Author: cprindia

A new draft Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification, 2018 has been put out for public comments by the Ministry. The last date for sending comments is 17 June 2018. The Ministry states that the draft is based on the CRZ review conducted by the Shailesh Nayak Committee in 2014. The recommendations and full report of the Shailesh Nayak Committee can be accessed here. The CPR-Namati Environmental Justice Program has prepared a detailed comparative analysis between the CRZ Notification 2011, recommendations of the Shailesh Nayak Committee and the Draft CRZ Notification, 2018 and its implications. This can be accessed here.

CPR-Namati Environmental Justice Program sent its comments to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change on the Draft CRZ Notification, 2018, which can be accessed here.

Find below links to all ten blogs under CPR’s blog series on CRZ:

• Coastal commons for private tourism and entertainment?
• Is it the end of participatory coastal planning?
• States ask Review Committee to loosen up the Coastal Regulation
• Crucial aspects of proposed Marine Coastal Regulatory Zone Notification revealed
• In conversation with Dr Shailesh Nayak – the man who led the review of coastal regulation
• The proposed Marine Coastal Regulation Zone (MCRZ) Notification
• A tale of two reviews: How two governments amended a coastal land use law
• The Supreme Court’s guiding principles for coastal regulation
• Coastal Regulation Zone Disputes before the National Green Tribunal
• CRZ drives a wedge between communities in Mumbai

A new draft forest policy, 2018 has been put out for public comments by the Ministry. The last date for sending comments is 14 April 2018. In an op-ed on the draft policy published on DNA India, the authors mentioned an earlier draft prepared by IIFM. The draft was uploaded on the Ministry’s website and then removed following a clarification by the Ministry. Since the authors have received the 2016 document on email for comments, they have been uploaded here and here.

Manju Menon, Shibani Ghosh and Kanchi Kohli sent their comments to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change on the Draft National Forest Policy 2018, which can be accessed here.

At the 10^th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGs) CPR brings together its past work and analyses on the subject.

The Accountability Initiative (AI) at CPR, in particular, has produced a series of reports and articles on the Scheme, detailed below:

• In its 2015 Budget Brief, AI tracked the allocation of funds and expenditure under MNREGS through analysing government data.
• AI studied the implementation of social audits of the MNREGS scheme by the government in Andhra Pradesh (AP), and the impact of these audits on citizens and state in these papers: Spectators or Participants and Transparency and Accountability in NREGA.
• AI’s study of the implementation of social audits in AP was featured in these articles in Livemint: MNREGS social audit lessons from AP and MNREGS: getting implementation right.
• Yamini Aiyar of AI has written analytical pieces on MNREGS, including how MNREGS faces critical questions in Livemint, and Re-framing the MNREGA debate in The Hindu.​

In 2013, Shylashri Shankar at CPR published a book titled Batting Corruption: Has NREGA Reached India’s Rural Poor? She has also written a piece on Killing MNREGA slowly in The Indian Express.

The Groundwater (Sustainable Management) Bill, 2017 drafted by the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation provides a new template that states can use to adopt legislation capable of addressing the fast-increasing groundwater crisis faced by many states. This Bill follows on an earlier model bill drafted in 1970 and updated several times until 2005 on which the dozen of existing groundwater acts are based. This 1970 template is unsuited to the present needs of a country where groundwater is now the primary source of drinking water and irrigation. In particular, it fails to provide for local-level regulation of what is often known as the most local source of water and fails to provide for conservation measures at aquifer level. The 2017 Bill integrates legal developments having taking place since the 1970s, such as the decentralization reforms kick-started in the 1990s, the recognition of water as a fundamental right and its recognition as a public trust. In doing so, it provides new bases for regulating groundwater as a public resource and to take measures at aquifer level, something that is crucial to address ongoing overexploitation and falling water tables.

Access the article here.

CPR faculty share a rounded analysis of Modi’s visit to China in the media, presented below.

