India renews pitch to build Stilwell Road

Aiming to make Myanmar its strategic gateway to Southeast Asia, India may renew its pitch to build a key section of the historic Stilwell Road and the Imphal-Mandalay route to promote cross-border trade and economic growth in Northeast states.

Updated on: May 27, 2012, 23:37:45 IST

PTI | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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Aiming to make Myanmar its strategic gateway to Southeast Asia, India may renew its pitch to build a key section of the historic Stilwell Road and the Imphal-Mandalay route to promote cross-border trade and economic growth in Northeast states.

Myanmar awarded the contract of the 312-km World War II road, linking Myitkyina in Kachin state to Pangsau Pass on the Arunachal Pradesh border, to a Chinese company — the Yunan Construction Engineering Group — in 2010.

With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh leading a delegation to Naypyidaw on Sunday, India has communicated that it is only interested in building the 160-km road section from Pangsau Pass to Tanai, and does not mind the remaining 152-km stretch to Myitkina being build by the Chinese company in a joint venture with the military junta-backed Yuzana group. Named after World War-II American General Joseph Stilwell, the road was used by allied forces to supply provisions to China.

It is understood that the defence ministry has requested the visiting delegation to raise the Stilwell Road issue, with the army indicating that the Chinese company has also secured rights to 500 metres of land on either side of the road. While the Chinese company has begun clearing the forest encroaching on the road alignment, the threat perception is that Beijing is looking towards a long-term commitment in the area, particularly because it considers Arunachal Pradesh as southern Tibet.

Army chief General VK Singh had raised the Stilwell issue with Myanmar President Thein Sein and the defence minister during his trip to Naypyidaw last January.

The other project New Delhi has shown interest in is the revival of the old southern Silk Route, which links Mandalay to Imphal as part of the ambitious Asian Highway route. As of now, there is only a small bridge on a stream separating the border post at Moreh to Tamu on the other side of the border.

While India plans to resurface Tamu-Kalewa-Kalemyo road, build by Indian Border Roads a decade ago, it is keen to extend this alignment to Mandalay, which is in turn linked to its largest city, Yangon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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