Chapter 272: The Neighbours Read the Map
January 28 — February 15, 1977Bangkok; Kuala Lumpur; Singapore; Jakarta; Manila; Phnom Penh; Vientiane; Hanoi; Colombo; Dhaka — and the specific, urgent, private calculations of governments that had just watched India do something that none of them had believed India would do, and that none of them had prepared for
The Southeast Asian diplomatic community received the news of the January 28th Rangoon announcement the way that communities received news that fundamentally altered the categories through which they understood their world — not with disbelief, because the military facts had been clear since December and the outcome had been visible to anyone paying attention, but with the specific recalibration that occurred when an abstraction became a concrete fact. India had been growing. India had been building its military. India had been developing its industrial base and its weapons systems and its power projection capability in ways that the region's foreign ministries had been tracking in their analytical reports since the early 1970s. The analytical reports had noted the growth and had made projections and had discussed implications in the measured language of professional assessment.
What had happened in Burma between December 3rd and January 28th was not the measured language of professional assessment. It was the thing itself. India had fought a war in forty days, won it completely, installed a transitional government, announced a fifty-seven-thousand-crore development programme backed by the three most powerful industrial conglomerates in the subcontinent, signed a Treaty that gave it basing rights and monetary control and preferential economic access, and then described the entire arrangement as the liberation of a suffering people and the introduction of democracy to a country that had been denied it for fifteen years.
This combination — military power, economic power, and the specific narrative of democratic benevolence — was more alarming to the foreign ministries of the Southeast Asian states than any single element of it would have been alone, because the combination was the combination that legitimised what it had done, and legitimacy was the specific quality that converted a single event into a pattern and a pattern into a regional reality. A country that had simply fought and won a war was one thing. A country that had fought and won a war while simultaneously announcing the largest foreign investment programme in Southeast Asian history while positioning itself as the protector of democratic governance was something else, and the something else was the thing that the foreign ministers of Thailand and Malaysia and Indonesia and Singapore and the Philippines and Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia were separately and simultaneously attempting to process on the morning of January 29th.
They processed it in their own ways, shaped by their own specific fears and their own specific calculations, and the variety of those responses was the specific portrait of a regional order that was in the process of recognising that it had a new organising centre, and that the new organising centre was not what the previous organising centre had been.
The Thai Foreign Ministry's emergency session convened at seven in the morning on January 29th, before the normal working day had begun, which was the specific time that emergency sessions convened when the person who had called the session considered the matter urgent enough to override the normal conventions of governmental working hours. Prime Minister Tanin Kraivichien, who had been in office since October 1976 when the military had removed the previous civilian government in circumstances that now, in the post-Burma-campaign context, felt considerably more exposed than they had felt in October, had called the session himself. He had read the January 28th announcement at midnight and had spent the subsequent seven hours in the specific state of wakefulness that military prime ministers occupied when they had just watched a neighbouring country's military government be dismantled in forty days by the force that shared the longest border with their own military government.
Thailand shared a border with Burma of approximately two thousand three hundred kilometres. The border ran through hill country and river valleys and the specific mixed terrain of the northern uplands where the boundary had been a fact of cartography rather than a fact of governance for most of its history. The Thai military's operational planning had always assessed Burma as a buffer — the specific geographic and political buffer between Thailand and the pressures to its west, a buffer that was maintained by the Tatmadaw's control of its territory and by the absence of any other force capable of projecting military power through Burma to the Thai border.
There was now a force capable of projecting military power through Burma to the Thai border.
The Indian Army's 57th Mountain Division was in Rangoon. The Indian Army's 17th Mountain Division was in Mandalay. The Indian administrative authority was in the Chin Hills and northern Sagaing. The Indian Air Force was flying from forward operating strips that were closer to the Thai border than any Indian military installation had previously been in the post-independence history of the two countries. The Indian Navy's Project 90 ships were in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea was Indian maritime territory.
Tanin Kraivichien looked at the map in the Foreign Ministry emergency session and said: "What do they want from us."
The Foreign Minister, a career diplomat named Upadit Pachariyangkun who had been in the Foreign Ministry for twenty-seven years and who had the specific quality that very experienced diplomats developed, which was the ability to say difficult things precisely, said: "They want, formally, nothing. There is no Indian territorial claim on Thailand, no Indian political demand directed at Bangkok, no Indian commercial pressure on Thai industries. The IBDP is a Burma programme, not a Thai programme." He paused. "What they want informally is the recognition that what has happened in Burma has happened, and that the regional architecture that follows from it includes an India that is a different kind of India from the India of six months ago."
The Defence Minister, a General named Prem Tinsulanonda who would later become Prime Minister himself and who was in this moment performing the function of a military officer assessing a military situation, said: "The border. Two thousand three hundred kilometres. If India wanted to threaten Thailand, how would they threaten Thailand."
Pachariyangkun said: "They would not threaten Thailand. Threatening Thailand creates a problem. Not threatening Thailand and letting Thailand understand that threatening would be easy is more effective than threatening, and it is also true."
Prem said: "So the threat is the demonstration."