• Shyam Saran shares his expertise on China, commenting on the ‘border issue’ on Headlines Today with Karan Thapar, and on the ‘trust deficit’ between the two countries on NDTV.
• Brahma Chellaney writes in Project Syndicate that Modi’s tour to China highlights that ‘the issues that divide the demographic titans remain formidable’.
• Srinath Raghavan, on the other hand, writes for NDTV that the visit laid a ‘solid foundation on which the two sides can now build’.

Narendra Modi’s visit to China is under close scrutiny. CPR faculty provide insightful analysis on different aspects:

• Srinath Raghavan in the Economic and Political Weekly deconstructs Modi’s opportunity in China—on how the prime minister has the political capital to push for a settlement of the border dispute, thus strengthening bilateral ties and expanding India’s political space on multilateral stages.
• Shyam Saran in this piece in The Wire explores the “out of the box” solution to the long-standing border dispute between India and China.
• In The New Indian Express, Bharat Karnad writes that Modi’s visit to China will be marred by bad geostrategics and even worse policy.
• Embedding Indo-Chinese relations historically Sanjaya Baru in The Hindu talks about how relations between the two countries will be shaped by whether China wishes to be a global hegemon or “truly believes in the creation of a multipolar world”

This research report is the product of an effort to develop an assessment framework or matrix to measure sanitation outcomes in India. It traces the international policy instruments on Open Defecation (Free) [OD (F)], the genealogy of the term, and then compares India’s policy environment with the other top contributors to global open defecation in 2012 (Indonesia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Pakistan). It outlines the challenges in terms of defining OD(F) and using existing survey instruments available to India to develop such a framework.

The report presents a proposal for a matrix to measure sanitation outcomes in India covering nine sanitation outcomes, making a case for the full sanitation chain, especially open discharge free (ODF2) environs. Finally, it evaluates the emerging monitoring framework of Goal six of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and suggests the consideration of this framework as part of the on-going efforts globally to evolve a monitoring framework for sanitation.

It was released at the Networking Event at the UN-Habitat III: Think Small, Go Big.

The nine sanitation outcomes with indicators for rural and urban settlements, that measure critical results indicative of processes in place for successful and sustainable sanitation service delivery in urban and rural areas, include:

• Defecation is not visible;
• Solid waste is safely managed;
• Residents have access to a toilet in residential and/or public spaces;
• Residents and floating population are using toilets in residential and/or public places;
• Human faecal and liquid waste is safely treated;
• Solid waste and faecal waste is safely handled;;
• Human settlements (cities and villages) are not water-logged;
• Hygienic behaviour is adopted;
• Women access safe menstrual hygiene management.

The matrix is flexible in that, it allows for changes in the choice and measurement of indicators for comparison within states and across the country. It also allows researchers to look at habitations of different sizes, densities and geographical characteristics and provide comparisons beyond just governance boundaries (of urban and rural).

The matrix also combines multiple sources of data and methodologies beyond the traditional questionnaire survey methodology; this allows for observation of characteristics of the settlement to be factored into the determination of outcomes.

Further, it goes beyond the presence of infrastructure and covers issues of equity of access, access of sanitation to all members of the household within and outside the premises of the house, and issues of health (disease burden as a result of poor sanitation), hygiene, and menstrual hygiene management

More details of the conference can be accessed from here.

The full research report can be accessed here.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement pose new conceptual challenges for energy decision makers by compelling them to consider the implications of their choices for development and climate mitigation objectives. However, they have relatively few tools to pragmatically consider these implications.

This paper reviews how multi-criteria decision approaches (MCDA) are used by decision makers globally to consider multiple social and environmental objectives. Based on a collation of 167 studies, the authors find that multi-criteria approaches can be used by policy makers to:

• distil a finite set of objectives from those of a large number of actors. This process is political, and objectives are often aligned with vested interests or institutional incentives;
• build qualitative and quantitative evidence to capture the implications of energy choices across economic, environmental, social and political metrics; and
• identify and manage synergies and trade-offs between energy, social and environmental objectives, and in turn, make explicit the political implications of choices for different actors.

