The Specter of Instability on India’s Eastern Front « Aletho News

The Specter of Instability on India’s Eastern Front

By MK Bhadrakumar | The New Indian Express | August 22, 2024

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s demand for the extradition of India’s deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina comes as no surprise. The party fears that the current antipathy towards Hasina in the country will sooner rather than later dissipate as the country’s joyous “second revolution” collides with the sobering reality that Bangladesh’s complex development problems are intractable and expectations are sky-high.

An analogous situation would be what is happening in Georgia. The US-backed “Rose Revolution” of 2003 is long gone. During the first decade, Georgia went through several political crises. Waves of protest erupted as the economy collapsed, corruption and venality increased, the rule of law collapsed, and misgovernance and anarchic conditions brought the country to its knees. The icon of the color revolution, Mikhail Saakashvili, was literally ousted from power and sent into exile. The party that emerged from the ruins of the color revolution in a free and fair election, Georgia Dream, sought rapprochement with Russia as it realized that Georgia’s future lay in good relations with its giant neighbor.

Washington recently tried to repeat the color revolution, but Tbilisi countered this in an ingenious way by introducing a law that would control all foreign contributions to NGOs, thus exposing in one fell swoop the fifth column and sleeper cells. Georgians said they had had enough of color revolutions.

These are the first days after the revolution in Bangladesh. The starry-eyed twenty-somethings are now striving to form a new political party to govern the country of 170 million people. Meanwhile, criminal cases are being filed against Hasina. Those in power seem to fear that Hasina will one day make a comeback. In reality, however, they have to arm themselves against something very different.

For the chronicle of color revolutions tells a sordid tale of failed states. Next door, Myanmar is in the US crosshairs, where it is financing and arming an insurgency with Western mercenaries providing expertise. Last Friday, two senior US officials met virtually in Washington with the shadow of Myanmar’s National Unity Government, made up of an opposition willing to act as proxies, politicians, and a group of ethnic rebel groups.

According to the US State Department, the two officials “reiterated that the United States will continue to expand direct support and assistance to pro-democracy actors,” including “developing concrete steps toward a full transition to civilian rule that respects the will of the people of Burma.”

One of the two officials was Tom Sullivan, the little brother of White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who is a senior adviser to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and serves as deputy chief of staff for policy at the State Department. The second official was Michael Schiffer, assistant administrator of the USAID office for Asia, a former Pentagon official who manages the Indo-Pacific strategy and is drafting new plans for engagement in Central and Southeast Asia. Friday’s consultations made it clear that the Myanmar issue is a priority in the Indo-Pacific strategy and that the US is pushing the regime change agenda vigorously.

Color revolutions take many forms. If in Georgia—and more recently in Hong Kong and Thailand—it appeared in the classic form of nonviolent street protests, in Ukraine in 2014 it took a hybrid form, when agents provocateurs secretly positioned in Kiev’s city square opened fire on the night of February 20, killing 108 civilian protesters and 13 police officers. That horrific incident under mysterious circumstances became the tipping point when democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych lost courage and fled in panic.

In Myanmar, the US is initiating regime change through guerrilla warfare. After Afghanistan and Syria, this is the first time Washington has used the technique of insurgency. But it needs safe havens to organize insurgency, as Pakistan and Turkey have done in previous cases.

Hence the importance of Thailand’s northern borderlands, which are part of the Golden Triangle, a vast mountainous region that provides cover for drug mafia and human traffickers, and has a significant refugee population from Myanmar. But the attempted colour revolution in Bangkok was crushed by the established ruling elite through constitutional means. Therefore, the regime change in Bangladesh is a stroke of luck for Western intelligence.

The encirclement of China with hostile states is the US’s unspoken agenda. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to Myanmar and Thailand last week underscored the seriousness of the situation. Wang Yi called the situation “worrying” and suggested that neighboring countries should promote cooperation with Myanmar to create economic and social conditions that prevent conflict. He said that neighboring countries “who are in the same boat and drink water from the same river” have a better understanding of the situation in Myanmar than others.

If Bangladesh is drawn into the conflict in Myanmar, the security implications for India could be very daunting, especially because of the religious dimension, with the Rohingya refugee problem and the activities of Christian evangelicals in the remote tribal areas of the region. There is a strong possibility that the collapse of the state structure will eventually lead to the fragmentation of Myanmar. It is extremely short-sighted to think that Myanmar is China’s problem, not India’s.

Suffice it to say that regime change in Bangladesh will destabilize India’s eastern periphery. Whether the US agenda in Bangladesh is ‘India-centric’ is a debatable point. US geostrategies invariably serve US interests and are insensitive to the collateral damage they inflict on others.

The Biden administration did not punish Germany, America’s closest NATO ally, by destroying the Nord Stream gas pipelines; instead, it buried a potential Russo-German alliance in the heart of Europe under the seabed. Likewise, Washington should have no reason to punish a rising India; instead, US officials continue to say its partnership is among the “most consequential in the world.” With the looming US presence in the Bay of Bengal, India must constantly guard against the fate of Icarus in Greek mythology.

August 23, 2024 –

Posted by aletho | Aletho News | Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, United States