Pachariyangkun said: "The threat is what forty days in Burma demonstrated. We did not know, before December, what the Indian military was actually capable of. We had the assessments. We had the intelligence reports. We had the published numbers — the aircraft, the tanks, the artillery systems. What we did not have was the evidence of how those capabilities combined in practice, under operational conditions, against an opposing force. We have that evidence now." He set his papers down. "Ten thousand Tatmadaw soldiers and forty-one tanks at Pegu. Destroyed in thirty-three hours. The Tatmadaw was not a negligible force. It had been fighting insurgencies for thirty years. It had a reasonable level of conventional military capability for a country of its size and resources. And India destroyed it in forty days."
The room was quiet.
Tanin Kraivichien said: "What do we do."
Pachariyangkun said: "We send a delegation to New Delhi. We congratulate India on the restoration of democratic governance in Burma. We express our strong support for the democratic transition and our commitment to working with the transitional government on the regional stability and development agenda. We propose a bilateral trade framework review and a tourism cooperation agreement, which gives India the economic relationship signal it will appreciate and which creates the visible goodwill that protects us. We do not make any statement about the territorial arrangements in the Chin Hills because making a statement about the territorial arrangements in the Chin Hills requires us to either endorse them or oppose them, and either position creates a problem."
Tanin Kraivichien said: "We endorse India's action."
Pachariyangkun said: "We endorse the outcome. We specifically endorse the democratic transition and the development programme. We do not specifically address the military action or the territorial arrangements. The distinction is diplomatic technique."
Prem said: "The military contact. Should we be reaching out to the Indian Army?"
Pachariyangkun said: "General, the Indian Army will receive a message from our reaching out that is the message we intend to send. I recommend it."
Prem said: "I will reach out to General Raina's office through the defence attaché channel."
Tanin Kraivichien said: "Do it. And prepare the delegation for New Delhi. I want them there by February 5th."
The delegation was ready by February 3rd. It arrived in New Delhi on February 4th and was received with the specific warmth that India showed toward delegations that arrived voluntarily and promptly and in the appropriate spirit, and the bilateral meetings produced a joint statement that expressed Thai-Indian commitment to regional stability, democratic governance, and economic cooperation, and that created, through the mechanism of the joint statement's existence, the public record of Thailand's position, which was the position of a country that had assessed the new regional reality with professional clarity and had made the accommodation that the assessment required.
What the delegation did not say, either publicly or privately, was what the Foreign Ministry's emergency session had actually been about, which was fear. Thailand was afraid. Not afraid that India would attack Thailand — that was not the calculation, because the calculation was that India had no reason to attack Thailand and every reason to maintain good relations with it. Thailand was afraid in the more diffuse and in many ways more lasting way of a country that had watched its strategic environment change in forty days and that was now in the process of understanding what the changed environment meant for the specific calculations that Thai foreign policy and Thai defence planning had been based on for a generation.
The changed environment meant that the buffer that Burma had represented was now an Indian forward position. It meant that the two-thousand-three-hundred-kilometre border with Burma was now, in practical operational terms, a proximity to Indian military capability that was quantitatively different from what it had been in October 1976. It meant that the specific question that every government in the region was now asking — what does India want — was a question that Thailand's diplomatic and security establishment was going to spend years finding the answer to, and that in the interim, the answer to the diplomatic question of how to relate to India was the same answer that it had always been for smaller countries in the presence of a demonstrably larger one: carefully and constructively.
Malaysia's Foreign Ministry issued a formal statement on January 29th, twelve hours after the Rangoon announcement, that was more immediately positive in its framing than any other statement from a Southeast Asian government and that reflected the specific calculation of a government that had been thinking about India's trajectory for longer than most and that had, in the months preceding the Burma campaign, been briefed by its own intelligence service on the Indian military's developing capability in ways that made the campaign's outcome less surprising in Kuala Lumpur than it was in some other capitals.
Prime Minister Hussein Onn, who had been in office since 1976 and who had spent his first year managing the economic consequences of a global recession while also managing the domestic political consequences of a country that was still working out what multiracial democratic governance meant in practice, read the Rangoon announcement with the eye of a lawyer — he had been trained as a lawyer and he read political documents the way lawyers read contracts, looking for what was specified and what was implied and what was deliberately left unspecified — and said to his Foreign Minister, Ghazali Shafie: "The territorial arrangements."
Ghazali said: "The Chin Hills and northern Sagaing under Indian administrative authority pending the territorial settlement. Which is not a settlement India is in a hurry to reach."
Hussein Onn said: "Which means India has the territory."
Ghazali said: "India has the territory."
Hussein Onn said: "And the economic arrangement."
Ghazali said: "Fifty-seven thousand crore rupees from three industrial groups. Shergill, Tata, and Ambani together in one programme. That is not a development fund. That is the integration of the Burmese economy into the Indian economic system."
Hussein Onn said: "Lee Kuan Yew has called."
Ghazali said: "He called this morning. He wanted to know what our position was going to be before we announced it publicly, which is what Lee Kuan Yew does."
Hussein Onn said: "What did you tell him."
Ghazali said: "I told him we were considering. He said he would be making a statement that was supportive of the democratic transition in Burma and that he thought Malaysia and Singapore should coordinate positions. I said we would think about it."
Hussein Onn was quiet for a moment. He looked at the map that had been brought out and spread on the conference room table, showing the region with the Indian advance's trajectory marked in red and the IBDP programme's key infrastructure elements marked in blue.