As the figure above shows, most of the applications of MCDA have been used in academic settings and in the Global North. As pressures to implement international pledges such as the SDGs and Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement grow, decision makers may increasingly seek productive ways to engage these political contexts, and make them tractable. The paper argues for a mainstreaming of such a multi-criteria and deliberative approaches for energy policy decisions in developing countries where trade-offs between energy, development and climate mitigation are more contentious while recognizing the data, capacity and transparency requirements of the process.

The complete open-access paper in Energy Research and Social Science can be found here.

By Mukta Naik

On the cusp of its demographic dividend,¹ India seeks to boost economic growth by transitioning large numbers of its working age population out of low productivity agricultural work, which currently absorbs 44% of the country’s workforce.² While farm productivity is vital, urbanization remains a key opportunity for large-scale employment transitions to the relatively productive non-farm sector. Moreover, cities have the potential to be ‘engines of economic growth’ for national economies, powered by an increase in productivity and innovation that emerges from the clustering of firms and labour, and tacit information spillovers between them.³

Key Urban Challenges

To leverage the urban opportunity, India needs to address three significant challenges: how to move people, how to broaden the scope of urbanization, and how to improve the quality of urbanization.

Migration mitigates poverty, yet barriers to long-term migration persist. Internal migrants constitute about 28.3% of India’s workforce. Another estimated 40-100 million short-term migrants do not permanently move their residence, but power critical sectors of the industry including agriculture, manufacturing and construction.⁴ Moreover, short-term migration is a key avenue for rural households to diversify their income and access employment in more urbanized and developed regions; in this, migration is a counterbalance to regional imbalances in the country. Worryingly, the urban wage premium exists only for well-educated migrants. For less educated rural migrants in the city, the wage premium kicks in only when they find regular employment; until then they remain casual workers likely to move through rural and urban locations without putting down roots.⁵

Policy documents have acknowledged the Constitutional guarantee for free movement within India and recognized that the unfettered movement of human capital to where it is required is fundamental to India’s economic development.⁶ Yet, labour mobility remains a neglected area of public policy. Migrants are often unable to access social protection, including access to subsidized food and housing. They face political exclusion because there is no system that enables the participation of absentee migrant voters in elections. Moreover, inter-state migrants from socially backward categories stand to lose access to affirmative action provisions because SC/ST lists are prepared by states. State-level domicile provisions continue to keep migrants out of higher education and formal employment. Moving people, therefore, requires attention to economy, society and institutional design.

India’s urbanization is dispersed, but metros get most of the attention. Urban policy in India since the mid-2000s has focused on transforming metropolitan areas – large urban spaces that sprawl across districts and incorporate multiple municipal (and rural) entities – into economic powerhouses. This has reflected in the Government of India’s urban schemes over time. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) exhibited a clear metropolitan bias.⁷ Recent schemes such as the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) and the Smart Cities Mission have also favoured metros and million-plus cities.

Policymakers have barely paid attention to the dispersed spatial nature of India’s urbanization. It is driven not by the large-scale migration of villagers to the metropolis, as is popularly imagined, but by the natural growth of large city populations, and the in situ transition of large and dense villages into census towns through demographic and economic changes.⁸ This trend, which is likely to continue,⁹ indicates that India’s urban vision need not be limited to the larger cities. In fact, the growth of small towns beyond the economics of large agglomerations is a key emerging trend in India that needs to be understood and valorized.¹⁰ Given the scale, diversity and spatial spread of urbanization processes in India, it might be entirely feasible to create hundreds of economic powerhouses in multiple locations that can trigger economic mobility for millions and reduce regional inequalities.

Cities are messy and exclusionary, and urbanization processes are top-down. Indian urbanization is caught in a paradoxical situation where, despite the attempts to address infrastructure and service gaps in larger cities, they remain increasingly unliveable as well as exclusionary.¹¹ For residents, the economic opportunity represented by the city is countered by disincentives like higher costs of food and housing, bad air quality, inefficient transport and inadequate basic services. In urban policy, however, the messiness is perennially attributed to in-migration, slums and poverty; its perceived antidote is a planning regime that seeks to indiscriminately transpose Chandigarh-like order – replete with grids and single land-use zooming – on cities and even transitional rural spaces. This imagination does not recognize the diversity of spaces that make up urban India, nor does it acknowledge the need for bottom-up efforts to build housing, provide services and organize transport.

