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...repeatedly turned its guns against its own people, most tragically in 1988 when a student-led protest movement was crushed, leaving some 3,000 dead. Nor do army leaders perceive threats to their authority coming only from inside the country. "Than Shwe grew up under colonial occupation by the British and the Japanese," says Thailand-based Burmese military analyst Win Min, "so he is a nationalist to the point of xenophobia [who] believes military rule is the only way to keep the country independent." Indeed, in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Oct. 1, Burma's Foreign Minister...
...Burma's top brass wasn't always so universally despised. Formerly a ragtag band of freedom fighters, the military helped the country free itself from British colonialism. Aung San, the father of democracy activist Suu Kyi, is revered both as an independence hero and as the founder of Burma's army. After independence in 1948, this group of beleaguered soldiers transformed itself into a professional force, opening the West Point-inspired Defense Services Academy. The military also burnished its legitimacy in another way, claiming to be the only force that could keep the country together. Burma is composed of more...
...most Calcuttans, the past is good enough. Mohun Bagan Athletic Club, the oldest Asian sporting club in existence, was founded in 1889 by a group of upstanding middle-class Bengalis keen to prove their mettle against the British. They named it after one of the many Victorian villas in the densely colonial north of the city where most well-to-do Bengalis lived. From its founding, the club was consciously modern and nationalistic, eager to cast off the much-invoked colonial stereotype of the effeminate Oriental. Drinking and smoking were strictly forbidden, and young athletes, some scouted from remote villages...
...payoff occurred a few decades later. In 1911, the Mohun Bagan football squad won the prestigious Indian Football Association Shield tournament - once the preserve of whites-only clubs - toppling the crack East Yorkshire Regiment, the best British team in India, barefoot in the final. Boria Majumdar, India's leading sports historian and author of Goalless, a history of Indian football, describes it as "India's Lagaan moment" - referring to the 2001 Bollywood blockbuster about a fictional cricket-playing village that beat the ruling British at their own game. This was real life, however, and Kolkata erupted in cele-brations, with...
...against athletes from the eastern parts of Bengal, whose accents, culinary tastes and even modes of dress differed. A contingent of eastern officials and players broke away from Mohun Bagan and set up the East Bengal club in 1920. The rivalry was ramped up after 1947, when the departing British divided Bengal along religious lines, its east becoming East Pakistan. Millions of Hindu refugees fled west to Kolkata. With livelihoods and loved ones lost, many had to struggle for their place among the city's better-established West Bengalis. "East Bengal gave them a banner to fly," says Majumdar...