The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  When we had left Yangon for Naypyidaw the previous day, for most of the 200 miles (around 322 km), ours was the only car on the highway. I have seen suburban America, with its empty sidewalks and lack of shops for continuous stretches, but there are always other cars or school buses along the road, reassuring you that a thriving community lives somewhere beyond those leafy trees. But in Naypyidaw, it was not so, making our drive surreal, and our presence highly conspicuous, which too was probably the point.

  Suddenly the road widened, with eight lanes on either side. It was big enough to carry an aircraft, and that, too, was the point. This is a capital city retreating from its people; it is a city where it is impossible to stage a political demonstration, a journalist told me, because there is no structure – a Tahrir Square, a Jantar Mantar – at which you can direct your protest, no central plaza where you can congregate.

  Our lonely car trundling along the gigantic road felt as if it were a tiny boat in a vast ocean, with nothing visible around us except water. When the driver brought us to the end of that road, I saw that security guards had erected barriers, beyond which was the distant silhouette of Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, the bicameral legislature of Myanmar, comprising Pyithu Hluttaw and Amyotha Hluttaw, the lower and upper houses respectively. They were so far away it was impossible to guess how large their scale was, and how long it might have taken us to get there. ‘This is how you build a coup-proof capital,’ a friend told me.

  Beneath the imperial triumphalism was the fear of the unknown. Muhammad bin Tughlaq, who ruled Delhi from 1325-51, had decided to shift his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad – with his sultanate extending to the south, he needed a capital in a more central location. But he shifted the capital back to Delhi to better defend the north. The move to Daulatabad had cost many lives and was seen as a huge waste. One rationale for creating Naypyidaw was to build a capital from scratch, closer to the ethnic nationalities, many of which have fought long battles with the Burmese nation, seeking either greater autonomy or independence.

  To give the city a cultural centre, a giant new pagoda had been built, mirroring the magnificent Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon. Albino elephants, meant to bring luck, were kept in chains across the pagoda. Yangon’s Shwedagon’s original shrine goes back perhaps 1,500 years. Its gleaming stupa shines at all hours, and the line of devotees patiently making their way to the top is usually long. Naypyidaw’s pagoda, called Uppatasanti, was opened in 2006, and is only marginally shorter than Shwedagon. Uppatasanti means peace, but it is a sutra to be invoked at a time of calamity, such as an invasion, reinforcing the impression of a city built to escape being besieged.

  In Everything Is Broken: Life Inside Burma, Larkin’s chilling account of how Myanmar’s government handled the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, she recounted a prophecy5:

  Mandalay pya pone

  Yangon thit pone

  Naypyidaw ayo pone

  It means:

  In Mandalay, a pile of ashes

  In Yangon, a pile of wood

  In Naypyidaw, a pile of bones

  She then explained that Mandalay was in the central dry zone of the country, where fires were frequent. Yangon, being a port city facing the delta, had faced a cyclone and seen fallen trees. And the bones? Naypyidaw sat on a fault line where an earthquake could occur. But there was another explanation – the bones of fallen soldiers. ‘With no public outlet for frustration against the regime, dissent was manifesting itself in whispering rhymes,’ she wrote.

  Naypyidaw, the city of kings, was built as a tribute to the rule of the generals. An astrologer had chosen the date and time of its opening. Nearly a decade later, it remained a city in search of its soul.

  The generals tried hard, but they could not keep dissent down. Over several visits to Myanmar, I came to know one such brave dissident, Ma Thida, a physician and writer who has spent several years in the country’s notorious Insein prison. In 2012, I was at her office where she edited a weekly newspaper. By-election results had started trickling in, with Aung San Suu Kyi set to become a parliamentarian. If Thida was excited, she wasn’t showing any of it. Her circumspection revealed her maturity – unlike her young reporters, she was old enough to have voted in the last genuine elections in the country and seen the results stolen, and she probably was worried about what the generals might do if the NLD would sweep the polls. She had learned to be patient the hard way.

