{"id":7654,"date":"2026-09-15T04:30:17","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T04:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myanmarmuslim.news\/en\/?p=7654"},"modified":"2026-09-16T06:39:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T06:39:11","slug":"from-identity-politics-to-citizenship-politics-united-we-stand-divided-we-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myanmarmuslim.news\/en\/2026\/09\/15\/from-identity-politics-to-citizenship-politics-united-we-stand-divided-we-fall\/","title":{"rendered":"From Identity Politics to Citizenship Politics: United We Stand, Divided We Fall"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A combined and updated version of my earlier post, “United We Stand, Divided We Lose,” first published in Burma Digest under the pen name MAHA BAN DOOLA and re-posted on 14 October 2007, now expanded with reflections adapted from A. Kathirasen’s “Moving from identity politics to citizenship politics” (FMT).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I. The Middle Ground We Almost Never Talk About<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If we sit long enough at a neighbourhood teashop, or walk through a housing quarter during a pagoda festival, a merit-giving ceremony, Eid, Chinese New Year, or any of our shared celebrations \u2014 or for that matter during an anti-government protest or in any corner of the Spring Revolution \u2014 we will almost certainly see a version of Myanmar that warms the heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We will see an unspoken, everyday grace. Neighbours helping neighbours without first checking identity cards. Youths playing football across cultural lines. Ordinary people sharing a quiet, unbothered pluralism that nobody feels the need to announce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the unglamorous bedrock of national survival. It is the messy, beautiful space where we actually live: the middle ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet running parallel to this is a very different reality \u2014 political machineries and machinations designed, deliberately and patiently, to dismantle this exact peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II. The Miniaturisation of Human Beings<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Human beings are wonderfully complicated. We each carry a crowded pantheon of loyalties. We are neighbours, workers, parents, children of a specific soil, and participants in a shared civic life. No single label ever exhausts a person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But race- and religion-based political systems have a perennial, lazy habit of trying to strip away all that overlapping complexity and force us down into a single, unyielding box.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Decades ago the Lebanese-French essayist Amin Maalouf warned that humanity was perpetually trapped in a tribal reflex that reduces a person to one belligerent affiliation. When identity is treated as a fortress rather than a bridge, politics stops being the art of negotiation and becomes an exercise in keeping people out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The philosopher Amartya Sen called this the “miniaturisation” of human beings \u2014 the deliberate political push to shove individuals into a preordained tribal category while erasing everything else that they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can watch this ancient script play out in real time in contemporary Myanmar, particularly through the majoritarian Buddhist identity strategies championed by several military-affiliated parties and by movements such as Ma Ba Tha.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The long-term cost is deeply corrosive. A country cannot split its soul along demographic or religious lines without hollowing out its institutional backbone. When every ordinary civic issue \u2014issuing National Registration Cards, house rental, Masjid renovation, a government contract or government or Public service enterance etc.\u2014 is dragged into the tribal mud, compromise becomes impossible and the state begins to fracture from within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

True political maturity takes the courage to step away from the politics of paranoia, to protect our fragile middle ground, and to heed the timeless warning: a house built on the exclusion and subjugation of its own people can never truly stand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we work towards and celebrate the formation of a new Federal Democratic Union of Myanmar, we need to move away from the politics of identity towards what I would call the politics of citizenship \u2014 where we are all citizens regardless of racial origin or religion, and where Myanmar unity trumps all other unities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III. Why I Care: A Personal Testimony<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi once said of political extremists, religious fanatics and ultra-nationalists:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Well, there are people who think that it’s right to do anything in the name of their religion, their race, their family, or any organization to which they may belong.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I have spent my life among the opposite kind of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During my schooling days, one of my English teachers was a Jew and the other was a Christian. My mathematics teacher was an Indian Hindu. My chemistry teacher was a Muslim. Our football coach and PT teacher was also a Muslim \u2014 he was our “Coach Carter,” and like the real coach in that famous story, his discipline and his intelligent handling of the team made us the best school side in the whole district, while every one of us also scored well enough in our examinations to enter professional universities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I, a Burmese Buddhist, was the team captain playing in midfield. My partner in midfield was a Muslim, and because the two of us worked and covered for each other, our three Burmese and one Rakhine strikers were free to score. Our goalkeeper was a Brahmin, and when he stood in front of the posts we felt as though the goalmouth had been sealed with cement. A tough Chin and a stout Karen at the back saved us from many more. Our two best Chinese friends never played football at all, but they never missed a match, and they successfully pressed their well-off fathers into funding the team more generously than we needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are all married now, most of us scattered to different countries. We are still in touch. We still miss each other. I dream about them more than once a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IV. A Note on My Own Faith \u2014 Please Read to the End Before You Are Angry With Me<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I am a born Buddhist, mostly in name. I never practised whole-heartedly. Later I married a Chinese Christian lady from a well-to-do family in my new country, and I followed her to church. In the end, life made me what people would call a free thinker, or a modern religion-less person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have had the good luck of close friends from many faiths: Hindus, Punjabis, Taoists, Muslims, and of course many Buddhists \u2014 and yes, Rohingya friends too. The plain fact that all of them have been good to me, and good to each other, is what made me curious about why so much of the world, and so much of our own country, is torn by religion-based conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I started reading about the religions. I was surprised to find how much the common virtues overlap. The great differences lie in form and external practice. Perhaps we are all looking at the same God from different vantage points. In my case the larger portion of my heart remains filled with the Buddha’s teaching \u2014 but I am not writing here to discuss religion. I am writing about the clashes, riots and wars fought in its name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me no excuse is ever good enough. Conflict should be avoided at all costs, by both sides. I am not interested in litigating who was right and who was wrong. I am interested only in the basic causes and the triggering events \u2014 because if we can recognise the sparks, we can smother them next time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believe that when either side resorts to force, both sides are already wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

