Can India Push Burma on the Road to Liberty?

Last month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh became the first Indian head of state in 25 years to make a visit to Myanmar (formerly Burma), the eastern neighbor that has for 50 years been ruled by a repressive military junta. The visit was both a welcome gesture of reconnection and a reminder of a wasted half-century in relations between two newly independent states (Burma was decolonized in 1948, a year after India) that share a border of more 1,500 kilometers (900 miles).

The meeting of top representatives of the world's largest democracy and an authoritarian but liberalizing regime was also a reminder of how the ideology of the nation-state -- appearing in this region in response to colonization, straining against local traditions of feudalism, despotism and dynastic rule to fashion a secure transition to democracy, and eventually spawning a fresh jostle for power and influence in an often arbitrarily broken-up subcontinent -- has served to disrupt age-old civilizational links in South Asia, probably for good. Realists would also say that the rapprochement was geopolitically inevitable, given Burma's vast reserves of natural resources (including natural gas) and China's growing influence over its economy, a reward for a no-questions-asked engagement with the junta. A team of prominent Indian businessmen accompanied Singh on his visit, seeking new markets in areas such as telecommunications and manufacturing.