The Economist 04Apr2020

44 Asia The EconomistApril 4th 2020

2

M

in kyaw theinis just 26, but he has a

commanding presence. In his home

in a suburb of Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest

city, he sits cross-legged on the floor in

front of a shrine festooned with tea lights,

flowers and magical diagrams. His family

and students gather round and listen in-

tently as he explains how he acquired his

powers, among them the ability to cure ill-

nesses, boost profits and repel knife-wield-

ing assailants (with his mind he turns the

knife back on them).

Mr Min Kyaw Thein is one of a growing

number of devout Burmese Buddhists

striving to master occult techniques. Inter-

est in magic has soared in Myanmar over

the past few years, says Thomas Patton, au-

thor of “The Buddha’s Wizards”. For centu-

ries many Buddhists have believed that ex-

treme piety can confer special powers.

Supernatural hermits, after all, help the

Buddha himself in the scriptures. In Myan-

mar weizza, or wizards, are also thought to

have protected the faith during periods of

calamity, such as during British colonial

rule. Today it is common to see shrines to

the most powerful weizza in pagodas,

where they are venerated for their spiritual

purity and their devotion to those in need.

But until recently those purporting to

be latter-day weizza had been banished to

the margins of Burmese society. Ne Win,

the strongman who ran Myanmar from

1962 until 1988, feared and envied secret

weizza associations, which had powerful

adherents and were so opaque that they

were regarded as a “Burmese Buddhist Illu-

minati”, according to Mr Patton. The dicta-

tor is said to have worried that they might

overthrow him by, for instance, raising an

army of ghosts. He dissolved some of these

groups, banned their magazines and

books, and had portrayals of weizza

scrubbed from films and other media.

Wizards started to make a comeback

about a decade ago, when the army began

ceding political power to civilians. Since

the abolition of the censorship board in

2012, and particularly in the past couple of

years, “there has been an explosion of pub-

lications about the wizards,” says Mr Pat-

ton. Young, image-conscious weizza mar-

ket their talents on YouTube and Facebook,

where the most popular attract hundreds

of thousands of followers. Three weizza to

whom The Economistspoke said that they

have seen surging numbers of students

and clients in recent years.

Their appeal lies in their ability to ma-

nipulate the physical world. The greatest

wizards can apparently fly, turn base met-

als into gold and attain immortality—all

handy skills. Even the middling ones claim

useful powers. Clients come to Saw Lwin,

an impish weizzawith a ruff of brown hair,

to perk up their profits, make them more

attractive, banish evil spirits and remove

tumours. Myanmar’s health-care system is

rickety, and the sick often turn to weizza

when doctors fail to heal them.

“Science solves cancer with medicine

and surgery,” says Saw Lwin. “We can cure

such things in our own ways.” Equipped

with his battered book of spells and a lami-

nated red diagram, he dips his index finger

in a small pot of perfumed ink. As he does

he briefly flashes the faded red tattoos—the

source of his healing powers—etched onto

his inner forearm. He presses his finger

into the palm of your correspondent’s

hand, then chants a spell. She has not fall-

en ill since. 7

YANGON

Demand for magic is growing

The occult in Myanmar

A wizard wheeze

businesses a stipend of $35 a night for up to

two weeks to accommodate commuters

from Malaysia, which has shut its border.

Migrants who fall sick from the corona-

virus in the city state will not have to pay

for treatment.

Sadly, some of India’s migrant workers

who did reach their villages have not fared

too well, either. One group that made it

from Tamil Nadu in the far south all the

way back to Bengal have hoisted ham-

mocks, charpoys and mosquito nets into

trees. They say they must live in suspen-

sion as there is no other way in their village

to maintain social distance. Elsewhere, re-

turning workers are held in suspicion as

possible carriers of disease, sparking con-

flict. In one case in Bihar, a man was beaten

to death after he pointed police to fellow re-

turnees who should have been quaran-

tined. At Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, tele-

vision cameras captured the humiliation

suffered by migrants, forced by police to

squat in a road as they were sprayed with

bleach, supposedly to “disinfect” them.

The fear of migrants being a vector is far

from misplaced. Workers who fled Mum-

bai to escape the 1918-19 Spanish flu pan-

demic carried it far into Indian provinces,

and hiv, the virus which causes aids, was

also spread along migrant corridors, notes

Chinmay Tumbe, the author of a book on

Indian migration. Just as Chinese migrant

textile workers may have carried covid-19

to Italy, some of the first nodes for the dis-

ease in India appear to have been seeded by

migrant dairy workers returning from Italy

to the Punjab, and workers from the Arab

Gulf returning to homes in Kerala.

As if that were not bad enough, some of

the poor Indian provincial regions to

which the recent wave of migrants has just

returned may prove exactly the wrong

place to be in an epidemic. The 120m peo-

ple of the state of Bihar, for instance, must

make do with just four testing centres for

covid-19. They share a meagre 0.11 hospital

beds for every 1,000 people, compared with

1:1,000 in Delhi or 2.4:1,000 in Singapore.

More immediately, what many of the

migrants fear is simply financial ruin, or

even starvation. And it is not just the mi-

grants themselves at risk. In 2017 interna-

tional remittances brought Asia an esti-

mated $268bn, much of it flowing to rural

economies that have few other sources of

investment. The scale of such transfers

across India is not known, but economists

estimate the total size of the migrant work-

force at about 100m people, many of whom

send regular transfers “home”.

Whether they service rich, advanced

economies such as Singapore’s, or perform

the menial drudgery in India, migrant

workers are among the most vulnerable to

any shocks. At times like this they pay the

price for the trait that some of their em-

ployers most prize: being invisible. 7