Robert Taylor
At the heart of the issue are expectations that the census will reveal significant growth of the Muslim population since the last census about three decades ago, particularly among the estimated 800,000 so-called Bengalis or stateless Rohingya, thus fueling fears among the Buddhist majority that they will be outnumbered. Such anxiety is linked to warnings that renewed communal conflict would set back, or even halt, the process of political liberalization begun in 2011.
Critics have also warned that the census data may not support various claims to group rights or political representation. The widespread, almost unprecedented, freedom of the press today in Myanmar and irresponsible journalists are merely one potential source for reports stoking religious or ethnic disharmony.
Leaders of minority groups are prone to advancing self-serving versions of reality. Among a broader group of critics, claims are also being made that the process is irredeemably flawed, despite generous support from the United Nations and Western governments for the project. Over the past year, foreign assistance for the census has grown, along with the survey's scope, from $58 million to $74 million. Claims are also being made that the designated census takers -- schoolteachers -- lack the experience to fulfill their controversial mission. Such accusations of incompetence ignore the country's long experience in recording personal and census data.
Deciphering the data
While one can appreciate the well-intentioned motives behind some of these warnings, ignoring the multifaceted nature of identity-group conflict in Myanmar, as in any other country, does not resolve these vexing issues. Indeed, hiding from reality gives those opposed to the census license to invent all kinds of claims, and leaves those who would dispute them lacking the data needed to confound them.
The problem is not the resulting census data but people's understanding of what that data represents. Myanmar is not alone in a world that is struggling to understand how emotionally charged concepts such as race, religion, citizenship, human rights and so-called group rights are not the stuff of reality but the stuff of fiction, law and states -- all of which are man-made and fast changing.
Myanmar's identity politics has grown out of a popular interpretation of the country's history as one of conflict between ethnic peoples. Since colonial times under British rule, the history of Myanmar has been viewed as a series of conflicts arising from ethnic groups moving into territory already occupied by others. The historical accuracy of this interpretation is rarely questioned, but when one examines the reality of Myanmar's ethnic conflicts, a different picture emerges.
The first recorded incidents of ethnic-group conflict in Myanmar that was not driven by rival rulers was among immigrants -- not indigenous people. When Yangon was a predominantly South Asian city, some of the first communal clashes were between Hindus and Muslims of South Asian descent. Urban confrontations between Burmese and Indians only occurred in the 1930s, as a result of labor disputes and efforts by Myanmar politicians to whip up intercommunal violence in order to destabilize the government.
Political parties based on identity groups did not appear among the indigenous population until the very cusp of independence in 1948. The Myanma Athin Chokkyi, or the General Council of Burmese Associations, the first major nationalist movement, was led for many years by Chit Hlaing, who did not appeal for support based on his Mon ethnicity but rather on his Myanmar identity.
Ethnic conflict among the indigenous population did not occur until 1942. In the unstable environment surrounding the Japanese invasion, young Burman nationalists, having been taught that the indigenous Karen were "lackeys" of the British colonial state, attacked Karen villages. The Karen retaliated, but unlike the mythology that surrounds ethnic conflict in Myanmar, their forces were led not by a member of the Christian Sgaw-speaking Karen, who were known to be close to the British, but by a Buddhist Pwo Karen.
Except among the minority of Sgaw-speaking Christian Karen, ethnically labeled political parties and insurgent armies appeared only after independence in 1948, when the political system began giving credence to claims of allegiance on the basis of putative ethnicity. The reality of the ethnic label was rarely, if ever, questioned. Hence, the "official list" of 135 ethnolinguistic groups, which the British identified in the last full colonial census in 1931, is now accepted as a somehow "scientific" description of ethnic identity in Myanmar. What was a pseudoscientific attempt by British-Indian census compilers has now become a Myanmar "fact."
But ethnicity in Myanmar is not set in stone. There, as elsewhere, ethnicity is plastic and contextual. Ask any Myanmarese what his or her ethnicity is, and you will get an answer. Ask what the ethnicities of his or her parents were, and quite often you will get two different answers. People will tell you they changed their ethnicity when they married. They often confuse the question of ethnicity with religious identity. The days when one could be born a Kachin and die a Shan may be gone in the eyes of census takers, but in life as it is lived, it still happens. When people play identity politics, they need to ask: Whose game are we playing?
Robert Taylor is a visiting professorial research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and author of "The State in Myanmar" (2009).
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