He said: "Malaysia does a significant amount of trade through the Strait of Malacca. The Andaman Sea approaches to the Strait of Malacca are now effectively under Indian maritime influence. The Nicobars are Indian. The Project 90 ships are in the Bay of Bengal. The Sittwe port on the Arakan coast, which Shergill Shipyard is building, will be a significant maritime installation on the eastern Bay of Bengal's western shore."
Ghazali said: "Yes."
Hussein Onn said: "Eighty percent of Malaysia's export trade passes through or near waters where India now has a meaningful military and maritime presence."
Ghazali said: "Yes."
Hussein Onn said: "Coordinate with Lee Kuan Yew. The statement should be warm rather than neutral, because warm statements from Malaysia and Singapore together carry more regional weight than either alone and they cost us nothing in the present circumstances. The cost of a warm statement is exactly zero when the alternative is not warmth but the appearance of hesitation, and hesitation at this moment signals precisely the wrong thing."
Ghazali said: "And the substance."
Hussein Onn said: "The substance is that we support Burma's democratic transition, we welcome India's investment commitment, we look forward to the strengthened regional economic partnership that the IBDP represents, and we propose an expanded Malaysia-India bilateral trade framework that gives our palm oil and rubber and electronics sectors preferential access to the Indian market in exchange for India's semiconductor and engineering products preferential access to the Malaysian market."
Ghazali said: "That is a trade deal we have been trying to arrange since 1973."
Hussein Onn said: "It was less urgent in 1973. Transmit the proposal to the Indian High Commissioner today. Let them know we are serious."
The statement was issued that afternoon, warm in its language and specific in its proposals, and the Indian High Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur transmitted it to Delhi within the hour with the annotation: Malaysia is moving quickly and moving toward India. Recommend the trade framework proposal be taken seriously as an early response — this is the kind of rapid accommodation that we should encourage and reward.
Delhi took the trade framework proposal seriously. The bilateral discussions began within ten days.
Lee Kuan Yew had been on the telephone since midnight.
Not literally continuously since midnight — he was seventy-three and maintained the sleep discipline of a man who understood that good decision-making required adequate rest — but he had been on the telephone in the specific intensive way of a head of government who was processing a situation that required his personal engagement at every level simultaneously, because every level was connected to every other level and because in Singapore's specific strategic situation — a city-state of two and a half million people at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula with no strategic depth and no natural resources and no military capability that could deter a serious adversary — every external development of consequence was also an internal development of consequence.
Singapore's strategic doctrine, as Lee Kuan Yew had developed it over the sixteen years of his premiership, was built on a specific understanding of the city-state's position: too small to resist, too important to ignore, too well-managed to be worth the cost of destabilising, and intelligent enough to convert all three of those facts into strategic assets rather than liabilities. The conversion required a specific quality of engagement with the world — not neutrality, which was the doctrine of countries that thought they could avoid being part of great power competition, but active positioning, which was the doctrine of a country that understood it would inevitably be part of great power competition and that intended to be on the right side of it.
What Lee Kuan Yew was processing at midnight on January 29th was the question of what the right side was now that the competition had a new character.
India had, in forty days, demonstrated something that changed the regional strategic equation in a specific way. It had demonstrated that the specific combination of military capability and industrial capacity and diplomatic positioning that India had been building since the early 1970s was not theoretical. It was operational. It worked. The Tatmadaw's conventional force had been destroyed in three weeks of fighting that had produced a kill ratio so extreme — Singh's Arjuna regiment at Kalemyo, the tank battle that the Indian press had covered in triumphant detail and that the regional military attachés had read with professional awe — that the regional military establishments had been engaged since December in the specific process of revising their assessments of what India's military could do.
The assessments had all moved in the same direction.
Lee Kuan Yew called his cabinet secretary at five in the morning and said: "I want the Foreign Ministry analysis on my desk by seven. Not the standard analysis. I want the specific analysis of what the India-Burma arrangement means for Singapore's position in the regional architecture over the next decade." The cabinet secretary said it would be on his desk by six-thirty. It was on his desk at six-fifteen, because the Singapore Foreign Ministry had been preparing it since midnight.
He read it. The analysis confirmed what he had already concluded, which was that the India-Burma arrangement had created a new regional reality that Singapore had three options in relation to. The first was opposition, which was not available because Singapore had neither the capability nor the interest to oppose India's regional position. The second was neutrality, which was not available because neutrality in the face of a fait accompli of this scale was indistinguishable from opposition in the minds of the people who had created the fait accompli. The third was strategic accommodation — the specific, intelligent, forward-leaning engagement with the new reality that converted a potential adversarial relationship into a partnership relationship, and that did so early enough to be seen as a genuine positioning choice rather than a reluctant capitulation.
He made a statement on January 29th that was more sophisticated than any other Southeast Asian government's statement and that reflected the specific sophistication of a man who had been doing this for sixteen years. He said: "Singapore has always believed that regional stability requires the active involvement of capable and responsible powers, and that the states of Southeast Asia are better served by a regional order in which large democracies play constructive roles than by a regional order in which the vacuum left by the absence of responsible leadership is filled by instability or authoritarian governance. What India has done in Burma is consistent with the values that Singapore and India share — democratic governance, rule of law, economic development — and it demonstrates a capability for constructive regional leadership that Southeast Asia needs and has lacked."
