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How Myanmar’s ‘national races’ trumped citizenship
Dr Nick Cheesman — is a Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Change in the Australian National University’s Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. 01 MAY, 2017
‘National races’ or taingyintha is among the pre-eminent political ideas in Myanmar today. It has animated brutal conflict over who or what is ‘Rohingya’ as well as communal violence that human rights researchers and advocates have variously characterised as a crime against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Although more scholars are struggling to make sense of how and why the ‘Rohingya problem’ appears to be so intractable, little explicit attention has been paid to how the conflict over Rohingya identity specifically, and contemporary politics in Myanmar generally, is contingent on the idea of national races. How did the idea of taingyintha become politically salient? How has it grown, developed and changed?
Taingyintha is a term that, like so many other politically salient modern terms in Southeast Asia, has a history that is neither long nor glorious. It was not a politically significant term in anti-colonial politics. Although at the end of the Second World War it featured in negotiations on the draft constitution, it failed to get a special mention in the 1947 Constitution on the matter of minority rights, succeeding only in getting two modest references in the chapter on citizenship, where in the English version it is translated as ‘indigenous races’. Nor is it found in the 1947 Panglong Agreement, which is commemorated annually on Union Day and mythologised as laying the foundations for taingyintha unity. It remained on the periphery of political language over the next decade.
But on February 12, 1964, a new day dawned for taingyintha, one in which it would go from being a term of limited political salience to the paradigm for military-dominated statehood. General Ne Win, who had seized power for a second time two years earlier, now grasped the idea of taingyintha and wielded it with hitherto unprecedented enthusiasm. Lamenting the mistrust between taingyintha and the failure to achieve reconciliation some 16 years after independence, he used the Union Day address to urge over and over that the national races come together in unity and amity for the good of the nation. He closed the speech by announcing that his government would work systematically to bring economic and social equality to the national races; and, would help them in projects for support of their literature, languages and cultures. Within the same year, the government had set up an Academy for the Development of National Races. The following year, staff from universities around the country began state-directed fieldwork to document and publish authoritative studies on national races’ culture. Taingyintha hereafter obtained a hitherto unprecedented place in state lexicon, and in the state-building programme and its rituals of national unity. By the 1980sit was orthodoxy that political texts at some point refer to national races’ eternal solidarity, their historical fraternity and their intentionality in working together for a new socialist economic order.
If the 1940s marked the early emergence of taingyintha as a term of state, and the 1960s its institutionalisation, then the 1990s witnessed its renaissance, yet with at least two distinct meanings at play. In one, national races comprised the members of a single political community, united in struggle against common enemies inside and out. In the other, national races were a sub-section of that community: people living far away who had failed to progress due to civil war and ignorance. Between them, these usages worked to justify relentless military campaigns against armed groups operating under the banners of multitudinous national races. The state’s guiding hand was required to draw all taingyintha together into the natural condition of unity from which they had been driven by historical circumstances.
These messages were conflated with a third message, via the project Gustaaf Houtman described as the ‘Myanmafication’ of the state in which ‘Burma’ became ‘Myanmar’ on the grounds that whereas the former term and its analogues refer to the Burman, the latter supposedly denotes the inclusion of all taingyintha in the Union. Children in schools across the country now sang of Myanmar to signify taingyintha, yet the books from which they learned, ‘Myanmar’ readers, did not include the languages and alphabets of all taingyintha, or even the biggest linguistic groups; merely those of the dominant group. ‘Myanmar’, while signifying national races, above all was to signify the pre-emeninent linguistic and cultural group, the Burmans. To speak and read the language of the Burman, to be civilised and cultured like a Burman was nothing other than to belong to Myanmar, which is to say, to be taingyintha.
Today, the 2008 Constitution cements national races in the country’s formal institutions, addressing the political community not as an aggregation of individual ‘citizens’ but as one of aggregated ‘national races’. From its opening words, it establishes a conceptual relation between national races and citizenship, such that the former is irreducible to the latter. Lexically and legally, national races trump citizenship. To talk of the political community ‘Myanmar’ is to talk of taingyintha, and to talk to that community is above all to address its members not as citizens but as national races.