Driven from the top, urban development schemes have shaped cities in particular ways; there has been no serious effort to decentralize power to urban local bodies – as mandated by the 74th Constitutional Amendment – or equip cities with adequate numbers of urban managers and technocrats. Cities are struggling with providing basic services and raising revenue. Instead of being handled by the directly elected government that runs the municipal corporation, critical planning functions related to land use and zoning; infrastructure and design interventions that can respond to local needs for public space, improved transport and safe streets; and economic functions related to industry and employment are carried out by state government-run institutions (development authorities, industrial development corporations and transport corporations). This makes it hard for governments to respond to localized problems, or tap into community initiatives.

Policy Recommendations 

India needs an integrated approach to urban policy, which recognizes the diversity of urban spaces in India, focuses on strengthening city governance systems, and is migrant-friendly.

Multiply urban growth engines. That India is moving towards a spatially dispersed urban system is good news, as it offers an opportunity to intervene in places that are yet to replicate the mistakes of large cities. We need to replace the imagination of transforming Mumbai into Shanghai – an onerous task – with a mission to transform hundreds of small cities across India, say in the size range of 100,000-600,000 people, into economic powerhouses. We must draw confidence from the successes of such cities the world over, which have been hotbeds of innovation and transformation.

The government must reorient central and state government schemes to include small cities, as a means of signalling their inclusion into India’s urban growth narrative. Not only will funding go much further in a small city, if designed in a non-prescriptive way schemes could allow for solutions to emerge from the ground up, thereby encouraging entrepreneurial energies and public institutions to collaborate. Contrary to expectations, these abound in small cities across India. In Odisha, for example, a state government scheme to grant titles to slum dwellers is leveraging the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) to set off a mini construction boom in small towns. In Kishangarh, Rajasthan – a city of 150,000 people – local business elite have leveraged infrastructur (such as a new airport, a private logistics park and a dedicated rail freight corridor) to position the city as a global centre for processing domestic and imported marble and granite, generating work for both migrants and locals.

A focus on small cities also helps villagers, given half of India’s rural-urban migration is to smaller cities. Placed at the mobility cusp, investments in small cities can go much further than basic infrastructure to create quality jobs and develop skills, both for rural and urban workers; they can also build infrastructure that boosts quality of life (transport systems, street lighting and public spaces).¹² With over half of India’s industries located in what is currently classified as rural,¹³ policies related to industrial development, skill development and labour must also focus on transitional ‘rurban’ spaces. This would call for an integrated response to urban and rural development that recognizes spatial diversity and responds to the wide variety of settlements across the country.

Un-think rigid planning regimes, empower local governments. The rigid master plans of our cities – and not all of them have plans – have been ineffective in strategically coordinating service provision and market forces to sustain economic growth. The governance and management of metropolitan areas might require a sui generis approach,¹⁴ given the complexities of their problems and the multiplicity of governance actors and institutions. But here too, solutions that are locally incubated must be emulated. For instance, the secret to Kolkata’s reliable, affordable and well-connected auto rickshaw system, is localized legislation to circumvent the vagaries of central laws and the involvement of representatives of rickshaw unions in key decisions like route planning.¹⁵ Certainly, a serious attempt to devolve power to urban local bodies and activate district planning committees is a necessary prerequisite to planned urbanization.

Beyond the logics of planning, a plethora of bottom-up initiatives must find representation in urban reform strategies, with the key objective of making cities efficient and pleasant places to live, work and socialize. Some of these initiatives deliver lasting solutions, such as the public library in Panaji, Goa, that is open seven days a week to all residents to read, study and interact, or South Canara’s privately operated bus system that transports thousands every day within and between the towns and villages of the coastal region. In other cases, they narrate a story of continuing struggle. In resettlement colonies like Bhalswa in Delhi, residents have been instrumental in bringing in services and amenities through protests, negotiations and legal representations with elected officials and bureaucrats over 15 years. Their resilience and persistence eventually resulted in partially mitigating the deep failures of the resettlement policy.

