New Delhi: Continuing its victory march into Myanmar’s Junta-controlled areas, the pro-democracy armed forces of that country have recently snatched control of Paletwa – a strategically key township in its Chin state.
The fall of Paletwa to Myanmar’s Rakhine-based ethnic armed organisation (EAO), the Arakan Army (AA), on January 15 came after two months of Junta resisting its seize. AA is one of the three militias to have joined hands with the People’s Defence Force (PDF), the armed wing of Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG) in exile.
That Paletwa borders Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts may have prompted the Bangladesh Border Guard (BBG) chief AKM Nazmul Hassan to at once dash off to that border to scrutinise its security preparations against infiltration, but that takeover of AA has much more strategic significance to India – more emphatically to Northeast India, in terms of its security, and also the expansion of trade and commerce from/in that landlocked belt.
Paletwa’s significance
Paletwa, positioned about 20 kms from the Bangladesh border, is a vital cog in India’s Look/Act East Policy, more specifically to the India-funded multi-crore infrastructure venture – the Kaladan Road Project, or the Kaladan Multi-Model Transit Transport Project, started by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2008.
A part of the ambitious bilateral project, estimated to be about Rs 3,200 crore now, is to connect the Kolkata port at Hoogly to Myanmar’s Sittwe port.
The port, based in Sittwe, the capital of the Rakhine state, is on an estuarial patch shaped by the Kaladan River while joining two other rivers to empty into the Bay of Bengal.
Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/RaviC/CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED
While the linking of the seaports of Kolkata and Sittwe would give Myanmar a functional sea network with India and thereby boost bilateral trade, further expansion of the infrastructure project into Myanmar’s Chin State would go on to benefit India even more significantly.
As per the blueprint, the project would link the Sittwe port in Rakhine State to the neighbouring Chin state through a river link on the Kaladan. Chin State borders Mizoram. The inland waterways would then reach Paletwa in Chin State. Thereafter, goods ferried from Kolkata to Sittwe to Paletwa by waterways would cross over to India through Mizoram by road.
When completed, the Kaladan project would not only link a land-locked Northeast India to the sea through Sittwe, and also lessen the region’s distance (currently only by road) to the Kolkata port, but also generate an alternate route to the region aside from the strategically vulnerable Siliguri Corridor, or what is commonly called the Chicken’s Neck.
This, along with the Indian government’s ongoing railway project with Bangladesh to join South Tripura with Chittagong’s Cox’s Bazar where a deep sea port is under construction (Cox’s Bazar also has the world’s longest unbroken sea beach), have been the ambitious ventures to help deliver to the northeastern states a window to the sea. Such a link would help open the resource-rich Northeastern expanse to wider commerce too.
Additionally, linking Agartala with Kolkata through the Akhaura railway line in Bangladesh, which is nearing completion, would further add to the warren of alternate routes to and from the Northeastern borderlands.
An operational Sittwe port in Myanmar augurs well for Bangladesh too as its Teknaf Port is just 60 nautical miles away. Furthermore, goods from Kolkata can also be routed through Teknaf to reach Sabroom, located about 300 kms by road. Sabroom is in Tripura and has an integrated customs facility, or a land port.
The Maitri Setu, or the friendship bridge over River Feni funded by India, is to connect this significant border town of Sabroom to Ramgarh in Chittagong. According to Land Ports Authority of India chairman Aditya Mishra on January 24, the bridge would be operational this February –– three years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi ‘inaugurated’ it virtually.
Progress in Kaladan Project
This past May, minus much media glare, union ports, shipping and waterways minister and former Assam chief minister, Sarbananda Sonowal, travelled to his home town Dibrugarh in Assam to virtually receive the first Indian cargo ship sailing from Kolkata docking at the Sittwe Port. The May 9, 2023, event was to declare the Kolkata to Sittwe slice of the Kaladan project operational.
On the Indian side, as per the official record, the road component of the Kaladan project is also nearly complete. In April 2023, the Mizoram government’s Public Works Department led by chief engineer C. Lalchhuana had informed state governor Haribabu Kambhampati that “98.01% of the road component of the Kaladan project on the Mizoram side (national highway 501A) has been completed so far.”
