A 5-day trip to India by Senior General Than Shwe, the head of the military junta that has ruled neighbouring Myanmar for decades, was expected to pass off smoothly. It did, as neither the Indian government nor the country's activist community rose to the occasion to apply any pressure on the draconian junta.
The itinerary of the General's second visit to India included access to the highest portals of power and business centres. Although incredulously dubbed as a "religious visit" by a devout Buddhist, Than Shwe came with a delegation of government officials and met the entire top brass of the Indian leadership. It was a de facto state visit that notched up workmanlike deals and accords on trade, investment and border security.
While the Indian government's 15-year-long logic of not upsetting Myanmar's entrenched authoritarian regime by advocating for democracy and civil liberties is strategically and morally questionable, an even more surprising silence has emanated from India's civil society.
Than Shwe visited major tourist and business centres across India where there is no dearth of activists, social workers and crusaders for justice. Yet, they did not think it worth their time and energy to display significant dissent.
The streets were largely left to Myanmarese exiles in India (unofficially around 100,000 strong) to voice their disgust at the honour and legitimacy being accorded to a man they consider a war criminal.
Myanmarese refugee organisations in India clearly have the greatest stake in their homeland's destiny, and they did turn out in sizeable numbers with banners and placards demanding that Than Shwe conduct free elections and release thousands of political prisoners. But glaringly absent from these mini-demonstrations were India's civil society progressives.
The Thailand-based Irrawaddy magazine mentioned as a footnote that a handful of Indian intellectuals, film makers, writers and movie stars had written a letter to the Manmohan Singh government denouncing the cosy relations between New Delhi and the blood-stained junta ensconced in Naypyidaw.
Some 'progressive' elements from India's marginal political parties, such as Jaya Jaitley of the Samata Party and the youth wing of the Communist Party of India, were observed marching, delivering speeches and burning effigies. However, such interventions belied the concept of 'civil society' participation, which is supposed to be non-electoral and unrelated to the agendas of political parties.
It is evident now that pro-democracy forces within the Indian civil society are negligible in number and declining in quality. When Than Shwe's deputy, General Maung Aye, came calling to India with an official entourage in April 2008, expatriate Myanmarese media outlets reported a gathering of over 1,000 Myanmarese exiles, Tibetan refugees and Indian civil society activists to mark their disapproval of the atrocities and repression being perpetrated by the junta.
But not even a few hundred Indian activists with some public clout and influence on opinion- making were around this time when Myanmar's head of state arrived.
The deficiencies and inconsistencies of the Indian civil society with regard to mobilising concern on issues of international social justice have been exposed in recent years in the Tibet theatre as well. When the Olympic torch relay in the run up to the Beijing summer games was underway in 2008, India proved to be one of the safest transit points. There was no untoward incident or even peaceful expression of mass outrage when the flame was carried by India's cognoscenti and selected sporting legends through sanitised New Delhi.
This passiveness stood in sharp contrast to the robust protests and symbolic shaming actions of civil society groups in a number of international cities, distressed by the Chinese government's crackdown in March 2008 on Tibet. The spirit of popular resistance to Chinese rule in Tibet, which were witnessed in the USA, Turkey, Japan, the UK, France, South Korea, Australia et al, were contrasted by sleepy anti-climaxes in India, West Asia, Africa and Latin America.
An interesting North-South divide has emerged in civil society approaches to murderous regimes in the decolonised world. While civil society activism in rich countries is global as well as self-critical in its range of interests, social movements in poorer, formerly colonised countries tend to be ambivalent about indignities meted out by states of fellow developing countries.
India's raucous civil society- a self-proclaimed defender of justice that estimates itself to be an avant garde force standing up against impunity and misrule- barely raised a whimper in the final stages of Sri Lanka's war in 2009. Except a few prominent figures like the novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy, who has critiqued Chinese oppression in Tibet, Sri Lankan state terrorism, as well as the US 'war on terrorism' in equal measure, most Indian social activists kept deafeningly quiet about the gory endgame of the war in Sri Lanka and the Indian government's acquiescence to it.
It would be unfair to label Indian civil society an accomplice of the Indian state, because the former does intercede with gumption against domestic state policies that militate against justice and equality. Even in foreign affairs, in recent times, Indian civil society entities have staged impressive protests and agitations drawing in crowds in excess of 20,000 against the US war on Iraq and Israel's attacks on Lebanon and Gaza.
But their no-show on Myanmar or Tibet reveals disturbing double standards that condemn Western iniquities but condone or ignore human-made disasters in Asia owing to ideological limitations of seeing villains only if they are white or capitalist.
Opposing state and corporate misdeeds stemming from the West and from within India, but remaining disinterested or misinformed about tyranny elsewhere in Asia and beyond, reproduces the toxic conditions in which Than Shwes of the world thrive.
(The author is Associate Professor of World Politics at the OP Jindal Global University in Sonepat, Haryana)
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