India's Strategic Opportunity in Myanmar (Dispatch)
Video Transcript:
Video Transcript:
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be paying a three-day visit to Myanmar beginning May 27. This will be the first state visit to Myanmar by an Indian prime minister since 1987. The recent re-branding of Myanmar by the United States from "military dictatorship" to "fledgling democracy" has provided India -- with US backing -- an ideological opening to influence the periphery of the subcontinent, where Indian and Chinese interests overlap. Though Singh is coming armed with infrastructure and development projects to woo the Myanmar government, India's profound internal constraints will continue to hamper the country's efforts to extend to its natural borderlands.
The message Singh is bringing to Myanmar this weekend is one of connectivity; India is making no secret of its desire to integrate the hilly jungle mass that is Myanmar into the Indian core. Singh's bag of incentives includes a possible $500 million line of credit for infrastructure projects, a bus service from India's northeastern neck to Mandalay, Indian banks ready to set up shop, hydropower and oil and gas investment, as well as a host of infrastructure projects to connect Indian and Myanmarese ports through road networks running up the Indian northeast.
All of these projects speak to a broader Indian strategy -- to politically and economically integrate its periphery with the national core of India. India's isolated northeast is significantly underdeveloped and it's a place where the rule of law is dictated by local tribes and various militant factions. The northeastern region of India has little meaningful connection with India's core territories. India's struggle to maintain territorial integrity in its periphery not only deprives the state of critical resources, but it also opens India up to a host of security threats. Revitalizing ties with Myanmar, in theory, helps India address those concerns.
India also has significant energy interest in resource-rich Myanmar, but again, India's structural deficiencies stand in the way of meaningful integration. For example, India has invested in two blocks of Myanmar's largest oil and natural gas field, but India lost a major bid to purchase the natural gas to China. Moreover, even if India does purchase natural gas from Myanmar in the future, the pipelines connecting to India haven't even been built, and India doesn't even have the domestic infrastructure yet to receive or distribute natural gas from Myanmar.
Any talk of Indian foreign investment therefore deserves a rigorous reality check. As is the case with most infrastructure projects abroad, India has already run into significant obstacles in Myanmar in obtaining the financing and in clearing the many bureaucratic hurdles that often accompany such projects.
India's refreshed interest in Myanmar will be closely watched by China, but the reality of Indian constraints is also reassuring to Beijing. China views Myanmar as a crucial avenue to supplying resources, especially oil and natural gas, to landlocked southwestern Chinese provinces. Myanmar is also a key alternative outlet to the sea, should China face a disruption in the Malacca Straits. China doesn't have to grapple with the same level of political constraints that India has when it comes to overseas investments, and so it has been able to develop much deeper ties with the Myanmar government, whether that government was a political pariah or a democratic darling in the eyes of the West, and has established a solid economic link to the state.
Now that Myanmar is politically available to states like India, the United States and Japan -- all of which share an interest in keeping China in check -- Beijing will have to expend more effort to maintain that foothold. But a comparison of the Indian and Chinese positions in a peripheral state like Myanmar reveals that a lot more challenges will need to be overcome before regional competitors can actually catch up to Beijing.
