Why on earth has the Myanmar army led by Nobel peace prize hero, Aung San Suu Kyi, suddenly begun picking on this innocent folk called the Rohingya, who have just been going about their business all these decades?
Perhaps it’s because they haven’t merely been going about their business.
A violent group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) is forcing all Rohingya males – even very young boys – to attack Rakhine Buddhists and other civilians and to provoke the Myanmar army into violence. This group has been getting its funding and weapons from countries like Pakistan and Malaysia and its training from al-Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan.
In June 2015, it was discovered that many of the horrifying videos and images of the Rohingya massacre being circulated on social media and major news outlets were of other disasters – the devastating earthquake in China, violent Tibetan activism in India, the terrorism of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, and even an oil tanker on fire in the Congo are FAKE. However, let us give the Rohingya the benefit of the doubt and assume that they have not, in fact, torched their own homes for international attention, as the Myanmar government is claiming.
Take Maungdaw, for instance, where the Myanmar army last week burnt down the homes of innocent Rohingya. Precisely a week prior to this incident, ARSA had attacked soldiers and Rakhine civilians in the area, who then had to flee their homes and hide in a monastery in Taung Bazaar. The victims in this scenario are clearly all the non-ARSA parties – all the Rohingya and the local Rakhines not engaging in jihadi violence.
Yet, this still begs the question – why the Rohingya? Why are they – the Muslims of Bangladeshi origin – the only community in a nation where over a hundred different ethnic groups of various religions coexist peacefully, being targeted?
The answer lies in the demystified history of the Rohingya. Since the 1940s (even before Saudi oil money, al-Qaeda training, etc), many Rohingya Muslims tried to wage “jihad” against Myanmar (burning Rakhine villages and massacring Buddhists for decades) and upon realising that they’d lost their bid for an Islamic nation, they have been, since the 1990s, trying to gain citizenship.
Fed up and in no mood to reward this community for its sedition with citizenship, Myanmar has taken a good look at its neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia – where Buddhism is waning, Islamism is increasing, and homosexuals and women are being caned in public, and has simply decided to expel all Rohingya Muslims from its country before the same fate hits home.
Nevertheless, there are thousands of Rohingya who are simply innocent victims – collateral damage, so to speak – in this conflict. In spite of the community’s checkered history, the non-violent Rohingya deserve to be treated differently and separately from ARSA. They deserve the protection and citizenship of a nation – that is their human right.
Historically, the Rohingya were brought as slaves from Bangladesh to Burma by the British. Why doesn’t the United Kingdom take them in and give them refugee status or citizenship? The Rohingya have more in common with the Bangladeshis in terms of religious and cultural identity and, moreover, they share the same ethnicity. What’s holding Bangladesh back? Turkey’s Erdoğan is even willing to cover the costs for Bangladesh taking in these refugees.
The fact is, these countries know only too well what Myanmar already knows – that certain organisations are secretly encouraging and spreading extremist ideologies among the Rohingya and will not cease to do so. Suu Kyi has explicitly stated that international organisations have been complicit in aiding Rohingya militants. But she has been pooh-poohed by Zeid bin Ra’ad al-Hussein from Saudi Arabia and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (which is ironical, like Saudi Arabia’s elevation to the UN Women’s Rights Commission; it’s his word against Suu Kyi’s, and the world has chosen to ignore hers).
In the meantime, Saudi Arabia is busy bombing Yemen into oblivion and starving millions of Yemeni children to death, all the while singling out Israel and Myanmar for human rights violations.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.