Therefore, instead of viewing the presence of informal settlements purely as failures of planning, Indian cities must leverage the vast amounts of investments residents have already made through auto-construction by extending basic services to informal settlements. Further, cities must amend statutory planning documents to include a variety of tenure typologies that promote mixed-use, mixed-income neighbourhoods and include rental housing. Similarly, in order to find context-specific solutions to house the homeless, ensure spaces of livelihood for street vendors, treat faecal sludge from septic tanks, and transport women safely to places of work, cities need to un-think the rigid plan and partner with communities, civil society and entrepreneurs to find workable models.

Enable labour mobility and improve governance of migration. Finally, a focus on the portability of social protection could be key to knocking down barriers for migration, enabling rural workers to reduce risks as they find regular employment and social acceptance in the city. Immediately, the government has the opportunity to amend legislations so as to facilitate the registration of migrant construction workers in schemes under the Building and Other Construction Workers Act. This programme has an unspent pool of nearly INR 200 billion for social benefits of this highly mobile and vulnerable group.¹⁶ Similarly, delinking individuals from household ration cards and a digital recordkeeping system would enable migrants to access Public Distribution System benefits wherever they might be. Experiments with smart card systems are already underway, with the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), but need strengthening and improvement. Overall, ramping up universalized social protection in education and health, including critical interventions like Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), is likely to incentivize long-term migration to cities over time.¹⁷

Key Takeaways

With the thrust of urban change occurring in small towns and densifying villages, the incoming government must seize the opportunity of incubating a large number of economic powerhouses in dispersed locations. A reorienting of investments towards small cities, a push towards decentralization, and keen attention to bottom-up context-specific solutions will provide pathways out of rigid planning and governance models that have not delivered. As cities become better places to live and work, dismantling barriers to migration will become imperative for the equitable distribution of economic opportunities and benefits.

Other pieces as part of CPR’s policy document, ‘Policy Challenges – 2019-2024’ can be accessed below:

• The Future is Federal: Why Indian Foreign Policy Needs to Leverage its Border States by Nimmi Kurian
• Rethinking India’s Approach to International and Domestic Climate Policy by Navroz K Dubash and Lavanya Rajamani
• India’s Foreign Policy in an Uncertain World by Shyam Saran
• Need for a Comprehensive National Security Strategy by Shyam Saran
• A Clarion Call for Just Jobs: Addressing the Nation’s Employment Crisis by Sabina Dewan
• Time for Disruptive Foreign and National Security Policies by Bharat Karnad