He then said something that no other government in the region had yet said, and that marked the specific quality of his political intelligence: "Singapore proposes the establishment of an India-ASEAN Strategic Dialogue framework, in which India participates as a formal dialogue partner with the specific mandate of contributing to regional security architecture and economic development cooperation. Singapore is prepared to convene the first session of this framework and to host its secretariat."
The offer to host the secretariat was the specific signal. A secretariat in Singapore for an India-ASEAN dialogue framework was an institutional presence of India in the ASEAN context, and an institutional presence of India in the ASEAN context was a transformation of India's regional position from external power to embedded regional stakeholder, and that transformation was what Lee Kuan Yew was proposing because he had calculated, correctly, that India would accept the proposal, and that Singapore would be the host of the architecture that organised India's regional engagement, and that the country that hosted the architecture had a relationship with the architecture that was different from the relationship that any mere participant had.
The Indian External Affairs Ministry received Lee Kuan Yew's proposal on January 29th evening and transmitted it to Swaran Singh's office with the annotation: Singapore is offering to institutionalise India's ASEAN engagement on terms that serve our interests. The proposal should be accepted promptly and enthusiastically.
Swaran Singh accepted it promptly and enthusiastically.
Indonesia's response was the most carefully calibrated of the major Southeast Asian states, which reflected the fact that Indonesia was the largest of them — a country of one hundred and thirty million people, the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, a military government under President Suharto that had been in power since 1967 and that had spent those ten years building a specific relationship with the regional order based on the principle of regional autonomy from external power competition.
The principle of regional autonomy — the ASEAN states managing their own affairs without the involvement of external powers — was the specific principle that the Burma campaign had comprehensively violated, and Suharto's government was in the difficult position of having been the most vocal advocate of that principle and now confronting the fact that its most significant test had produced a result that the principle could not have prevented.
Foreign Minister Adam Malik, who had been the architect of much of Indonesia's post-1967 regional diplomacy, called his team together on January 29th and said: "We have two problems. The first is the principle. The second is the reality."
His deputy, Mochtar Kusumaatmadja, said: "The principle is that external powers should not interfere in the region's internal affairs."
Adam Malik said: "And the reality."
Kusumaatmadja said: "The reality is that India has interfered in the region's internal affairs and has done so in a way that has been militarily decisive, economically substantial, and politically presented as the restoration of democratic governance. The reality is also that the Tatmadaw's government killed Indian citizens on Indian soil, which gives India a specific justification for its action that is harder to categorically oppose than an unprovoked intervention would have been."
Adam Malik said: "So our principle is in difficulty."
Kusumaatmadja said: "Our principle is that the states of Southeast Asia should manage their own affairs. India's action was against a government that attacked India. A principle that says a government may attack a neighbour and the neighbour may not respond is not a principle that can be defended."
Adam Malik said: "Then we defend the narrower principle."
Kusumaatmadja said: "The narrower principle being—"
Adam Malik said: "The narrower principle being that external military intervention in Southeast Asia should be limited and proportionate to the specific provocation that prompted it, and that the long-term arrangements that follow such intervention should be subject to multilateral oversight rather than bilateral determination alone." He paused. "This gives us a position that acknowledges India's right to respond to the Tlawng Ridge attack while expressing concern about the scope and permanence of the post-war arrangements. We are not opposing India. We are establishing a record of engagement with the process that positions us as a regional voice in the ongoing management of the Burma situation."
Kusumaatmadja said: "Suharto has called Tanin Kraivichien."
Adam Malik said: "What did Tanin say."
Kusumaatmadja said: "Tanin's delegation is going to New Delhi next week. Bangkok is full speed ahead on accommodation."
Adam Malik said: "Then we are behind Bangkok, which is not where Indonesia should be." He made his decision. "We issue the statement today. The narrower principle framing. We simultaneously transmit to New Delhi through the High Commission channel a private message expressing our interest in a bilateral strategic partnership discussion, which signals to India that our public statement should not be read as opposition but as engagement. We then propose that Indonesia host the first regional discussion on the post-Burma peace framework, which is different from Lee Kuan Yew's ASEAN-India dialogue and which gives us our own institutional initiative rather than being a participant in Singapore's."
The statement was issued that afternoon. Indonesia expressed its support for Burma's democratic transition and its commitment to regional stability and its interest in constructive engagement with the new reality that India's action had created, while also noting the importance of the ASEAN framework for regional self-management and proposing that the region collectively engage with the post-Burma settlement process through the existing ASEAN institutional mechanisms.
It was not the warm endorsement that Malaysia and Singapore had offered. It was more qualified and more principled, and it reflected the specific reality of Indonesia's size and regional importance — a country of one hundred and thirty million people could not simply endorse a neighbour's military intervention without addressing the principle, because endorsing without addressing the principle created a precedent that the largest Southeast Asian state had more reason to be cautious about than any other.
But it was also not opposition. And the private channel message to New Delhi made clear that the public statement's qualifications were diplomatic technique rather than strategic resistance.
New Delhi received both messages, read both correctly, and transmitted to the Indian High Commissioner in Jakarta: Indonesia is managing its domestic and regional position carefully. The private channel message is the signal. Accept the bilateral strategic partnership discussion and propose March for the first meeting. The post-Burma framework proposal will be absorbed by the ASEAN-India dialogue framework that Singapore is hosting — coordinate with the Singapore High Commissioner on sequencing.
The Philippines government's response was the quietest of the major Southeast Asian states, which was a reflection of the specific preoccupation of the Philippines' government in January 1977 — Ferdinand Marcos had been under martial law since 1972, had been managing the specific domestic political pressures of a dictatorship that had promised economic development and was delivering economic growth alongside political suppression, and was in the middle of a separate foreign policy challenge related to the southern Philippines insurgency that absorbed a significant portion of his attention. The Burma situation was an external development of consequence, but it was an external development in the western Bay of Bengal that was geographically removed from the Philippines' specific strategic concerns, which were primarily focused on the South China Sea and the domestic insurgency.
The Philippine Foreign Minister's statement was supportive and brief — two paragraphs endorsing Burma's democratic transition and expressing the Philippines' commitment to regional stability — and was followed within forty-eight hours by a request from Marcos's office for a bilateral meeting with the Indian High Commissioner to discuss the specific security cooperation frameworks that India was proposing for the region, which was a request motivated less by enthusiasm for the India-Burma outcome than by the specific calculation that a regional security framework that India was organising was one that the Philippines needed to be part of, because the Philippines' own security challenges included sub-national armed forces that no bilateral solution had yet managed adequately and that a broader regional security framework might address differently.
The Indian High Commissioner received Marcos's request and transmitted to Delhi: Marcos wants security cooperation. The insurgency is the motivation — he sees the India-ASEAN framework as potentially relevant to his own internal security challenges. This is worth exploring, carefully. The Philippines' geographic position in the western Pacific and its relationship with the American military basing framework makes it a useful contact in the regional architecture.
Vietnam's response was the most complicated of the regional states, and its complication reflected the specific complexity of Vietnam's position in January 1977 — a country that had been reunified less than two years earlier after thirty years of war, that was still in the process of absorbing the south into the north's governance framework, that was carrying the specific institutional and economic damage of a country that had been in continuous conflict since 1945, and that was watching a neighbouring country that shared a border with Burma manage a regional situation in a way that Vietnam's own strategic tradition was trained to be suspicious of.
The Vietnamese response was also complicated by the specific ideological question that India's action presented. India was a democracy that had removed a military dictatorship. Vietnam was a communist state that had removed a government backed by the most powerful capitalist country in the world. The two removals were not comparable in the specific ways that the different ideological traditions assessed them, but they were sufficiently parallel in their basic structure — large power removes small-country government, installs friendly administration, develops economic relationship — that the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry's internal assessment of the India-Burma situation was coloured by the awareness that the pattern it was observing was a pattern that Vietnam knew from its own history.
The Vietnamese Foreign Minister, Nguyen Duy Trinh, transmitted to his regional embassies on January 30th an assessment that said, in the specific language of Vietnamese diplomatic communication: India's action in Burma demonstrates the regional implications of the military capability India has been developing since 1971. The Burma outcome reflects India's ability to project military force at regional distances with a speed and decisiveness that none of the regional states, including Vietnam, had accurately assessed. The IBDP programme represents the economic dimension of a regional hegemonic strategy that is consistent with the patterns observed in the behaviour of major powers establishing regional spheres of influence.
He also said: Vietnam has no specific adversarial interest with respect to India's Burma policy and no capability to oppose it effectively. The appropriate Vietnamese position is to engage India diplomatically on the basis of our shared anti-colonial history and our shared commitment to non-alignment, while being clear in our internal assessments that non-alignment is not a description of what India is doing in Burma.
The public statement that Vietnam issued on January 30th was careful and correct and said nothing specific about the Burma arrangement, expressing generic support for the Burmese people's right to determine their own political future and Vietnam's commitment to peaceful relations with all states in the region. It said nothing that could be quoted as endorsement and nothing that could be quoted as opposition, and it was the diplomatic equivalent of an abstention — which was the specific position that Vietnam's combination of ideological positioning and practical realism had calculated as correct.
Vietnam also established, quietly and through the trade ministry rather than the foreign ministry, the first commercial contact with the IBDP secretariat in Rangoon, expressing interest in the port development programme and in the potential for Vietnamese rice exports to access the Indian market through the Burma trade corridor. The commercial contact was unmistakably a signal that whatever Vietnam's public diplomatic position was, its economic assessment of the new regional reality was forward-looking rather than resistant.
Laos did not make a public statement for six days.
This was not an accident. The Lao People's Democratic Republic, established in December 1975 after the Pathet Lao's completion of their political consolidation, was a small landlocked country governed by a party that had spent thirty years in revolution and that was now in the early and difficult period of governing a country in peacetime without the revolutionary movement's mobilising energy to sustain itself. The Lao Foreign Ministry in Vientiane in January 1977 was a thin institution staffed by people who had been trained for ideology rather than for the technical practice of international diplomacy, and the Burma situation was the kind of event that required exactly the technical diplomatic judgment that the Lao Foreign Ministry was least equipped to exercise rapidly.
The statement that was eventually issued on February 4th was short and expressed Laos's support for the Burmese people's aspirations to peaceful development and democratic governance, and it was read, by everyone who read it, as exactly what it was: a statement produced by a government that was afraid and that had spent six days consulting with the Vietnamese advisors who were the most practically present external influence in Vientiane at the time, and whose conclusion from those consultations was that the appropriate position was the minimally committed positive position that left open the maximum number of future options.
Laos was, among all the states that bordered Burma, the one whose strategic position had changed the most dramatically in ways that went beyond the immediate diplomatic question. Laos shared no border with India and no immediate economic relationship with the Indian system, but it shared borders with Burma and Thailand and Vietnam and Cambodia, and the Burma situation had changed the strategic character of every one of those borders. The specific change that mattered most in Vientiane was the Thailand border — Thailand, which had historically been the primary external pressure on Laos's political orientation, was now a country that was rushing to accommodate India, and a Thailand that was accommodating India was a different Thailand from the Thailand that had been accommodating the American strategic framework, and a different Thailand required a different Laos response to Thailand.
This was the kind of second-order strategic calculation that took time to work through, and the six days of silence before the Lao statement was in part the time required to work through it, and the statement's minimally committed positive language was the result of the calculation not yet having been completed when the political pressure to say something became stronger than the diplomatic value of continued silence.
Cambodia was the exception.
The Khmer Rouge government of Democratic Kampuchea, which had been in power since April 1975 and which had been conducting the specific project of the Year Zero — the evacuation of the cities, the abolition of money and schools and hospitals and markets, the systematic destruction of everything that the revolution had designated as incompatible with the pure agrarian communist state — was not a government that engaged in the kind of regional diplomatic calculation that Thailand and Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia were performing. The Khmer Rouge's ideology had a specific relationship with external reality that was characterised by the systematic rejection of any framing that did not originate within its own theoretical system, and the India-Burma arrangement, as an event in the external world, was processed through that system and produced the specific output that the system was designed to produce.
Khieu Samphan, the Head of State of Democratic Kampuchea, issued a statement on January 30th through Radio Phnom Penh that was the most direct statement of opposition to India's action that any government in the region produced, and that reflected not diplomatic calculation but ideological reflex. The statement said that India's action in Burma was a blatant act of imperialist aggression against a sovereign state, that the so-called democratic transition was a cover for the extension of Indian hegemony over the peoples of Southeast Asia, that the IBDP was a tool of neo-colonial economic exploitation that would reduce Burma to a source of raw materials for Indian industry, and that the revolutionary peoples of the region rejected India's claims to a regional leadership role based on military force and capitalist development.
The statement was broadcast repeatedly on Radio Phnom Penh and was transmitted to the few foreign governments that maintained diplomatic relations with Democratic Kampuchea, and it was read with varying degrees of attention by the regional foreign ministries. Vietnam noted it and assessed it as consistent with the specific Khmer Rouge tendency toward maximalist ideological statement that had characterised every aspect of that government's domestic and foreign policy since 1975. Indonesia noted it and said nothing publicly. Thailand noted it and was mildly grateful that Cambodia had said publicly what Thailand's own domestic critics were saying privately, because the existence of the Cambodian statement gave Thailand's accommodation a comparative context that made the accommodation look moderate rather than merely subservient.
India's External Affairs Ministry noted the Cambodian statement and transmitted to the Indian Mission in Bangkok, which maintained the closest Indian diplomatic observation post to Phnom Penh: The Democratic Kampuchea statement is ideological performance rather than strategic assessment. No response required. The statement's isolation — Cambodia is the only government in the region to have issued unequivocal condemnation — serves our interests by demonstrating the depth of the regional accommodation.
Pol Pot, who was described publicly as Brother Number One and who was the actual governing authority of Democratic Kampuchea regardless of the formal positions held by Khieu Samphan and other figures, did not issue a personal statement because Pol Pot had not publicly acknowledged his role in the government. He received the reports of the regional response to the Cambodian statement through his intelligence channels and assessed them. He assessed that Cambodia was isolated. He assessed that India was consolidating a regional hegemonic position. He assessed that the Khmer Rouge's specific ideological framework placed it in opposition to every aspect of that consolidation. He did not change his assessment or his ideology.
He did, however, quietly instruct his border security forces to increase the vigilance of the Cambodia-Burma border zone, which was a border that Cambodia shared with Burma in the south and that the new Indian administrative presence in Burma made a different kind of border from what it had previously been. The instructions to the border security forces reflected the specific Khmer Rouge combination of ideological fearlessness and operational paranoia — they were not afraid of India in the ideological sense, and they were paying close attention to India's movements in the operational sense.
Radio Phnom Penh continued to broadcast denunciations of Indian imperialism throughout February, with the specific consistency and fervour of a broadcasting service that had found an external enemy to denounce in terms that its domestic audience could be presented as evidence of the revolution's righteous opposition to the capitalist world order. India did not respond to any of the broadcasts. India did not need to respond. The broadcasts were isolated in a regional context that had largely moved toward accommodation, and their isolation was itself a form of Indian strategic success.
Bangladesh was not a country that needed to deliberate about its response to the India-Burma arrangement.
Bangladesh had been independent for six years, having achieved that independence in 1971 through a war in which India's military intervention had been the specific fact that made independence possible. The relationship between India and Bangladesh was not the relationship between equals — it was the relationship between a patron and a client that had been forged in the specific conditions of 1971 and that the subsequent years had developed in ways that reflected the fundamental asymmetry of that origin. Bangladesh depended on India for the management of shared river systems, for the transit routes through which Bangladeshi exports moved to international markets, for the specific security relationship that made Bangladesh's northeastern borders manageable, and for the economic relationship that was the largest component of Bangladesh's external trade.