Correspondingly, Myanmar’s commerce minister U. Aung Naing Oo had also announced in June last year that the road to connect Paletwa with the border town of Zorinpui in Mizoram “is underway in full swing”. Though the Indian minister of state for external affairs R. K. Ranjan Singh, an MP from Manipur which also shares a long border with Myanmar, had told reporters in March last year that “the unpredictable atmosphere occurring in Myanmar” has affected the progress of the Kaladan project, that the Myanmarese commerce minister and Junta leader, two months later had, however, dismissed the anti-Junta combats in the region having any effect on infrastructure linking with India.
This past January 15 though, the field situation seemed to have undergone a paradigm shift with AA taking over Paletwa, forcing the Junta to surrender all 24 of its positions in that area, including the Light Infantry Battalion 289 headquarters from where its brigadier generals had controlled the township.
Why AA control of Paletwa is bad news for India
As part of the Brotherhood Alliance, stitched between NUG’s armed wing, the PDF, and the three powerful EAOs – the AA, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) – operations to weed out Junta began close to Myanmar’s international borders.
Since this past October, the Alliance forces, under Operation 1027, have been able to wrest control of several strategic townships close to Myanmar’s borders with India, China, Bangladesh and Thailand, pushing thousands of refugees to flee to neighbouring countries.
The January 15 takeover of Paletwa by AA is part of that victory curve. Since Paletwa is a crucial component of India’s infrastructure development in eastern and north-eastern India, a region hemmed in by China, it becomes vital then to put a close lens on the Arakan Army; importantly, its approach towards China and India.
Founded in 2009 to establish an ‘Arakan nation’, AA today has grown to a strength of over thirty thousand soldiers. AA was formed with help from the Kachin Independence Army, one of Myanmar’s most powerful groups which is also believed to have trained militants from Northeast India in the 1980s-90s.
Though AA is Rakhine-based, a report in the Washington-based think tank, the Stimson Center, had stated this past April that “at least 6,000 troops are stationed in areas controlled by AA allies, such as the country’s north and northeast.”
An incisive report by Kyaw Hsan Hlaing, a noted Myanmar observer, it goes on to underline the reasons why AA has grown so phenomenally in spite of being one of the youngest EAOs in Myanmar. Importantly, AA is part of the Federal Political Negotiation and Coordination Committee, a coalition spearheaded by the United Wa State Army (UWSA), Myanmar’s largest and strongest group which runs the autonomous Wa State. UWSA is a strong ally of China.
From time to time, some observers have also published reports about the possibility of China funding AA to have leverage over Myanmar and India.
That AA has earlier attacked the India-backed Kaladan project but has never touched any Chinese big-ticket infrastructure projects in the region is also oft-cited as proof of AA’s proximity to China and its geopolitical interests. In early 2019, India and Myanmar’s military is understood to have launched a joint operation to chase away the AA forces obstructing the Kaladan project. In retaliation, AA had abducted five Indians working at the Kaladan site, leading to the death of one. In mid-2020 too, there was a face-off between AA and Junta forces close to the project site.
This past January, with Junta, supporting the project, and surrendering control of Paletwa to AA, seen close to China, the completion of the crucial venture is certainly under a cloud.
Chinese infrastructure projects in the region
Aside from India creating a trade corridor with Myanmar’s Rakhine State through Sittwe, China is funding Myanmar’s Kyaukphyu Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in that state to also craft its business interest and to uplift its backward Yunnan Province. The SEZ will be linked to the Shwe Gas Field through the Bay of Bengal to Yunnan. China is also linking that part of its country with Myanmar through a railway line.
In tandem, India has also recently announced financing a railway line between the Chin State and Mizoram. Huge infrastructure investment by India in the western part of Myanmar touching Northeast India is also because it is not only the gateway to ASEAN but also to likely counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
It is then that China increasingly being seen backing the EAOs to take control of the border areas is a worrying development. The continuous capture of key towns by the EAOs bordering India including Paletwa, has, therefore, only bared the fact that the shadow of the civil war in Myanmar can only grow over India’s Northeast.
Additionally, the NUG government in exile’s displeasure with the Narendra Modi government for some time now for having backed the Junta diplomatically and with the supply of arms, and the Manipur ethnic conflict close to the Myanmar border nowhere near an end further adds to the intricacies of the region’s geopolitik.
