Stanford Professor Scott Sagan once said something everyone in Politics, Army, Police and Paramilitary forces should hang on their wall: “Things that have never happened before happen all the time.” India’s politicians, Army Commanders, Police and Customs Chiefs, Paramilitary Commanders, Judges and journalists should peep into Myanmar’s backyard to see the horrendous quantities of drugs spewing across international borders into neighboring Thailand and Laos. Can India, especially the North East, more particularly Manipur, be unaffected by the volcanic explosion of drugs? It’s a massive group of politicians and bureaucrats making imperfect and erroneous decisions with limited information, that is going to make Manipur’s drug crisis an expensive disease everywhere to everybody. In just the last two years Myanmar has inundated Thailand with drugs, resulting in the seizure of 54 million methamphetamine pills, 177kg (390 pounds) of the tranquilliser ketamine, 120kg (264 pounds) of the crystal meth known as “ice” and 12kg (26 pounds) of heroin. These operations led to the arrest of 320 suspects and the killing of 27 others.
In early January 2023, Thailand’s elite anti-narcotics Pha Muang Task Force army unit, in Chiang Rai recovered 500,000 meth pills and killed five smugglers following a firefight that lasted several minutes.
A week earlier, the force had intercepted smugglers hauling hundreds of kilograms of ketamine after crossing from Myanmar into Thailand’s Chiang Mai province. Six smugglers were killed in that clash.
The previous month, in December, 15 people were killed among a group of about 30 smugglers hauling backpacks filled with methamphetamine in Chiang Mai’s Fang district. The task force recovered a gun and a grenade along with backpacks filled with drugs.
December month also saw the force recovering 6.4 million meth pills, brought in from Myanmar by boat, in Thailand’s Chiang Saen district. The boat had dropped its huge cargo at the port on the Thai side of the Mekong River for later collection by smugglers. Seizures of drugs and shoot-outs are an everyday happening in Thailand.
The seizures just do not stop, it is raining Myanmar drugs, drugs, drugs everywhere in neighbouring Thailand. 6.5 million yaba pills and rifles seized in Mong Hsat in Myanmar’s Shan State; 1.1 million meth pills in Thailand’s northern Nan province and 3.2 million in neighbouring Bueng Kan province; 800,000 meth pills and 30kg (66 pounds) of crystal meth in Thailand’s southern Songkhla province
What makes our Opposition politicians think that drug producers and traffickers in Myanmar, have given exemption or immunity to India’s international borders in the North East? The size of the Chiang Saen seizure has made even the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) to call Myanmar “the biggest global meth-trafficking spot”. The United Nations has pegged Myanmar’s drug trade at a staggering $10 billion and that South Asian countries are the biggest markets for transit, trafficking and consumption.
Looking beyond Thailand, a whopping 143 million meth tablets were seized in Communist ruled Laos in 2021 after entering the country from the Shan State of neighbouring Myanmar. In the first month of 2022, Laos authorities seized 36 million pills and almost 600kg (1,322 pounds) of crystal meth. Myanmar drugs are not just on an eastwards only cruise, the journey Westwards is less challenging, 1,643 kilometres of international border with India, Manipur’s border alone is 398 kilometres. Since the Myanmar military’s February 2021 coup d’état, over 50,000 civilians have fled across the border from Myanmar’s Chin State and Sagaing Region into India’s northeast.
Manipur shares a 400-kilometer border with Myanmar, most of which is unfenced. The India-Myanmar frontier is an open border with a Free Movement Regime (FMR) which legally permits the tribes residing along the border to travel up to 16 kilometres across the boundary for up to three days without visa restrictions. All this makes drug-trafficking very simple and uncomplicated. Another dimension is that the Kuki-Chin-Zo tribes, a transnational ethnic group, live in the India-Bangladesh-Myanmar tri-border area, predominantly in India’s Mizoram and Manipur states, Myanmar’s Chin State and Sagaing Region, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts district of Bangladesh.
According to a spokesperson of the Coordinating Committee on Manipur Integrity, an umbrella group of several Meitei civil society organizations, that at the root of the current crisis is “narco-terrorism involving illegal Kuki-Chin immigrants from Myanmar, cross-border Kuki insurgent groups, and Myanmar-based drug cartels.”
India’s Opposition politicians, bureaucrats and journalists should understand that drug-trafficking is a transnational business model of organised crime. It is not just about seizures and arrests, there is the need to disrupt their banking, disrupt their chemical trade disrupt the facilitators of their business, their lawyers, their money launderers, their supporting journalists, corrupt bureaucrats and politicians. It is a massive battle involving innumerable players and institutions. Anybody pointing at ST status given to Meitei Tribe, or a photograph of two naked women running, are trying to pull wool over the eyes of the nation. Some may be “disturbed”, but there will be dangerous unprecedented events that will move the needle the most. Unprecedented events and their unprecedented nature, the nation will not be prepared for them.
Some time back, The Wall Street Journal, had published the outlook of a Russian Professor Igor Panarin:
“ the U.S. will break into six pieces – with Alaska reverting to Russian control….California will form the nucleus of what he calls “The Californian Republic” and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. There will be the heart of “The Texas Republic”, a cluster of States that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington D.C. and New York will be part of an “Atlantic America” that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern States, called “The Central North American Republic” Hawaii will be a protectorate of Japan or China and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.”
China and Pakistan are constantly designing the one thousand cuts with which to disintegrate India. Drug trafficking is an easy way to destroy any nation – economically, industrially, culturally and socially. India and its institutions – Legislature, Executive and Judiciary should not feel threatened by a bunch of drug-traffickers or their photographs.
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