14 Brooten, McElhone and Venkiteswaran ninety per cent Buddhist. The majority Burmans (or Bamar people), who primarily reside in the seven regions in the central part of the country, are mainly Buddhists and they have historically dominated politics and the military, and, by extension, narratives in the media and other social and religious institutions. According to the former military junta, and the two governments that have since been in power, there are 135 different indigenous ethnic groups in the country. However, this figure is widely contested; some say there are 135 languages and dialects spoken, not ethnic groups; others say the figure is propaganda, as the military was never able to produce any reliable data or list of the “135 national races of Burma” (Smith 1994, p. 18; see also Cheesman 2017; Lintner 2017). For the first time in more than thirty years, a census carried out in 2014 with UN help calculated the population to be 51,486,253, including an estimated 1,206,353 people who were not counted in parts of Rakhine, Kachin and Kayin States due to conflict and problems of access in those regions (Department of Population 2015). Many ethnic civil society organizations (CSOs) criticized the ethnic coding in the census, claiming it was designed without proper consultation, and they called for the census to be postponed until peace was attained. More than one million Rohingya Muslims were not officially counted unless they agreed to be categ­ orized as Bengalis (Mclaughlin 2014), although the UN did include them in the final population estimate. Millions of Myanmar nationals living outside the country were also not counted. That this issue is contentious can be assessed from the fact that as this volume was going to press the government had yet to release any data on ethnicity collected in the 2014 Myanmar Population and Housing census (San Yamin Aung 2018). Many of the ongoing, and in some cases increasing, conflicts in Myanmar echo earlier conflicts from the British colonial period. During the post–World War II negotiations for independence, General Aung San, who had backed the Japanese during the war, signed the 1947 Panglong Agreement with several ethnic groups from the north who were pro-British and wanted assurances of self-administration upon independence. But Aung San was assassinated before the agreement could be enforced. Although the concept of federalism was included in the independence constitution, it became a tool for the subsequent Burmese military governments to impose their rule over the ethnic 01 ch1-MyanmarMediaIT-5P.indd 14 8/4/19 10:29 am