  In 1988, when she was twenty-two, she got interested in politics. ‘I wanted freedom and a better society,’ she told me. She joined the political demonstrations that were spreading across Yangon. She joined the NLD’s information section and travelled with Suu Kyi. In her novel, The Roadmap, which she wrote under a pseudonym, Suragamika, she described secret agents wearing dark glasses and smoking, sitting in a corner, keeping an eye on young people having conversations over endless cups of green tea. The agents were called ‘snakes’, and they were on the lookout for ‘peacocks’, the young students who wanted to change the world. (NLD’s symbol is the peacock). Her novel captured the horrendous moment when hopes rose and crashed. After the generals ignored the election results, they produced a ‘roadmap’ for democracy, giving Thida the title for her novel. She was arrested during the crackdown. Her six-week trial was not open to the public and she was sentenced to twenty years in prison – seven for endangering public security, three for contacts with illegal organizations, and ten for distributing illegal materials.

  She was in jail for five-and-a-half years. She told me she was not abused physically, but there were long interrogation sessions. ‘They tried to deprive me of sleep,’ she recalled. But they had no idea of her strength: she kept replying politely. When the interrogators wanted to stop, she said she was willing to continue. When an officer shut his notebook at 2 a.m. one morning, saying she could take some rest, Thida said, ‘We have started this, we must finish.’ At which the officer, in a resigned tone, pleaded: ‘We are humans, we need to sleep.’ But she wanted to go on, and she recalls, ‘One of the officers told me, “What are you doing? Are you torturing us?”’

  Thida had a simple technique for dealing with her inquisitors. She would speak the truth; she would not lose her temper; she would smile. ‘In the end, they had to give up,’ she said. ‘They didn’t expect how I would respond.’ When I asked her what had given her such courage, she spoke of her Buddhist faith. In Buddhism, she said, there is the idea of dukkha, or suffering, imperfection, and impermanence, which one must endure in one’s journey towards nirvana. ‘I had to be creative in dealing with my dukkha, in all aspects of my life,’ she said. ‘If there was an obstacle, it was a challenge, and I had to face it. I never thought from my side alone. I thought of what they might expect from me. And if I thought hard enough what to expect myself, I would be prepared, and be able to protect myself. The logic is simple. If you respond to them in a way they cannot expect, they will not be able to protect themselves, and I will be able to overcome the obstacles they place in my path.’

  She also kept herself busy by treating the sores and wounds of other prisoners, including sex workers, whom many in the jail shunned. But Thida’s resistance took its toll. Her body weight had fallen to 80 lbs and she was often running a high temperature. She could not eat, drink, or walk; she could not even stand up without support. Her liver was reacting abnormally. Being a doctor, Thida was able to understand that her body was weakening. She was suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis and endometriosis, but the prison doctor was a stern woman, unwilling to listen to her.

  ‘I was bleeding. The doctor noted that my illness was serious. She was married to an army officer, and she asked for cash. I refused to pay her – I told her I might not be in prison if I were corrupt. So she denied me treatment. I had acute liver shutdown, and I was vomiting. I suggested they should feed me through infusions – she refused,’ Thida recalled during one of our several conversations.

  As her illness worsened, the prison authorities grew alarmed and sent her to a public hospit
al, but then pulled her back twenty hours later out of fear that her ill treatment would be revealed. Her condition continued to deteriorate, and she told her jailers, ‘If anything happens to me, all consequences will be on you.’ She had managed to bring back medication from her brief stay at the hospital, but the prison doctor demanded that she surrender it. Instead of complying, Thida went on a hunger strike. She told the prison’s director that she wanted to keep her medicines. The director said that the doctor feared that Thida would take all the medicines at once and attempt suicide.

  ‘But I don’t want to die,’ she said. ‘I want to survive, and that’s why I want my medicines. If I wanted to die, I could hit my head on the wall tomorrow to kill myself.’ As her medicines were returned to her, she asked for another favour: she wanted a different doctor to treat her. When the prison director wanted to know why, she said that the prison doctor had given her six months to live. ‘When a doctor tells you that,’ Thida told the director, ‘what would you do? You’d ask for a second opinion. I want another opinion.’

  She got her way. ‘My hunger strike lasted only forty-five minutes,’ she recalled. As he left her cell, the director told her, ‘You are free, we are not.’

