YANGON, Myanmar — If the ruling generals holed up in Naypyidaw, their garrison city in central Myanmar, wanted to know what riotous fun young Burmese are capable of, they should have come down to watch how their people celebrated the traditional New Year’s “water festival” in this former capital.
A similar festival is celebrated in neighboring Thailand and Laos. But the one here has a certain poignancy about it. This is the one time of year when the junta looks the other way as masses of young people let loose in dancing and drinking in this otherwise repressive city, where gatherings of more than 10 people are usually banned.
So this week, thousands upon thousands of mostly black-clad and drippingly wet young Burmese thronged this city’s Inya and Kabaraye Pagoda roads, the two areas to which the government confined the weeklong revelry.
As the blazing sun rose, every other car in the city appeared to have been mobilized by people heading to the water festival. By 10 a.m., hundreds of meters of creaking vehicles were backed up trying to enter Inya Road, where water from the nearby lake was being pumped to 27 roadside “pandals,” temporary water-throwing platforms that doubled as discothèques.
On the pandals, young women screamed and danced under a shower of water and disco lights, stomping the wooden floors to the ear-shattering rhythms of emo rock music, Western and Burmese. It was not yet noon, but the floor was already strewn with sprawling young men in a drunken stupor.
Down in the street, young men stomped and danced on top of their vehicles, which crawled along, honking, while the revelers on the pandals drenched everyone within range with garden hoses and water cannons.
“We celebrate like this because we can only do it once a year,” said Ko Zaw Maung, 20, who was with his girlfriend, Ma Ju Ju.
The festival originates in the traditional Burmese way of bidding farewell to the old year and greeting the new: a respectful sprinkling of water to cleanse friends and family members as the Buddhist deity Tha Gyar Min descends to grade each person for the past year. Thingyan, the traditional New Year, begins on Friday, and the water festival peaks the day before.
Nowadays, in Myanmar as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the ancient ritual has been taken over by young people who have turned it into free-for-all. It is perfectly acceptable to fling a bucket of icy water at total strangers, at a bicyclist or a passing taxi. (Drunk driving and traffic accidents spike during the weeklong festival.)
The pandals, some with names like “Mr. LA,” “Dream Boat” or “God Theater,” hire disc jockeys and celebrities to entice patrons. Many of the platforms are sponsored by rich and powerful families and businesses, under license by the Yangon military command.
One pandal, named “Channel-5” is that of Pho La Pyae, a grandson of Senior General Than Shwe, the head of the ruling junta. His pandal stands apart, the only one not adjoined by other platforms.
The biggest pandal, an arch-shaped structure with the rather unimaginative name of YGN (short for Yangon) is run by Sithu Moe Myint, the son of U Michael Moe Myint, a Burmese oil magnet.
“This festival has become fundamentally unfair,” complained a Yangon businessperson who helped organize one of the pandals, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of government reprisals. “This is only for the rich.”
The platform sponsors collect admission fees that run as high as $10 a person, or a third of a factory worker’s monthly salary.
Young people save all year to pay for the tickets and clothes for this one chance to legally let off steam — an explosion of fun paradoxically provided by the privileged in a regime that many of the young people hate.
When one drunken man tried to barge onto a pandal without an admission ticket, security guards ruthlessly beat him with batons. The man, his shirt in shreds, lay in the road in a stream of water, as the throng moved on, pushed forward by the merrymaking mob.
A year and a half ago, the military crushed an uprising led by Buddhist monks. Just under a year ago, Cyclone Nargis left more than 100,000 people dead. Now, the government is preoccupied with preparations for next year’s elections, which critics say are aimed at prolonging its grip on power.
“Some countries faced instability following electoral violence due to the fact that political parties attacked one another in canvassing for votes in the electoral period, because democratic practice had not been mature enough in the countries concerned,” Vice Senior-General Maung Aye said last week, according to the government mouthpiece, The New Light of Myanmar.
The general’s warning against haste on the road to political reform and his appeal to the military to “see to democratic transition” came as Bangkok, the capital of democratic Thailand just an hour’s plane ride away, was beset by anti-government protests.
Under the Burmese version of democracy, not even the water festival can continue after sundown. As the sun sank, the water pumps suddenly died. The music went silent. At both ends of the road, the police moved in with barricades. And people strolled back to their unlit homes.
“It’s a controlled festival,” the business person said.
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