 ¹ See pages 30-34 in the Economic Survey 2016-17 (New Delhi: Economic Division, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India, 2017).
 ² Modelled International Labour Organization estimate for 2018,  https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sl.agr.empl.zs.
 ³ G. Duranton, ‘Cities: Engines of Growth and Prosperity for Developing Countries?’, Working paper no. 12 (Washington D.C.: Commission on Growth and Development, 2008); World Bank, ed., ‘Urban Policy and Economic Development: An Agenda for the 1990s (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1991).
 ⁴ P. Deshingkar and S. Akter, Migration and Human Development in India (2009); R. Srivastava, ‘Labour Migration in India: Recent Trends, Patterns and Policy Issues’, Indian Journal of Labour Economics 54(3) (2011): 411-440.
 ⁵ P. Mukhopadhyay and M. Naik, ‘Moving from Principle to Practice’, in People on the Move: Advancing the Discourse on Migration & Jobs (JustJobs Network, 2018).
 ⁶ MoHUA, ‘Report of the Working Group on Migration’ (New Delhi: Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, 2017).
 ⁷ S. Khan, The Other JNNURM : What Does It Mean for Small Towns in India?, Working Paper No. 4 (CPR: 2014).
 ⁸ Pradhan 2013
 ⁹ Roy and Pradhan predict that in Census 2021, the share of India’s urban population will continue to grow beyond municipal limits in census towns, both under the influence of metros and also in more localized forms away from metros.
¹⁰ E. Denis and M.H. Zerah, Subaltern Urbanisation in India: An introduction to the Dynamics of Ordinary Towns (New Delhi: Springer, 2017).
¹¹ Indian cities rank poorly on the Mercer Quality of Living Survey 2019. See https://www.mercer.com/newsroom/2019-quality-of-living-survey.html; A. Kundu, and L. Ray Saraswati, ‘Migration and Exclusionary Urbanisation in India’, Economic and Political Weekly 47(26 & 27) (2017): 219-227.
¹² M. Naik and G. Randolph, ‘Migration Junctions in India and Indonesia: Re-imagining Places, Re-orienting Policy, Policy brief (JustJobs Network and Centre for Policy Research, 2018).
¹³ E. Ghani, A.G. Goswami and W.R. Kerr, ‘Is India’s Manufacturing Sector Moving Away from Cities?’ (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012).
¹⁴ See Partha Mukhopadhyay and Mukta Naik’s op-ed titled ‘For equitable growth, India must unthink the urban’, Hindustan Times, 17 December 2018, https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/for-equitable-growth-india-must-….
¹⁵ Arora et al., ‘Integrating Intermediate Public Transport Within Transport Regulation in a Megacity: A Kolkata Case Study’ (New Delhi: Centre for Policy Research, 2016).
¹⁶ S.N. Roy, Manish and M. Naik, ‘Migrants in Construction Work: Evaluating their Welfare Framework’ (2017).
¹⁷ Mukhopadhyay and Naik, ‘Moving from Principle to Practice’.

Three months into the Constitutionally questionable takeover of the Myanmar government by its military, the Tatmadaw, on February 1, aborting the results of the November 2020 general elections in favor of the National League of Democracy led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on what was essentially an election dispute, the situation in Myanmar continues to be extremely polarized, intensely confrontational and highly volatile. Like Afghanistan after the Soviet intervention, and Syria after the Arab Spring, Myanmar may never be the same again. But whether it descends into chaos and turmoil like them will depend a great deal on the ability of all sides internally to make compromises, international restraint and support, and a decisive ASEAN.

The signs are not good. The ruthless crackdown by the Tatmadaw aimed at silencing any opposition to the takeover resulting in close to 750 deaths and more than 3000 detained and arrested including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and a slew of draconian laws and amendments suppressing fundamental rights and allowing the state authorities unrestrained powers of arrest, detention, violations of privacy and data, and control over communications, has generated widespread anger against the regime and virtually wiped out any tolerance for a military role in government any more. If successful, the Tatmadaw’s actions can only push Myanmar back to its isolation since the 1960s, this time with an internet wall in addition, undoing all that it has achieved since former military strong man Sr. Gen. than Shwe’s 7-stage road map to democracy. This will not be sustainable.

Two features distinguish the protests this time from 1988. First, a new generation has come of age since the USDP government of U Thein Sein that has tasted political, media and social media freedoms, the internet, and contacts with the outside world after 50 years of closed military rule, that it is determined not to sacrifice. Although street protests have ebbed somewhat, its embers are very much alive, and there are signs that public opposition to military rule especially in the Bamar heartland is mutating and moving to the countryside and borderlands, and could turn to armed struggle with help from sympathetic Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs).

Second, when the Tatmadaw crushed the student-led agitation in the 1990s, it was able to reach out to the ethnic insurgencies ringing the Bamar heartland and sign individual peace agreements with most of them some with the help of the Chinese. This time, although Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing has signaled a continuity of the peace process among other things in his address to the Myanmar people on February 8, and has invited ethnic political parties and armed organizations to support its new State Administrative Council, most have shown solidarity with the opposition and kept a distance. Indeed, some powerful EAOs like the Kachin and Karen armed organizations, have renewed hostilities including attacks on military bases. The Tatmadaw have in turn launched air attacks including jets and helicopter gunships at EAO positions, leading to a movement of refugees in Karen state seeking shelter in Thailand being turned back. As many as 250,000 are reported to be internally displaced, and UN organizations are anticipating a food  and humanitarian crisis.