V. Looking for the Sparks: Four Sources I Trust<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I deliberately avoided the accounts of interested parties, with their excuses and their blame games, and went to the libraries instead. Four sources struck me as reasonably disinterested:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. Maurice Collis<\/strong>, the British judge who sat during the first Indian\u2013Burmese conflict and belonged to the ruling class of the day. His eyewitness account appears in Trials in Burma<\/em>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Moshe Yegar<\/strong>, an Israeli diplomat posted to the embassy in Rangoon in 1960, whose MA thesis at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem became The Muslims of Burma: A Study of a Minority Group<\/em>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Bertil Lintner<\/strong>, married to a Shan lady and probably the foremost Burma specialist among European journalists. He predicted in the Bangkok Post<\/em>, roughly two and a half months in advance, that the Ne Win government would engineer an anti-Muslim riot \u2014 and that in the end both communities would unite, with a snowball effect that would help bring the government down.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. The US State Department’s annual human rights reports<\/strong> on religious freedom in Burma, which document what the junta has done to Buddhist, Christian and Muslim citizens and to the ethnic nationalities alike.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    I promised my Christian and Muslim friends that I am not here to blame any of them, and I make the same promise to my Buddhist friends. What follows will hurt both sides in places. I am reopening old wounds and conducting a post-mortem precisely so that we can perform damage control the moment the same symptoms reappear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Mutual understanding, mutual respect, and basic human rights irrespective of race, creed, colour, religion or ethnicity would defuse most of the ill feeling among us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    VI. 1930: A Dock Strike That Became a Massacre<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    The first anti-Indian riots in Burma broke out in 1930, under British rule. They were not aimed at Muslims or at Islam as such, but at Indians in general.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The trouble began in Rangoon port, through the irresponsible conduct of a British stevedoring firm. The firm employed hundreds of cheap Indian labourers. When those Indians went on strike, the firm hired Burmese workers to break the strike. The Indians duly gave in and ended their action. The next morning, when the Burmese workers reported for duty, they were told their services were no longer required \u2014 and some of the Indian workers, still bitter at having been forced back to work, laughed at them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Some of the Burmese workers fought. The Indians retaliated. Within half an hour at least two hundred Indians had been killed and thrown into the river. The authorities invoked Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code and ordered police to fire on any assembly of five or more that refused to disarm. That was the black day of 26 May. Within two days the violence had spread nationwide, and nobody ever established the true casualty figure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Note what actually lit the fuse: not theology, not scripture, but a labour dispute manipulated by a third party that profited from the division.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    VII. 1938: Nationalism Wearing a Religious Mask<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    The riots of 1938 were different. The real target was the British government, but the Burmese nationalists dared not say so openly. Growing nationalist sentiment, fanned by the local press, was disguised as an anti-Indian and anti-Muslim campaign in order to escape the full force of the imperial machinery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The nationalists built their campaign on the following grievances and incidents:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    1. Mixed marriages<\/strong> \u2014 conversion of Burmese girls, and the religious and legal consequences that followed regarding non-conversion, divorce, death and inheritance.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    2. Economic envy<\/strong> \u2014 Indians and Muslims were on the whole better off, and jealousy set in.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    3. Social contempt<\/strong> \u2014 many Buddhists refused to accept Burmese Muslims as fellow citizens, dismissing them as kala<\/em>, foreigners, dirty and low-class.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    4. A press hate campaign<\/strong> from 1935 onwards, with newspapers claiming that “Indians and Muslims have taken our wealth and our girls,” demanding their expulsion from government service and their deportation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    5. A religious pamphlet war.<\/strong> A dispute between a Moulvi, Hassan Shah, and a Buddhist, Maung Pan Nyo, produced a book in 1931; Buddhists published pamphlets attacking Islam; the Burmese Muslim Abdulla Maung Sin wrote a rebuttal claiming Maung Pan Nyo’s book had offended Islam and the Prophet; Maung Shwe Hpi, another Burmese Muslim, republished the whole exchange in one volume; Hassan Shah issued a new edition of his book.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    6. June 1938<\/strong> \u2014 a Buddhist journalist reprinted the most offensive anti-Buddhist extracts from those books. Newspapers, organisations and monks demanded action against the author, and called for an end to intermarriage to stop the spread of Islam.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    7. Boycott<\/strong> \u2014 monks called for a boycott of all Indian and Muslim businesses, and men with whips patrolled the markets to stop Buddhists from buying at Indian and Muslim shops.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    8. 26 July 1938<\/strong> \u2014 an anti-Muslim rally at the Shwedagon Pagoda launched the “Burma for the Burmese” campaign.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    9. The crowd marched on the Muslim (Surti) Bazaar. Indian policemen broke up the violent demonstration and three monks were injured.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    10. Burmese newspapers ran the photographs of Indian police striking Buddhist monks, and the riots spread.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    11. Indian shops, houses and mosques were looted, destroyed and burnt. Hindu Indians were assaulted and killed. The violence spread across the country; 113 mosques were recorded as damaged.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