  Thida typically spent twenty-three hours each day behind closed doors; she was granted thirty minutes for a short walk. The rest of the time she was back in the same cell. She could meet her parents for fifteen minutes every two weeks.

  ‘How dare you call me free,’ she replied. The director looked at her closely and said, ‘We are government employees. You are free in your thoughts and in your world – we are not.’

  In the months that followed, Thida treated herself and continued to meditate. ‘I had become more determined to face any obstacle. I did not care about anything happening to me.’ During the time she was in jail, her brother died and she could not attend his funeral.

  By now, her situation was known among activists outside Myanmar. Human rights groups had taken up her case, calling for her release. The generals, who still sought international respectability for Myanmar, bristled at such criticism. In 1997, the country had joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and two years later, when ASEAN requested that Myanmar be allowed to take part in a summit between European and Asian leaders, the Europeans demanded that Myanmar first take positive steps on human rights – which led to the release of some prisoners, including Thida. When she was released, she told the prison director, ‘Thank you for keeping me in prison. It gave me the time to practise Vipassana meditation.’

  While in prison, she had won the prestigious Reebok Human Rights Award, and her writing was published abroad. Prison authorities learned about her fame, but when they mentioned it to her, she said, ‘I am not responsible for being well-known. I never intended any of this.’

  After her health recovered, she returned to the Muslim Free Hospital, continuing to treat patients. She wanted to go abroad to study, but the government refused to give her a passport. So she undertook advanced studies at London’s School for Tropical Medicine as an external student and was allowed to go for her graduation during a brief period of thaw in politics. She received invitations from universities abroad, but it had taken her six years to get a passport. In 2005, she travelled to eleven countries over a period of ten months, and between 2008 and 2010, she spent time at the University of York in Britain, then at Brown University, and later, on a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University in the US. Since the political liberalization, she has travelled to international literary festivals, published her memoir, and in September 2016, she was awarded the Václav Havel ‘Disturbing the Peace’ Award given to a writer of courage. (Disclosure: I was on the panel that shortlisted the nominees; three independent judges chose her as the first Havel laureate).

  Thida enjoyed her time abroad, but decided to return to Myanmar. ‘I had fought hard for my personal freedom. But it was not only for me,’ she said. ‘I could have compromised and avoided prison. I kept asking myself after my release – what do I want? I wanted to be free, but I also wanted to free my society. So I have to stay here, I have to work for my people, not for other people. That’s why I came back. My life is here. People want me to get more political, but I want to be a good citizen.’

  There is the private Buddhism of women like Thida, who live by its precepts and the noble Eight-fold Path, and there is a more public, demonstrative Buddhism in Myanmar, which has lately revealed an ugly face. The vituperative speeches of monks like Wirathu, once sold on audiotapes and compact discs on the streets of Yangon, are now available far more widely, and disseminated quickly through the internet, often with dubious videos bearing hate-filled messages and doctored images. That anger contrasts with the sublime image of the line of young boys and girls, as novice monks, walking along the footpath at dawn in village after village in Myanmar.

  Buddhist symbols and terms are ever-present in Myanmar. A pro-democracy news organization, Mizzima, is so named after the Buddhist ideal of the middle path. Suu Kyi herself has written about how Buddhism has shaped her politics. Even the generals who damaged Myanmar’s democracy so severely claimed to be devout Buddhists. Monks challenged the generals in 2007, and a decade later, seemed to be urging the army to suppress the Rohingyas.

  Indeed, some Buddhist monks have encouraged the unspeakable violence unleashed against the Rohingyas – a term Myanmar nationalists (including Suu Kyi) don’t even use. (During my visits there, with a few notable exceptions, most local residents I knew avoided calling the Arakan Muslims Rohingyas. It was as if by not calling them, they were trying to obliterate their existence). In 2017, over 600,000 Rohingyas had been forcibly displaced from Rakhine province. Many of the Burmese people I spoke to about the violence would only call the situation ‘complex’. Some former student leaders, like Kyo Kyo Gyi, who had courageously defied the military in the past and spoken eloquently against the generals when we had met in 2013, now supported the attacks in Rakhine. Sitagu Sayadaw, a monk, comforted soldiers at an address at an army base which was telecast to his 250,000 followers, citing an ancient parable from Sri Lanka, in which Buddhist clerics had assured the Sinhalese king Dutugamunu that the innumerable Hindus he had killed amounted to ‘only one-and-a-half lives’. Many in Myanmar took those remarks to mean that he was condoning, if not encouraging, violence against Rohingyas.

