Once again India has rolled out the red carpet for Burma\u2019s aging despot Than Shwe, whose sleep has reportedly been disrupted by his deep-seated fears of being hauled to The Hague for his alleged crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n
And yet leading Indian newspapers such as The Hindu and the Times of India have come out in full support of the New Delhi ruling elite\u2019s pathetic embrace of a prospective war criminal, rationalizing and popularizing India\u2019s uncivilized Burma policy, devoid of both modern humanism and ancient wisdom.<\/p>\n
Gandhi once famously \u2014 or infamously \u2014 remarked that western civilization would be \u201ca nice idea\u201d (in response to a fan\u2019s question \u201cWhat do you think of Western civilization?\u201d)<\/p>\n
Were a similar question posed about today\u2019s Indian civilization, the Burmese public would be likely to come up with the same response: \u201cIndian civilization would be a nice idea.\u201d<\/p>\n
They will indeed \u201clook west\u201d and witness that India has reached a new \u201ccivilizational\u201d low with its greedy resources grab in Burma and ugly \u201crealpolitik\u201d.<\/p>\n
Despite India\u2019s anglophone elite of around 200 million \u2014 many of whom are Oxbridge and Ivy League alumni \u2014 the India of today embodies neither the liberal ideals of the European Enlightenment nor the Spiritual Enlightenment of Gotama Buddha or Gotama the Enlightened.<\/p>\n
The fanciful label \u201cthe world\u2019s largest democracy\u201d which Indian elites often tout when it suits them means little for the Burmese. India behaves no differently from today\u2019s authoritarian states in Asia or Africa.<\/p>\n
(Regarding India\u2019s reputation of being the world\u2019s largest democracy, it would be intriguing to survey the opinions of the two thirds of the country\u2019s 1 billion population who have been eternally condemned to abject poverty and social and political exclusion, thanks to Indian State policies and practices.)<\/p>\n
To belabor the obvious, India as a nation-state is as greedy, exploitative and destructive (towards other societies as well as its own laboring classes) in its pursuit of its internal elite\u2019s interests as, say, China or Russia \u2014 neither of which pretends to be other than authoritarian.<\/p>\n
Indeed when it comes to narrowly defined national commercial and strategic interests, no differences can be detected between Oxbridge-educated political leaders such as Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Chinese politburo members and former Soviet KGB operatives.<\/p>\n
India runs its foreign policy as if governing a nation-state were no different from managing a brothel\u2014a purely business transaction (euphemistically referred to in political discourse as \u201crealpolitik\u201d), without any human value or vision worthy of a civilization.<\/p>\n
India\u2019s conduct today reminds me of the \u201cpolitics-is-not-about-ethics-or-compassion\u201d reply I received from the President of Singapore S. R. Nathan, when he was Singapore\u2019s ambassador to Washington almost two decades ago.<\/p>\n
As Nathan bluntly put it, \u201crunning a country is not like running a church,\u201d implying that ethics, compassion and values don\u2019t belong to statecraft.<\/p>\n
Nathan was responding to a question I posed during a \u201cquestions and answers\u201d session after a lecture he delivered at the University of Wisconsin in Madison: How can your Singaporean government justify selling the Burmese military junta an unknown quantity of arms immediately after the massacre of several thousand unarmed Burmese protesters, including university students, monks, schoolchildren, housewives and even civil servants in 1988?<\/p>\n
It hardly surprised the audience in the room that the then Singaporean ambassador to Washington would be so forthcoming about his government\u2019s world-famous immorality.<\/p>\n
For the highly polished Cambridge- and Harvard-schooled ruling elite of this city-state neither practices nor believes in any ideal other than the profit-motive.<\/p>\n
Casinos, amusement parks, strip-malls, money-laundering and arms deals seem to mean a great deal more to them than such \u201calien\u201d ideals as \u201ca representative government.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the world\u2019s \u201clargest democracy\u201d pimping its civilizational wisdom for gas and oil, as well as out of its fear and loathing of China?<\/p>\n
With neighbors like these the Burmese public can only expect their \u201chell on earth\u201d to get worse and worse in the years to come.<\/p>\n
__________________________<\/p>\n
Dr. Zarni is a research fellow on Burma at the London School of Economics and a visiting senior fellow at the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once again India has rolled out the red carpet for Burma\u2019s aging despot Than Shwe, whose sleep has reportedly been disrupted by his deep-seated fears of being hauled to The Hague for his alleged crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6661\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}