{"id":3352,"date":"2025-10-18T07:04:25","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T07:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myanmarmuslim.news\/en\/?p=3352"},"modified":"2025-10-18T07:04:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T07:04:27","slug":"a-rebel-border-indias-evolving-ties-with-myanmar-after-the-coup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myanmarmuslim.news\/en\/2025\/10\/18\/a-rebel-border-indias-evolving-ties-with-myanmar-after-the-coup\/","title":{"rendered":"A Rebel Border: India\u2019s Evolving Ties with Myanmar after the Coup"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With armed groups now holding most of Myanmar\u2019s periphery, India has reached out to the rebels while preserving its historical ties to Naypyitaw. But it has also announced border controls that could undercut this approach. A more fine-tuned policy would better serve New Delhi\u2019s ends<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What\u2019s new?<\/strong>\u2002Fragmentation of Myanmar\u2019s state has prompted India to adjust its foreign policy stance toward its neighbour, balancing engagement with Naypyitaw with outreach to regime opponents, who now control much of the Indian border. But New Delhi has introduced restrictive border controls that threaten to undermine its wider policy goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why does it matter?<\/strong>\u2002Myanmar\u2019s Chin and Rakhine States, now largely under non-state control, face regime embargoes, making trade and aid from India essential for their populations, as well as for stemming refugee flows. For India, stable borders and better trade and transport connections to South East Asia now depend on ties to armed groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What should be done?<\/strong>\u2002Rather than build physical barriers, India should address legitimate security concerns along its Myanmar frontier without disrupting the lives of transborder communities. Having given generous emergency support after the 28 March earthquake, New Delhi should also boost cross-border trade and aid, assist refugees and broaden engagement with groups in Myanmar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I.Overview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Since launching its disastrous coup in 2021, Myanmar\u2019s military has lost its hold on most of the country\u2019s borders, including the one with India. New Delhi has accordingly adjusted its foreign policy stance, forging tighter links with anti-regime armed groups along the border while maintaining ties with the top brass in Naypyitaw. In parallel, however, India\u2019s home ministry has introduced restrictive new border policies, including plans to fence the frontier and limit crossings by locals. These threaten to undermine India\u2019s foreign policy objectives by alienating local people, disrupting the informal trade they rely on and complicating relations with the armed groups that now control the Myanmar border. New Delhi should work with state governments in India\u2019s north east to address legitimate security concerns without unduly disrupting the lives of locals and compromising its goals of greater connectivity with South East Asia. This shift in approach should include finding ways to increase informal trade and aid across the border, provide more support for refugees, and engage with a wider range of constituencies in Myanmar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Immediately following Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing\u2019s February 2021 coup, India was keen to stay close to the regime in Naypyitaw. For decades, New Delhi has sought to maintain fluid relations with whoever was in power in Myanmar in order to protect its key interests, including border security and regional connectivity, as well as to prop itself up in its competition with China. India has also relied on successive regimes in Myanmar to support its counter-insurgency operations against separatist groups in its north-eastern states, many of which had rear bases across the border. Against this backdrop, Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s government assumed that the post-coup regime in Naypyitaw would prevail in its struggle against domestic opponents. But that turned out to be a severe miscalculation. As anti-regime forces progressively took control of most areas of Myanmar bordering India, New Delhi diversified its engagement, seeking to build closer ties to opposition forces, while keeping good relations with Naypyitaw \u2013 including by sending generous support after the devastating 28 March earthquake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A hard-border approach is … in contradiction with India\u2019s objective of boosting connectivity and trade with South East Asia under its Act East policy.<\/q><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But while the foreign ministry recalibrates its Myanmar policy, India\u2019s home ministry has been moving in a different direction, introducing a set of restrictive controls along the Myanmar border. These include proposed fencing of the frontier; constraints on the Free Movement Regime that allows travel across the common border for area residents; and biometric registration of refugees who have crossed into Indian territory during the Myanmar civil war, with an eye toward repatriating them. These restrictions are incompatible with the ground realities in many parts of India\u2019s north east, where communities straddle what they regard as an arbitrary border inherited from colonial times. A hard-border approach is also in contradiction with India\u2019s objective of boosting connectivity and trade with South East Asia under its Act East policy. It is at odds, moreover, with New Delhi\u2019s decision to build stronger relations with Myanmar armed groups that now control the border, since these forces oppose the fence and similar measures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of a hard border, New Delhi would be better served by a more fine-tuned policy. Such an approach could be designed most effectively in collaboration with India\u2019s north-eastern states. Optimal solutions will likely vary from state to state, but the overarching principle should be to address legitimate security and border management concerns without disrupting the lives of transborder communities, damaging relations with armed groups in Myanmar or undermining the Act East objectives. It is also in India\u2019s interest to facilitate more informal trade across the border, as well as greater volumes of aid, both of which are essential for addressing humanitarian needs in Myanmar and creating conditions conducive for refugees to return. In the meantime, more central government assistance is required to help the north-eastern states meet the needs of refugees in the states of Mizoram and Manipur. India should also expand its engagement to include a broader range of non-state actors in Myanmar, including influential ethnic armed groups not based along the Indian border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II.The Bilateral Relationship<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A.Historical Development of India-Myanmar Relations<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

