Northeast India Can Become Gateway to Southeast Asia: Report

India's Northeast can emerge as true gateway to South-East Asia: Report

New Delhi, Aug 7

The persistent unrest in Manipur over the last few years has provided an opportunity to many "inimical international and national forces" in India and abroad to intensify efforts aimed at destabilising the region, with the broader objective of weakening India and hindering it from becoming a superpower, B L Vohra, a former Director General of Police and Home Secretary of Manipur, wrote in 'Saviours' magazine while underscoring the need to step up efforts to strengthen security and promote prosperity.

Highlighting China's longstanding support for the insurgent groups in the Northeastern region, Vohra wrote, "In the late 1970s and early 80s, it was providing physical training and weapons to Manipuri insurgent groups like PLA (whose then-leader, Biseswor Singh, had told me personally after he had gone to China with a group for training and weapons), PREPAK, etc., and to NSCN from Nagaland. And now, its increasing economic cooperation with Myanmar and, more recently, with Bangladesh, is not a good sign for India in the northeast."

"The visit of the current Prime Minister of Bangladesh to China some time back is a pointer to this, as an agreement regarding the Teesta Project was finalised," he added.

According to the expert, Myanmar has, by default, become a source of instability for India, as the military Junta has little control over the regions bordering India, allowing Indian insurgent groups to operate freely from bases across the border.

"Also, one of the NSCN groups, NSCN-K (Khaplang), is essentially from Myanmar, as Khaplang is a native of Myanmar. As we all know, most of the tribes living in the Indian states of the northeast and bordering Myanmar have kith and kin on both sides, and this creates other problems in Indian states as noticed often," Vohra mentioned in his article written for the 'Saviours' magazine.

The security and terrorism expert argued that along with neighbouring countries, other global powers have also played a role in creating trouble in the Northeastern states.

Earlier in March of this year, he said, India's National Investigating Agency (NIA) arrested one American and six Ukrainians from separate airports in Delhi, Lucknow, and Kolkata on charges of illegally entering Mizoram without permits before crossing into Myanmar.

"It is alleged that even drones were smuggled by them there to help and train the local groups fighting against the Myanmar government. Some are even linking this to the use of drones sometime back by some Kuki groups in Manipur in the recent conflict. This cannot be ruled out," Vohra stated.

"Also, some other foreign powers are taking deep interest in fomenting trouble in India, about which less is known in the public domain, but our intelligence would know more about these for sure," he added.

— IANS