Will Nay Pyi Taw dance to Delhi’s tune?

The closest South Asia version of Wild West is perhaps the jungles that make for a porous border between India’s Northeast and Myanmar. It is unguarded, is dotted with thick forests and untamed rivers, and is enveloped in energy-sapping heat and humidity most of the time in a year. It was here that the Japanese met their Waterloo in World War II beaten as they were by better-acclimatised Indian soldiers in the British 14th Army led by the irrepressible General William Slims. The Japanese, on a winning spree till then, were thrown back into the sea as the British army pushed them back all the way from Kohima and Imphal.

And it is in this area that the contemporary Indian Army’s crack Parachute unit, the 21 Special Forces, launched a limited cross-border raid on two insurgent camps located about 7 km inside the Myanmar territory on June 9. The ‘guesstimate’ of the number of killed and wounded has varied from 7 to 100. Officially, the Indian army has only chosen to say ‘significant casualties were inflicted on them.’ Sources in the know have put the figure of dead between 35 and 40.

Whatever the number, the fact is, the Indian establishment broke away from its usual hesitation in launching a pre-emptive strike against a group of Northeast insurgents who have recently come together to form an anti-India front with support from elements within the Chinese establishment.

An assortment of Northeast insurgent groups (a veritable alphabet soup-NSCN-K, PLA, UNLF, KYKL, KCP, ULFA, NDFB-S) have once again come together to form a front ostensibly to create a separate homeland for ethnic tribes in the region. It goes by a rather unwieldy name-United Liberation Front of West South East Asia. Helped by friendly Chinese ex-soldiers and Intelligence operatives and a safe haven in the Sagiang division of Western Myanmar these groups are led by Shangwang Shangyung Khaplang, a Hemi Naga from Myanmar as its chairman.

In his mid-70s, Khaplang has been heading a faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-K) named after him since 1988 when he split from his erstwhile comrades Thuingaleng Muivah and Issac Chisi Swu, leaders of the I-M (Issac-Muivah) faction of NSCN.

Currently being treated for an unspecified ailment in a Yangon hospital, Khaplang has always played second fiddle to the I-M faction after their break up in 1988. All three were followers of the original Naga rebel Angami Zaphu Phizo, the man who launched the Naga insurgency in the 1950s only to fade away into oblivion in the 1970s. Khaplang and Muivah were among the few top insurgent leaders who had travelled to China in the mid-1960s to seek the Communist leadership’s support for their objectives. From the 1970s, China, busy with its own economic development, has been rather lukewarm to the Northeast insurgents. Of late — for the past six-seven years at least — the Chinese have however started showing greater interest in keeping the pot boiling in the Northeast.

In 2008, a Northeast militant who chose to surrender to authorities had revealed how groups of insurgents from the region were travelling to the Yunnan province to receive training and then return with arms. In April 2009, it was the turn of Isak Chisi Swu, the NSCN (IM) president involved in talks with New Delhi, to visit China. Paresh Baruah of ULFA, too, visited China in 2010 after he was forced to flee from Bangladesh in the wake of a major crackdown against the Northeast militants by the Sheikh Hasina government in Dhaka. Now Baruah, younger than Khaplang, is the key unifier in the new arrangement. In 2011 and 2012 the renewed Chinese interest in insurgencies in the north-eastern states became more pronounced. Two major conclaves of Northeastern insurgent leaders were organised by the Chinese at Taga in Western Myanmar.

Thin on the ground in western Myanmar and busy battling major insurgencies in the east and north of the country, the Myanmarese army has very little control in the areas bordering India’s Northeast. The Indian insurgents groups therefore find it convenient to operate from these areas.

Last Tuesday’s strike on the camps will however force the grouping to re-evaluate its policy and move further inward into Myanmar. The key question is: Will Nay Pyi Taw cooperate and crack down after a minor wrinkle that has appeared in its dealings with New Delhi?

Some ill-considered statements by junior Indian ministers not directly involved in planning or decision-making in the Special Operation and the breathless media narrative which started extrapolating and speculating about the possibility of a similar action on the Pakistan border, forced the Myanmarese to back off and deny that the raid took place inside their country after  Zaw Htay, director of the office of Myanmar President Thein Sein, confirmed to The Wall Street Journal a day after the raid that Indian troops had entered his country.

He was quoted by WSJ saying that there was “coordination and cooperation” between the Indian troops and Myanmar’s armed forces based in the area of the raids, but added that no Myanmar soldiers were directly involved. “We will never allow or support insurgents, whether (they are) against Myanmar or against our neighbouring countries,” Mr. Zaw Htay had said.

India’s National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval is likely to be in Myanmar on Monday and Tuesday to re-tweak the Indo-Myanmar security cooperation. The outcome of his visit will largely determine the trajectory of future operations in the border areas.

– The writer is a national security analyst and specialises on the Northeast, having lived and reported from the region between 1983 and 2006