A day after US President Barack Obama snubbed India over its ‘silence on Myanmar’, highly placed sources in the Ministry of External Affairs said that India and US have different concerns.
“A country north of us (China) is taking a lot of interest in Myanmar. We have 1,600 km of border with Myanmar and most of the Northeastern States are connected to this country,” sources said.
“We have border movements, we have security concerns and it is a strategically placed country. We can’t close our eyes,” the official stressed.
Yesterday, US President Barack Obama criticised India for failing to condemn rights abuses in Myanmar, saying democracies with global aspirations could not ignore “gross violations” in other countries.
“When peaceful democratic movements are suppressed, as they have been in Burma (Myanmar), then the democracies of the world cannot remain silent,” Obama said in an address to the joint session of Parliament.
“Faced with such gross violations of human rights, it is the responsibility of the international community, especially leaders like the United States and India, to condemn it,” he said. “If I can be frank, in international fora, India has often shied away from these issues,” he added.
Meanwhile, in a Lok Sabha reply Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, M Ramachandran confirmed that militants belonging to various insurgent outfits of the North Eastern Region maintain camps in remote bordering areas of Myanmar and Bangladesh. The camps located on both sides of the border are often used for training and harbouring of insurgents, he added.
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