Into Burma on tonga, rocking with Kareena
Thanks to ‘open’ border, Indians shop in Myanmar for cheap consumer goods, liqueurs
The Indian Express
Wed Jun 06
Sankarshan Thakur
Tamu (Myanmar), June 5: WE rode into one of the world’s most obstinate military dictatorships with ten-rupee tickets on a ramshackle tonga. The border guard who signed our permits on the Moreh Frontier called himself Ping Pong Taa and his bearing was only a little more military than his name. He wore his outsize sergeant’s cap fashionably askew, in the manner of an MTV veejay, and he was playing a Kareena Kapoor song on his Chinese mini-stereo—‘aa rang de dupatta mera...haan rang de dupatta mera...’’ Not quite the officially designated bilateral theme, but you couldn’t blame Ping Ping Taa for not trying: he had the volume turned so high all of India and Myanmar could hear.
‘‘Latest,’’ he proudly smiled, revealing what could only have been pewter dentures between other rotting teeth, ‘‘Lovely, no?’’
It was raining and the horse neighed and bucked angrily down the slippery strip from no man’s land into Tamu. Every time the animal skittered off the road and dug its hooves indignantly, its Myanmarese owner turned and jested in broken Hindi. ‘‘India hai naa, India,’ he said, ‘‘Hum Burma kaa, hamara ghoda India ka, udhar se aataa hai, open border se, iska to permit bhi nahin maang hai.’’ (It’s India. I am Burmese, my horse is Indian, it comes from the other side, across the open border, he doesn’t even require a permit).
The horse was grossly whipped and underfed, like all horses yoked to carts everywhere else, but if it had a voice, it would perhaps also have complained about the unbearable burden of slaving in an alien land. It jerked and pulled but half an hour or so later it deposited us quite safely in Tamu town, the first Myanmarese post beyond the ‘‘open’’ border.
The famed bamboo curtain is more than just a little ajar here and the view out may offer better perspectives on what’s happening across the border than you may find in India itself. Tamu is nothing but a hardcore trading depot, even more aggressive in purpose now that the WTO is in place. The town’s spine is two long columns of squat shops spilling over with all manner of goods, mostly Chinese and cheap: garments, bolts of silk, electronics, toys, cosmetics, platoons of plastic durables, crockery, cutlery, pornography. Ask for it and the Tamu retailer will produce it for you.
The train of goods from Tamu in Noreh and Manipur is long and overloaded. Tongas, such as the one we took, and old ford station wagons form an unbroken chain of Indians emptying their cash in Tamu for goods. Manipur is meant to be a strictly dry state but barely a hour off its limits you will find the most versatile liquor stalls and the most well-stocked: the best Scotch in a dozen or more brands, the most delectable wines, liquers so rare often neither seller no buyer may know how esoteric or prized they may be.
And all of it travels rather smoothly and regularly to ‘‘dry’’ Manipur; it is possible in Imphal to blend the most exotic cocktails and it doesn’t always have to be done under the table; you just pay a little premium, carting costs from Tamu or Moreh. But stuff more lethal than just excess alcohol is exported out of here into India. In the alleys and bylanes of Tamu bustle the arms bazaars that feed insurgency in the north east.
Chinese and Czech automatic weapons, rocket launchers, grenades, mines, remote explosive devices.
‘‘It is an open market on the other side,’’ an Assam Rifles major had told us on the Indian side of the border post at Moreh, ‘‘We know it but we can do little about it. It is an understatement to call the border porous, it leaks more than it plugs. We can barely keep tabs on what we call the legal trade coming in from Myanmar, there is just so much that comes in.’’
A few minutes at the international turnstiles will tell you how heavily loaded even the legal trade is against India just a one-day traffic of goods pouring in. All India seems to export is cash and ill-bred horses and songs Kareena sings: that is music to Myanmarese ears, or at least to Ping Ping Taa’s.