanity.