Sreeram Chaulia

By Bertil Lintner

Rs 699

Since political control and legitimacy are maximised in the heartlands and usually taper off in the peripheries, the interstices between powerful nations have historically been frontier regions with no clear sovereign demarcation.

Who governs these “in-between” lands is always up for grabs and dependent on dynamic relations between the major powers surrounding them. Intermediate spaces, where political geography is ambiguous and lines are blurred, get tugged in different directions and subjected to unwarranted interference from the giants that covet them.
Such is the fate of the belt stretching from India’s Northeast up to the northern reaches of Burma, a theatre of what veteran Southeast Asia specialist Bertil Lintner calls a less known “Great Game East”. From 1967, China armed ethnic rebel movements in India’s Northeast via the conduit of Burma’s Kachin tribal areas for strategic reasons. Beijing saw these investments as tit for tat to New Delhi’s granting of asylum to the Dalai Lama and the covert arming of Tibetan refugees in Kalimpong (West Bengal) and Chakrata (then part of Uttar Pradesh) by India and the United States.
Lintner’s new book, Great Game East: India, China and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile Frontier, brings alive the intrigue and mutual suspicion with which China and India have been sparring for influence in their buffer tracts. “Seemingly localised ethnic conflicts”, he maintains, “fit into a bigger picture of an increasingly stronger India beginning to challenge China’s near-supremacy” on the eastern edges of the subcontinent. China’s current push to access and dominate the Indian Ocean, reminiscent of the Russian Empire’s bid for warm water ports in the original Great Game of the 19th century, and India’s inheritance of British geopolitical insecurities do lend a Rudyard Kipling-like feel to this contest on the peripheries being waged through proxies, spies and ruthless statecraft.
The book begins with an investigation of China’s hardnosed assistance to the Nagas, the most inveterate anti-India rebels. Even as atheistic fervour was sweeping Communist China during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, Christian hymns could be heard from the Naga training camps located at Tengchong in China’s Yunnan province. China’s goal of “strengthening a fifth column inside a strategic adversary”, says Lintner, enabled Naga rebels to remain truculent with the Indian government for decades. Chinese aid to the Nagas far exceeded what the latter received from the erstwhile East Pakistan between 1962
and 1971.
The main Naga insurgent movement, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN), still swears by “Mao Zedong thought” and its leaders seek weapons from China and Pakistan to this day. In 2004, a massive cache of illicit arms bound for the NSCN from China was seized in Bangladesh. The NSCN’s notorious arms procurement chief, Anthony Shimray, confessed in 2010 that the Chinese continue to ask his separatist movement to keep a tab on the Dalai Lama and Indian troop movements in Arunachal Pradesh.
The grievances of the Mizos against Indian rule preceded Chinese meddling, but Lintner deftly narrates that “what began as a tribal uprising soon became drawn into the geopolitics of the region.” He recounts an unforgettable anecdote of a Mizo insurgent commander crossing Burma into China in 1968 and being welcomed by a Chinese military officer with the words: “Seven hundred million Chinese support the Mizo cause.”
India eventually weathered Chinese designs and co-opted Mizo separatists to obtain a political settlement in 1986. But the ethnic affinities of Mizos with the Chins in Burma forced India’s intelligence agencies to “play their own games” by moderately arming the Chin National Army (CNA) in the mid-1980s.
Easy thoroughfare to and from Burma has historically exposed Manipur to invasions from the east. For Beijing, anti-India Manipuri rebels inspired by Marxism were more likeable than the Bible-toting Nagas and Mizos.
In 1978, Manipuri guerrillas even borrowed the name of China’s military to form their own People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which was trained in Chinese-occupied Tibet. Even after the more peace-prone Deng Xiaoping came to power in Beijing, China’s military intelligence aided the Manipuri PLA through a Burmese proxy. Lintner argues that the motive was no longer to weaken India’s hold on its fringes but to “collect useful intelligence in the Sino-Indian border areas”. Weapons from China’s “grey market” and drugs from Burma have ravaged Manipur, which has no respite even now from indiscriminate violence.
Although China disavowed Mao-era policies of exporting revolution by the gun, private Chinese arms dealers tied to state-owned Chinese companies like Norinco, have kept the flames alight in Assam.
Until 2007, the dreaded United Liberation Front of Asom (Ulfa) had a “liaison office” in Ruili town of western Yunnan. An unholy, on-and-off alliance between Pakistani and Bangladeshi intelligence agencies, which are interlinked with the Chinese military industrial complex, keeps stirring the pot of disaffection in Assam. To check militants from the Northeast coursing through Bangladesh, Lintner reveals, India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) also used the Shanti Bahini (a rebel force of the Chittagong hill tribes) as an asset.
In Burma, the author maintains that China is “playing several games” by arming the junta to the teeth and simultaneously sponsoring anti-government tribal insurgents like the Wa rebels.
Earlier, Beijing had nurtured the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) against the junta. To deny sanctuaries to Naga, Assamese and Manipuri insurgents in Burma, India too entered the “Game” by arming the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in the early 1990s.
Despite recent strategic rebalancing in Burmese foreign policy, Lintner labels that country “a cockpit of anarchy severely impacting on India’s national security”.
The book concludes with an overview of cloak-and-dagger strategies by China and India in the Indian Ocean, which the author presents as the new canvas of the Great Game East that will replace the old terrestrial border flashpoints.
He depicts dramatic moments from the 1990s, when R&AW had deployed ethnic Karen rebels from Burma to spy on the Coco Islands, where Chinese presence was highly disconcerting to India.
While dismissing “wild exaggerations and misperceptions” of what China is doing in the Coco Islands, he adds a dash of mystery by mentioning “suspicious structures and strange-looking buildings in the middle of the forest” in these remote specks, south of Burma’s mainland. Cooperation between the Indian and American navies in the adjoining Andaman Sea, says Lintner, is unquestionably “to counter the rise of China”. As China’s rising global economic interests increase the strategic stakes in the Indian Ocean, the spy thriller is indeed likely to be water-borne in the future.
An ethnographically rich account, filled with mindboggling details of rivalries and double crossings, Great Game East also has the cachet of close personal portraits of reclusive rebel commanders whom Lintner and his wife interviewed and photographed in inhospitable jungles.
If there is a shortcoming in this book, it lies in the absence of comparative thinking about other Great Games and how these murky phenomena finally end. Who wins such secretive wars of wills and nerve? As Great Games entail a division of spoils between the main players, are the people on the ground the inevitable losers? Can Great Games and zero sum realpolitik be somehow
overcome through regional integration?
A journalistic work like Lintner’s does not pretend to raise such abstract generalisations. But we must keep asking for the sake of the innocents who get crushed when big powers grate against each other on the margins.

Sreeram Chaulia is a professor and dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs