Battleground Burma
Beijing may be leveraging military contacts with rebel groups to engage in a proxy war with India.
PROXY MOXY: India’s special forces were recently sent in pursuit of militants in Burma that reportedly have connections to China. PHOTO: RAVEENDRAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently sent his country’s special forces into Burma to attack two militant camps, in retaliation for a series of deadly ambushes on Indian soil. Given reports that the militants’ activities have been secretly supported by Beijing, we may be witnessing not just an Indian antiterrorism campaign but the start of a proxy war between India and China.
The violence began when a splinter group of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, a militant Christian organization that seeks a sovereign state for the Naga people of India and Burma, launched several attacks on Indian security forces in northeast India. One of these operations left eight members of India’s Assam Rifles paramilitary force dead in early May. A month later, 18 Indian soldiers were killed and 15 injured in an attack in India’s Manipur state.
New Delhi’s ensuing pursuit of this splinter group, known as the NSCN-K, was swift and deadly. The Indian army followed NSCN-K into Burma and carried out what it calls pre-emptive raids based on “credible and specific intelligence” about plans for further attacks on Indian territory. Initial reports indicate the two militant camps suffered significant casualties.
The raids were sanctioned by a 2010 agreement permitting Indian counterterror forces to enter Burma if they receive permission from Burmese authorities. Yet the Burmese army wasn’t directly involved in the raids—either because it was already overstretched fighting insurrections in northern Burma or because, since NSCN-K hasn’t broken the truce it signed with the Burmese government in 2012, Burma’s army had no justification to intervene.
Tensions had been escalating since March, when the NSCN-K broke a 14-year truce with the Indian government, claiming it was weakening the nationalist cause. The NSCN-K then announced in April that it had joined forces with eight other rebel militias to create a new United National Liberation Front of West South East Asia (UNLFWSEA) to pursue the common goal of undermining Indian rule.
These militant groups reportedly have connections to China. Among the nine groups in the new umbrella force is the United Liberation Front of Assam, led by Paresh Baruah, whom Indian authorities say has found safe haven in the Chinese province of Yunnan and has close ties with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
A recent Times of India report revealed that India provided Burma with telephone records linking Chinese military officers to the leadership of NSCN-K. Indian intelligence purportedly suspects that China has been discreetly pushing for cooperation among the region’s various militant groups. China has dismissed these reports as “absurd,” and some Chinese experts have pointed at the Indian army’s own actions towards the Naga minorities—including reports of violence and rape—as being the cause of the local attacks.
China has a history of meddling in the domestic affairs of its smaller and weaker but strategically located neighbor. For more than a decade until Deng Xiaoping came to power, China backed the antigovernment Communist Party of Burma. As recently as 2012—at the same time that Burma was reversing decades of policy and starting to open up to the U.S.—China supplied the United Wa State Army, a militia active at the China-Burma border, with rifles, machine guns, armored vehicles and helicopters, helping turn this militant group into what Burma specialist Bertil Lintner has called “a cross-border extension of the PLA.”
Maintaining a level of insurgency at India’s border with Burma would likely serve China’s interests. Both India and China are trying to develop ties with Southeast Asia. India has Mr. Modi’s “Act East” policy, while China has its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, including infrastructure networks linking the greater Mekong region to landlocked Yunnan.
Burma is thus essential to China’s southwest passage to the Indian Ocean and a vital component of its energy security, as it offers a continental alternative to the sea lines that run through the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea. January’s opening of a pipeline linking Burma’s Kyaukpyu deep-sea port to Kunming is but one example of Burma’s strategic importance for China. Other infrastructure projects are also being discussed, such as a $20 billion railway line that will follow the pipeline routes and bring Chinese goods to the Burmese market. China has also poured substantial investments into hydropower projects and mineral extraction.
Beijing thus stands to gain most from a deterioration of India’s bilateral relations with Burma. By keeping India occupied with insurgencies on its side of the Burmese border, China hopes to keep New Delhi at bay and regain some of the regional influence it has lost in recent years amid Burma’s opening to the West.
Ms. Rolland is the senior project director for political and security affairs at the National Bureau of Asian Research.