Side by side, the pro-democracy anti-Tatmadaw opposition is also organizing itself politically. Newly elected legislators who have formed a Committee Representing the Myanmar Parliament (the CRPH), have adopted a Charter calling for a ‘federal democratic union’ and even a federal army aimed at appealing to Myanmar’s ethnic constituencies. On April 16, they announced the formation of a virtual National Unity Government (NUG) as the legitimately elected government of Myanmar and are seeking international recognition for it. Progress towards a federal union reconciling ethno-centric Bamar mindsets and ethnic aspirations of equality and sharing of power and resources will however require much more than anti-Tatmadaw sentiments.

Internationally, the US and the West in general have condemned the ‘coup’ and imposed targeted sanctions against the Tatmadaw although having shunned Myanmar since the 1990s, they have very little leverage over the Generals. Most Asian capitals that have developed equities with the military government over the last 60 years of their rule which they are reluctant to jettison without a viable alternative in sight, have expressed varying levels of concern but stopped short of tough condemnations.

China, which had cultivated good relations with the NLD and faced veiled criticism from Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing himself over its long suspected support for EAOs under its influence, has been caught off balance in Myanmar once again, and is groping for a more decisive response. It is seen as the Tatmadaw’s primary supporter by the protestors, but it is probably Russia’s steady support and example of the Thai military next door that may have emboldened Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing to take such precipitate action. Russia may well have also played its Indo-Pacific card vis-à-vis the Quad through Myanmar. India has made veiled official statements against the Tatmadaw’s actions without specifically naming it, but some of its actions have conveyed conflicting messages.

China and Russia have shielded the Myanmar military regime from stronger statements or action in the UN Security Council on the grounds that such action would be counter-productive, but are watching US actions on the ground. Any pro-active support by it to the opposition such as the Responsibility to Protect doctrine invoked by many of the protestors in its neighborhood would invite a reaction and could extend China-Quad competition in the Indo-Pacific into the Bay of Bengal and involve Russia on China’s side as well.

ASEAN has been active but unable to engage either the Tatmadaw or the opposition in a meaningful dialogue so far. By and large, the international community has been content to let ASEAN take the lead in finding a resolution to the crisis on the principle of ASEAN centrality rather than risk burning their fingers themselves. So far, this has kept the Myanmar crisis from becoming a proxy in a new Cold War with the US on one side, and China and Russia on the other. The rest of Asia has a vested interest in keeping it this way. That is one reason why the ASEAN initiative deserves all the support it can get.

All eyes are now on the special ASEAN Summit at Jakarta on April 24. ASEAN unity, consensus and centrality will be tested. So far, the prospects do not look bright. ASEAN can provide the most dignified fig leaf for the military to walk back the takeover, but the Tatmadaw has shown no willingness to compromise. Meanwhile, the NUG has challenged Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing’s presence in Jakarta and demanded that it be invited.

How ASEAN navigates these irreconciliable positions will determine if the Myanmar crisis can be contained. If it succeeds in even bringing the Tatmadaw and NUG together, commence a dialogue, and chart out a new road map for a return to democracy, it will be a triumph for ASEAN.

But if it tends towards solutions tolerating the regime as it will be prone to out of its own concerns over instability and ‘too much democracy’, it will lose credibility in Myanmar and beyond. It may then push Myanmar’s immediate neighbors, India, China, Thailand and Bangladesh, who will face the most immediate brunt of a likely spiraling of conflict and instability next door, to find ways to deal with the situation amidst intensifying US-China-Russia suspicions and contest spilling over into Myanmar. This has to be avoided. As ASEAN meets for its Summit, it may consider enlarging its initiative to include Myanmar’s regional neighbors and Asian powers like Japan to find an Asian solution to the crisis.