  And yet, in another time, Buddhism’s central tenets had helped courageous individuals in the country face adversity with calmness, remain steadfast in their core beliefs, and continue their struggle without expecting instant rewards. In a lecture to the European parliament delivered in absentia in 1990, Suu Kyi had said, ‘The wellspring of courage and endurance in the face of unbridled power is generally a firm belief in the sanctity of ethical beliefs. It is a man’s vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity which leads him to dare and to suffer and to build societies free from want and fear. Concepts such as truth, justice and compassion cannot be dismissed as trite when these are often the only bulwarks which stand against ruthless power.’

  And the clarion call for freedom came against the backdrop of the pagodas – Shwedagon and Sule. People gathered there to register their protest, to demand political freedoms. But clearly, as we would discover later, those freedoms were not for everyone.

  If Shwedagon inspires awe and is a destination in itself, Sule symbolizes the journey you need to undertake towards realizing the goal. The area around the pagoda shows a close-up of the microcosm of life in Yangon – tourists consulting maps, young men offering to be their guides, hawkers selling lottery tickets, children with copies of Burmese Days (there is no escape from that novel), well-fed monks looking pensively at the traffic, and backpackers counting change and haggling before buying fruit from a street vendor.

  Sule Pagoda is about a kilometre from the riverfront, across Maha Bandula Park, surrounded by roads filled with cars and pedestrians. This is the heart of Yangon, with hotels and churches, parks and markets, shops near the pago
da selling flowers and offerings. This part of the city feels less colonial, less British; there is chaotic anarchy in its traffic, and the crowded bazaars are reminiscent of Calcutta or Bombay of the 1970s, only with unrecognizable brands advertised amateurishly in indecipherable scripts on billboards. Jumbled-up exposed electric cables are entangled around the pillars and poles, somehow connecting the ramshackle buildings, linking them with the city’s power grid. At night, hawker stalls come alive with families in shorts and singlets sitting on plastic stools and aluminum-topped tables, slurping noodles in fish stew. There is a disciplined file of monks in maroon robes walking by.

  There is a reason all roads seem to lead to Sule Pagoda. British town planners who wanted to develop Rangoon in a rectangular grid pattern chose the pagoda as their starting point. Its stupa rises to a height of 46 metres and a relic of the Buddha – a strand of hair – is believed to be there. Over the years, it has become the focal point of peaceful and democratic protests in Myanmar. Suu Kyi had led nationalist demonstrations there, and in 1988, thousands of students turned up near the pagoda, day after day, bringing traffic to a standstill, demanding democracy. In 2007, when Buddhist monks rose in protest against the regime, they congregated here.

  What links Suu Kyi’s choice of Shwedagon Pagoda as the place where she made a major public address in 1988, dedicating herself to building a Burma her father had dreamt of, and Sule Pagoda as the place where demonstrations occur, is Buddhist faith. The Burmese struggle for democracy has been, to a large extent, peaceful and non-violent. Could Buddhism offer an explanation why? What accounts for that civilian courage? In her book Freedom from Fear, Suu Kyi explains her understanding of what makes a good ruler by drawing on Buddhist precepts and principles. She invokes ten duties of a king – dana (liberality), sila (morality), paricagga (generosity), ajjava (integrity), maddava (kindness), tapa (austerity), akkodha (non-anger), avihamsa (non-violence), khanti (forbearance), and andavirodha (not opposing the will of the people). She writes: ‘The quest for democracy in Burma is the struggle of a people to live whole, meaningful lives to live as free and equal members of the world community. It is part of the unceasing human endeavour to prove that the spirit of man can transcend the flaws of his own nature.’6