General Ziaur Rahman, who had been the de facto governing authority in Bangladesh since the specific violent events of August 1975 that had removed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's government, was a nationalist who had spent his period in power attempting to establish a Bangladeshi identity that was distinct from the Indian identification that the 1971 liberation had created. His government had made overtures to other Islamic states, had opened conversations with Pakistan, had attempted to build a foreign policy that was Bangladeshi rather than Indian in its orientation. These efforts had achieved a limited diplomatic diversity while not altering the fundamental realities of the relationship, because the fundamental realities were geographic and economic rather than political.
Ziaur Rahman's response to the India-Burma arrangement was the response of a man who understood the fundamental realities. Bangladesh issued a statement on January 28th — the same day as the announcement, hours after the press conference, without any period of deliberation — that warmly endorsed India's action, expressed admiration for India's commitment to democratic governance and development, and proposed a tripartite Bangladesh-India-Burma trade and development framework that would connect Bangladesh's export industries to the Burma market through the Indian infrastructure corridor.
The speed of the statement and the warmth of its language were themselves a message, and the message was the message that Bangladesh's position in relation to India always sent: full cooperation, no delay, maximum alignment with Indian interests, combined with the specific Bangladeshi pitch that every such accommodation included — the proposal for a concrete economic benefit that acknowledged the power relationship while converting it into a commercial framework.
The tripartite trade framework proposal was noted in Delhi and assigned to the Commerce Ministry for assessment, which was an encouraging response and which Ziaur Rahman's Foreign Ministry correctly interpreted as meaning that the proposal would be seriously considered rather than filed.
Sri Lanka's response came on January 30th and was supportive, warm, and specific in its economic proposals, which was the Sri Lankan diplomatic tradition — a country with a long history of non-alignment that was in practice more aligned with India than it publicly acknowledged, and that had developed a specific style of engagement with Indian regional policy that combined public declarations of sovereign independence with practical alignment in every concrete situation.
Prime Minister Junius Richard Jayewardene, who had been in office since 1977 following the general election that had ended the seven-year rule of Sirimavo Bandaranaike, was a pro-Western market liberal who had come into office with the specific intention of reorienting Sri Lanka's economic policy away from the nationalisation and protectionism that the Bandaranaike era had represented. He was also a realist, and the realism of January 1977 in Sri Lanka's strategic position produced a response to the India-Burma announcement that was enthusiastically positive and commercially specific — Sri Lanka proposed enhanced port cooperation between the Colombo port and the developing Indian maritime network, offered preferential access for Indian maritime operations through Sri Lankan waters, and requested Indian support for Sri Lanka's own infrastructure development programme, framing the request as a natural extension of the regional development mission that the IBDP represented.
The Indian High Commissioner in Colombo transmitted the Sri Lankan response to Delhi with the annotation: New government, new orientation. Jayewardene is moving faster toward India than expected. The port cooperation proposal is worth taking seriously — Colombo is a significant container transshipment hub and integration with the Indian maritime network at this moment could shape the regional logistics architecture in ways that serve our long-term interests. Recommend a prompt and positive response.
Delhi responded promptly and positively.
The collective response of the Southeast Asian diplomatic community, viewed from the Indian External Affairs Ministry's regional desk in New Delhi on February 10th, fourteen days after the announcement, was a picture that had assembled itself with a coherence and a speed that the Ministry's regional analysts found striking. The analysis that the desk produced for Foreign Minister Swaran Singh on February 10th said:
Thailand: Full accommodation. High-level delegation completed bilateral meetings in New Delhi, joint statement issued, defence dialogue opened. Assessment: Thailand has accepted the new regional reality and is positioning for maximum economic benefit within the framework India has established.
Malaysia: Warm accommodation. Trade framework negotiations underway, bilateral contacts at foreign minister level ongoing, ASEAN-India dialogue framework discussions proceeding. Assessment: Malaysia is ahead of its regional partners in practical engagement and is seeking to convert accommodation into commercial preference.
Singapore: Strategic leadership accommodation. ASEAN-India dialogue framework formally proposed and accepted, secretariat to be hosted in Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew has made this the centre of his current foreign policy agenda. Assessment: Singapore has converted accommodation into institutional leadership, which is consistent with Lee Kuan Yew's approach to every regional development of this kind.
Indonesia: Qualified engagement. Public statement mixed but private channel positive, bilateral strategic partnership discussion agreed for March, commercial contacts with IBDP secretariat initiated. Assessment: Indonesia is managing its regional leadership self-image while making the practical accommodation that its interests require.
Philippines: Quiet engagement. Statement positive, security cooperation discussions requested, bilateral meeting with High Commissioner completed. Assessment: Marcos is interested in the regional security framework primarily for the domestic security implications.
Vietnam: Diplomatic abstention with commercial engagement. Public statement neutral, commercial contacts with IBDP established, trade corridor discussions initiated. Assessment: Vietnam is separating its public ideological positioning from its practical economic interests, which is consistent with Vietnamese diplomatic tradition.
Laos: Delayed minimum. Statement issued after six-day delay, content minimally positive, no subsequent follow-up. Assessment: Laos is absorbing the implications and has not yet determined its commercial or strategic position. Follow-up contact recommended.