India and Myanmar (then Burma) gained independence from Britain within a few months of each other, in August 1947 and January 1948, respectively. Solidarity from shared experience of anti-colonial struggle underpinned warm relations between then-Myanmar Prime Minister Nu and his Indian counterpart, Jawaharlal Nehru.1<\/a> Both were early advocates of non-alignment in the Cold War.2<\/a> In 1949, Nehru provided significant covert weapons shipments to help Nu counter a communist insurrection and prevent the fall of Yangon.3<\/a> The stability of India\u2019s eastern neighbour and good relations with Nu were so important that Nehru did not react strongly to land nationalisation and other nativist economic policies in the 1950s that targeted Myanmar\u2019s ethnic Indians, thousands of whom fled the country.4<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

General Ne Win\u2019s 1962 coup created a bigger challenge for the Indian government, which worried that Myanmar under military rule would be a less reliable partner. New Delhi was determined to cultivate Ne Win as an ally against China and in tackling separatist insurgencies that were growing in India\u2019s north-eastern states, operating from Myanmar soil. India was thus the first country to recognise the military government after the 1962 coup, and it set about building relations with Ne Win.5<\/a> The two governments had common interests: India had lost a border war with China the same year, and Myanmar was fighting a China-backed communist insurgency.6<\/a> Nehru thus again remained mostly silent when, in 1964, Ne Win expelled hundreds of thousands of Myanmar Indians, seizing their property and businesses.7<\/a> After Nehru\u2019s death that year, his daughter Indira Gandhi \u2013 who would become prime minister in 1966 \u2013 visited Yangon as Ne Win\u2019s personal guest, marking the beginning of a close political relationship between the two.8<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rajiv Gandhi, Indira\u2019s son, who succeeded her as prime minister following her 1984 assassination, led the relationship in a very different direction. On his first visit to Yangon in 1987, he pushed for closer economic cooperation and connectivity with Myanmar, especially for India\u2019s north-eastern states, an approach that New Delhi would formalise several years later as its Look East policy. He also advocated for connectivity plans that would much later become the Kaladan infrastructure project (see Section II.B below).9<\/a> Septuagenarian dictator Ne Win bluntly rejected these overtures, which were contrary to the economic isolationism that was a hallmark of his rule, and which contributed to the fall of his regime the following year.10<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nationwide demonstrations against Ne Win\u2019s rule erupted in Myanmar in 1988, prompting the collapse of his regime.<\/q><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nationwide demonstrations against Ne Win\u2019s rule erupted in Myanmar in 1988, prompting the collapse of his regime, a brutal crackdown by the army and the emergence of a new junta. By that point, India was primed to take a different approach toward its neighbour. Ne Win had infuriated Gandhi by refusing closer economic relations; the Indian security establishment, meanwhile, had been frustrated by Ne Win\u2019s inability to deal with Indian insurgents operating in the north east from rear bases in Myanmar.11<\/a> As a result, New Delhi backed democratic forces it believed likely to prevail. These were led by Aung San Suu Kyi \u2013 whose father, the assassinated independence hero Aung San, had been close to Nehru, and whose mother had been ambassador to India. Aung San Suu Kyi, moreover, had been educated in India.12<\/a> New Delhi issued statements in support of the Myanmar people\u2019s \u201clegitimate democratic aspirations\u201d, withdrew its ambassador and provided covert funding to support both political opposition to the junta and armed resistance groups, especially the Kachin Independence Organisation.13<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

India\u2019s pivot failed, however. The Myanmar military held out against its armed opponents, and though Aung San Suu Kyi\u2019s National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in the 1990 elections, the military had placed her under house arrest before the polls and refused to transfer power. With the regime looking secure, and China having switched from supporting communist insurgency in Myanmar to backing the generals, India worried that it was losing influence in the country.14<\/a> North-eastern Indian insurgents were also expanding their use of Myanmar territory, with support from Pakistan.15<\/a> With the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, the personal dimension of the Indian leadership\u2019s relationship to Aung San Suu Kyi had also dissipated, even if considerable public sympathy for Myanmar\u2019s pro-democracy forces remained.16<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1991, Rajiv Gandhi\u2019s successor P.V. Narasimha Rao executed a policy U-turn on Myanmar when he unveiled the Look East strategy, which promoted economic integration with East and South East Asia. By the following year, New Delhi had ended its support for the political opposition and armed resistance, focusing instead on forging links with the military regime.17<\/a> What followed was two decades of close relations, with increased trade and military cooperation, including joint military operations targeting north-eastern Indian insurgents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

B.India\u2019s Contemporary Policy Objectives<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

After Myanmar embarked on a path of political liberalisation in 2011 and allowed Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy to return to parliamentary politics in April 2012, India kicked relations into a higher gear.18<\/a> The following month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh became the first Indian prime minister to visit Myanmar in nearly 25 years. India\u2019s defence minister then made the trip in early 2013, with the objective of deepening security cooperation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, India has had three broad policy objectives in Myanmar:<\/p>\n\n\n\n