      On 22 September 1938 the British Governor appointed an inquiry committee. Its finding was blunt: the real cause was discontent with government and the deterioration of the social, political and economic condition of the Burmese. The book had merely been seized upon as an inciting pretext by irresponsible newspapers, and anti-Muslim propaganda served as cover for the political struggle for independence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      (The Simon Commission \u2014 the Royal Statutory Commission appointed under the Government of India Act 1919, the Montagu\u2013Chelmsford reforms \u2014 had earlier been sent to examine how dyarchy was working in Burma. At the Round Table Conference in London in 1930 the British government rejected most of what was recommended, accepting only separation.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      The lesson is the one that matters most in this essay: in both 1930 and 1938 the riot was never really about religion. Religion was the disguise. Economic grievance, political frustration and an irresponsible press did the actual work.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

      VIII. Press Freedom and Press Responsibility<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

      The remarks of the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, made in a different century about a different controversy, remain the best advice anyone could have given the Burmese and Indian-Muslim journalists of the 1930s:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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      “We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

      He believed that press freedom should always be exercised in a way that fully respects the beliefs and tenets of all religions, and that misunderstanding and animosity between people of different faiths and cultural traditions are overcome through peaceful dialogue and mutual respect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Today the printing presses of 1938 have been replaced by Facebook pages, Telegram channels and anonymous accounts. The mechanism has not changed at all. Only the speed has.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      IX. How Nationalism Is Harvested<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

      The pride and warmth of nationalism \u2014 love of country, of one’s people, of one’s faith \u2014 is regularly exploited by politicians, ultra-nationalists, religious fanatics, racial extremists, and by the military junta itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107 are the most prominent and indisputable examples. But it is shameful to admit how many governments and politicians around the world have been guilty of the same crime at one time or another, to advance an agenda or to cover up their own failures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      The technique is always the same. Threaten your own people with foreign powers and enemies: colonialists, imperialists, religious terrorists, communists, the imminent danger of racial riots, the imminent loss of the independence of their beloved country. With the help of a controlled media, it works \u2014 and anyone who objects is labelled unpatriotic, or a traitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Once intoxicated with patriotic fever, people are blinded. They become willing to do anything: to kill, to be killed, to sacrifice themselves, their families, their property and everything on earth. Patriotism can mobilise an entire nation. That is exactly why it is so attractive to the worst people in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      I have to remind my Muslim friends, in the same spirit of frankness, that the widespread misuse of the word jihad<\/em> has bred terrorism in many places and has backfired badly on ordinary Muslims everywhere, including in Burma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      X. Now We Are the Foreigners<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

      With globalisation, the world has become a global village, and we “Shwe” Myanmar people have spread across it like wildfire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Hatred of foreigners is rooted in fear of loss, insecurity, low self-esteem and envy among locals. Well \u2014 we are now in exactly the position that Indian and Chinese “foreigners” once occupied in our own country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Burmese people now migrate and work, legally and illegally, in many countries. In some of them the local citizens are hostile to us. They say we are taking their jobs. They say our cheap labour makes it impossible for them to demand a pay rise. They say we are poor, dirty, that we bring disease into their country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      And at home, our own brothers and sisters among the ethnic nationalities accuse the Bamar of behaving like a domineering elder brother \u2014 arrogant, bent on assimilating or destroying them, raping and abusing them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      If we resent the first accusation, we have no honest option but to face the second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      The curative portion of the medicine has been written down for a long time. The purposes of the United Nations include achieving international cooperation “in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      “Equality, justice, dignity” is the emblem of the Human Rights Committee. Racial discrimination is the exercise of power to distinguish between people on the basis of race, colour, descent, national or ethnic origin, rather than individual merit. Xenophobia is the fear of the foreign and the strange. Religious intolerance occurs when a person’s beliefs are not respected because of their faith or way of thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      For decades, millions of people have suffered discrimination, exclusion and preference on the basis of race, skin colour, sex, religion, language, national or ethnic origin and forms of expression \u2014 causing extreme suffering and, very often, death. The Holocaust murdered six million Jews and millions of Roma, Poles, Soviet prisoners, disabled people and others. The Crusades of the 11th to 13th centuries killed heavily on both sides. There is no country on earth exempt from discrimination; only differences of degree, and of honesty about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Kofi Annan again:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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      “Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission therefore is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will and must be defeated.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

      And after twenty-seven years in the prisons of a racially discriminatory apartheid state, Nelson Mandela’s response on becoming South Africa’s leader should stand as the example for all of us: he used non-violence to dismantle the object of racial division rather than to inherit it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      XI. What the Buddha Actually Asked of Us<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

      So let me come back to my own small life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      If not for my teachers \u2014 Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and of course my many Burmese teachers and lecturers \u2014 I would not be where I am. If not for my ethnic minority teammates, my teammates of other races, and my coach “Carter,” we would never have won a single tournament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      The Buddha taught us to detach from atta<\/em> \u2014 I, me, my, mine. I have come to see how far that instruction reaches: my family, my relatives, my race, my religion, my house, my town, my country. And he asked us to extend loving-kindness and compassion to all humans and animals, including our enemies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Our common enemy would happily manufacture another racial or religious riot tomorrow, to distract a discontented population and to throw up a smokescreen against world opinion. That is not paranoia. It is the documented pattern of 1930, of 1938, of 1997, of 2012, and of every year since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      We are like a married couple. In Burmese we compare a married couple to the tongue and the teeth. The teeth sometimes bite the tongue \u2014 unintentionally. If the tongue can remember that the teeth are chewing food into smaller pieces so that it can taste better, forgiveness comes easily enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      There is another Burmese saying: when we are close together we quarrel constantly; only when we are far apart do we miss each other so badly that it feels like dying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      I am far away now, and I miss all of my friends of every race and religion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      XII. From Identity to Citizenship<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

      The middle ground \u2014 the teashop, the football pitch, the neighbour who helps without checking your identity card \u2014 is not soft or sentimental. It is the load-bearing wall of the country. Everything else we are trying to build, the federal constitution, the courts, the elections, rests on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Identity politics is cheap to start and almost impossible to stop. Citizenship politics is difficult, slow, and the only thing that has ever worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      So as we build the new Federal Democratic Union of Myanmar, let our test for every policy, every party platform and every post we share online be a simple one: does this treat people as citizens with equal rights, or does it miniaturise them into a single tribal box?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      We must unite against our common enemy, whether we are inside Burma or abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      UNITED WE STAND. DIVIDED WE FALL.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

      MAHA BAN DOOLA<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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      Editor’s note on this edition<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

      This post merges two pieces: my 2007 essay “United We Stand, Divided We Lose,” and a newer reflection adapted from A. Kathirasen’s “Moving from identity politics to citizenship politics” (Free Malaysia Today), whose argument about the middle ground and the miniaturisation of human beings applies to Myanmar as squarely as it does to Malaysia. Historical details from Maurice Collis, Moshe Yegar and Bertil Lintner are retained from the original. Casualty figures for the Holocaust have been corrected to the standard historical estimates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      \n