Cambodia: Active opposition. Radio Phnom Penh broadcasts continuing anti-India statements, no diplomatic contact, border security increased. Assessment: Khmer Rouge opposition is ideologically reflexive rather than strategically consequential. Cambodia's isolation in the regional context is itself a strategic asset for our narrative.
Bangladesh: Immediate full accommodation. Tripartite trade framework proposed, commercial discussions underway, maximum alignment. Assessment: Baseline.
Sri Lanka: Warm engagement with economic agenda. Port cooperation and infrastructure support requested, new government is markedly more India-oriented than predecessor. Assessment: Positive development. Recommendation: Respond substantively to port cooperation proposal.
Summary: The regional response is overwhelmingly in the direction India's action has oriented it. The outlier is Cambodia, which lacks the capability and the diplomatic position to constitute a meaningful resistance. The pattern of responses confirms that the regional states have assessed the India-Burma arrangement as the new baseline for regional strategic reality and are positioning for productive engagement with it rather than opposition to it. This is the pattern that a successful regional hegemonic consolidation produces, and it is the pattern that India's action has produced.
Swaran Singh read the analysis.
He read it twice.
He put it down on his desk and looked at the ceiling of his office in South Block for a moment that was not quite thought and not quite reflection but was the specific internal acknowledgement of a man who had spent thirty years in the Foreign Service and who was now looking at a picture of the world that was different from the picture he had been looking at six months ago, and that was different in the direction that thirty years of Indian foreign policy had been working toward.
He picked up the analysis and walked to Chavan's office.
He put it on Chavan's desk.
He said: "The neighbours have read the map."
Chavan looked at the analysis. He looked at the summary paragraph. He said: "Cambodia."
Swaran Singh said: "Cambodia is broadcasting."
Chavan said: "Cambodia is always broadcasting."
He put the analysis in his drawer.
He said: "What's next."
What was next was the India-ASEAN Strategic Dialogue's first session, which Singapore hosted on February 12th in the Raffles City Convention Centre and which was attended by the Foreign Ministers of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, along with India's Foreign Minister, Singapore's Foreign Minister, and the Indian High Commissioner in Rangoon representing the transitional Burmese government as an observer.
Vietnam sent an observer. Laos sent an observer. Bangladesh sent its Foreign Secretary. Sri Lanka sent its High Commissioner to Singapore as an observer.
Cambodia sent nothing.
Lee Kuan Yew opened the session with the specific quality of a man who has arranged an outcome and is now presiding over its formal commencement. He said: "The purpose of this dialogue is not to ratify what has happened in Burma. What has happened in Burma has happened and the purposes of this body are forward-looking rather than retrospective. The purpose of this dialogue is to establish the institutional framework through which India and the states of Southeast Asia coordinate on regional security, economic development, and political stability in the new regional context that the post-Burma settlement has created."
He said: "India is a democracy. The members of ASEAN are, in varying forms and with varying degrees of completeness, committed to democratic governance and the rule of law. Burma is in transition toward democratic governance under Indian facilitation. The India-ASEAN Strategic Dialogue is the institution through which this community of democratic and democratically-oriented states coordinates its regional responsibilities."
The framing was Lee Kuan Yew's most significant contribution to the proceedings — the conversion of the regional accommodation to Indian regional hegemony into a narrative of democratic solidarity, which was the same framing that Chavan had used at the Rangoon press conference and that India had been deploying in every public context since the announcement. The framing worked because it was partly true — India was a democracy, most ASEAN states were committed to at least the forms of democratic governance, Burma was going through a transition that was presenting itself as democratic — and because the parts that were not true were not prominently examined in an institution whose members had their own complex relationships with democratic governance and were not in a position to be rigorous about others.
The session produced a joint statement that affirmed the participating states' commitment to regional stability and democratic development, welcomed the IBDP as a model for regional economic cooperation, established the India-ASEAN Strategic Dialogue as a formal institutional framework with an annual Ministerial session and a quarterly Senior Officials meeting, and agreed on the framework's terms of reference that gave India a formal role in the region's multilateral institutional architecture for the first time in its post-independence history.
Swaran Singh, signing the joint statement at the end of the session, looked across the table at his Southeast Asian counterparts and thought about what the document in front of him represented and what it did not represent, and the two things were connected in the specific way that diplomatic documents were always connected to the realities they described and the realities they concealed.
The document described regional cooperation and democratic solidarity and economic partnership and institutional commitment. It did not describe Cambodia's Radio Phnom Penh denunciations or Thailand's two in the morning emergency sessions or Indonesia's careful calculation or Vietnam's deliberate abstention from the session table. It did not describe the specific fear that had moved every government in the room from wherever it had been on January 28th to this room on February 12th.
He signed the document.
He shook hands with his counterparts.
He went to find Lee Kuan Yew, who was overseeing the reception that followed the signing with the specific proprietorial satisfaction of a host whose event had gone as planned.
He said: "Well managed."
Lee Kuan Yew said: "Institutions matter. The institution you have now is the institution that will shape the next decade of India's regional engagement. Use it correctly."
Swaran Singh said: "We intend to."
Lee Kuan Yew said: "I know." He picked up his tea. "That is why I offered to host it."
End of Chapter 272