STILWELL ROAD (India): Ninety-year-old Phingal Singh Limbu still remembers his colleagues dying around him as they hacked a way through the Burmese jungle to build a road from India to China during World War Two.
“The deaths were uncountable,” said the frail former Indian Army sepoy, speaking at his home in Assam state in India’s far northeast where he settled after the war.
“Most of them died of malaria, some of diarrhoea. But we also fought the tribes who attacked us, because they had never seen outsiders,” he said, his house beside the road he helped build.
Sixty years ago, that road — built by Chinese labourers, Indian soldiers and American engineers, and named after American General Joe Stilwell — provided a vital lifeline to relieve China’s besieged army as it fought Japanese occupation.
Today, much of the Stilwell Road (also known as the Burma Road) lies disused and overgrown, in parts little more than a jungle track. For decades it has exemplified the mistrust between Asia’s giants, India and China.
But it is slowly becoming a symbol of hope, as Beijing and New Delhi repair relations, and talk of repairing and reopening the road for trade, perhaps as part of a pan-Asian highway.
It may also become a symbol of hope for India’s undeveloped and troubled northeast, a lush but landlocked region joined to the rest of India by a “chicken’s neck” of land just 32 km wide, and racked by decades of separatist violence.
“For more than four decades, since India’s war with China in 1962, the northeast has been seen as a sensitive border area, viewed exclusively through the lens of national security,” said Sanjib Baruah of New Delhi’s Centre for Policy Research.
“We need a fundamental re-thinking, a ‘glasnost’ kind of opening up of the northeast. Globalisation is a moment of opportunity, and re-opening the road is clearly a good idea.”
Near the coal-mining town of Ledo, a giant signboard marks the start of the Stilwell Road, urging “Rejuvenate our lifeline. Revitalise our relationship. Reach out beyond the borders”.
A huge map traces the road’s 1,736-km journey through the jungles, over the mountains and across the rivers of Myanmar into western China and ultimately the city of Kunming.
This was once the southern Silk Route, bringing jade, silk, amber, spices, tea and Buddhism across ancient Asia. Today, that route is dead. Trade between India and China makes a laborious 6,000 km trip through the Straits of Malacca.
Officials say Indian goods using the Stilwell Road could reach Kunming in two days, and by branching off south through Myanmar, make it to Bangkok in four and Singapore in six.
Trade between the world’s two most populous countries is rising sharply, reaching over $13 billion last year from less than $3 billion in 2000. But it still represents less than one per cent of China’s total trade. The potential is huge.
But the Stilwell Road could have even more dramatic implications for India’s restive northeastern states.
The British did little to develop the northeast. Partition of the subcontinent at the end of colonial rule helped cement its isolation, surrounded by neighbours China, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and Burma (now Myanmar).
In 1950, Assam, northeast India’s largest state, was more than four per cent richer than the rest of India. Isolated and often ignored, by 1999 it was more than 45 per cent poorer, with the gap steadily widening, according to a United Nations report.
Geographically and ethnically closer to Southeast Asia than “mainland” India, the northeast is home to dozens of separatist rebel groups. Experts agree private sector development and trade has to play a central role in weaning young men away from guns.
“If you can’t earn a livelihood, the cheap thing to do is to pick up a gun,” said George Verghese, an author and another academic at the Centre for Policy Research. “People have now recognised that peace and development go hand-in-hand.”
Tea and oil prop up the northeast’s economy, but there is little or no manufacturing. Raw materials, brought from distant Kolkata, are expensive, and the market — less than four per cent of India’s one billion people — too small to care about.
Optimists hope that opening up those long dormant borders would change that equation, and make the northeast a vital staging post for India’s new engagement with Southeast Asia. But economics professor Bijoykumar Singh says it will not help if the region is merely a transit stop. “What we need is for some of the exports India will be sending to be produced here.”
Work has already begun on repairing the road.
Eyeing the vast South Asian market, and trying to attract investment to its southwest, China is leading the way — turning its 679-km stretch of the old Burma Road from Kunming to Myanmar into a six-lane highway and helping rebuild the road in Myanmar itself.
