File Photo: Pro-democracy supporters take part in a protest in New Delhi on February 22, 2022, against the military rule in Myanmar. (Photo by Money SHARMA / AFP)
Nicholas Nugent
India is reviewing its relations with neighbour Myanmar in the wake of instability in Manipur State and as Myanmar’s Rakhine State seems close to falling under rebel control.
India has traditionally regarded the northeast as a backwater, not significant in either political or economic terms. The eight states of the north-east will together send only 25 members to the 543-seat Lok Sabha in Delhi following the national election being held in April and June.
Yet the region abuts onto three important neighbours, Bangladesh, China and Myanmar, and can be a worry because of the narcotics, heroin and amphetamines, that permeate the porous international borders, especially that with Myanmar. Four Indian states, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram have borders with Myanmar.
MANIPUR FRICTION
The government is currently concerned at the situation in Manipur where a violent civil conflict between Meitei and Kuki-Zo tribal communities has been raging since April 2023 killing at least 200 and displacing as many as 70,000 people. Delhi is worried at the apparent breakdown of law and order. In February a police officer was abducted by a radical Meitei group after a Meitei leader was arrested over an incident with a car. State police effectively went on strike, laying down their arms in protest, before both detained men were released. Police are said to be demoralised.
Lawlessness in Manipur is causing India’s central government headaches but so too is the spilling over the border of refugees from the escalating war in Myanmar. Tens of thousands have taken refuge in the southern border state of Mizoram since the military junta seized power in Myanmar three years ago in February 2021 and started to wage war against its own people.
The exodus from Myanmar’s Chin State has continued but lately it is often members of the country’s security forces that have been seeking refuge in both India and Bangladesh. In February Bangladesh’s foreign minister Hasan Mahmud told journalists in Delhi his country had agreed to return 388 people, mainly soldiers and border guards, to Myanmar.
India’s National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, said over 700 “regime troops” had sought sanctuary in India since the previous November. Nearly 300 crossed into India on just one day, 17 January this year. The Bangladesh minister said the escalating conflict in Myanmar was “a matter of concern” for both India and Bangladesh.
Incursions by Myanmar security forces are believed to have resulted from military successes by the Three Brotherhood Alliance against the junta’s army, known as the Tatmadaw. Since October three Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) constituting the Alliance, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) and the Arakan Army (AA), have engaged the Tatmadaw close to Myanmar’s border with China.
ETHNIC-PDF ALLIANCES
Ethnically based groups have long opposed successive central governments while seeking control of local fiefdoms. Since the 2021 military takeover they have operated in a loose alliance with the so-called People’s Defence Forces or PDFs, whose main purpose is to contest military rule and restore democracy to Myanmar.
Since the start of this year, the fierce war for control of territory has spread and there are now battlefields on Myanmar’s border with Thailand and in mountainous districts around the Chindwin River close to India in Chin State, Sagaing Division and Rakhine State, the last being the homeland of the Arakan Army.
BORDER FENCE
Narendra Modi’s BJP-led government in Delhi fears Myanmar’s civil war spilling over into India because of the affinity between tribal communities on both sides of the international frontier, though its response appeared to be somewhat drastic. Home Minister Amit Shah told parliament in February the government planned to abrogate a long-standing agreement with Myanmar, last revised in 2018, which allows citizens of both countries to wander freely across the frontier without formalities, known as the Free Movement Regime (FMR). This allows free movement up to 16 kilometres on either side of the border.
Mr Shah said the government would erect a fence along the entire 1,643 km frontier with Myanmar “to ensure the internal security of the country and to maintain the demographic structure of India’s north-eastern states bordering Myanmar.” The government wants to stop the influx of illegal immigrants, drugs and gold smuggling. Official sources estimate the fence will cost a massive $3.7 billion equivalent and, given the mountainous terrain, will take several years to complete.
The plans received a mixed reception in the four Indian states which border Myanmar. Arunachal Pradesh, which has the longest stretch of border at 512 km, was supportive. The state has a much longer – and disputed – border with China to the north and is not thought to receive much of an influx of people or drugs from Myanmar.
Manipur, whose border with Myanmar is 398 kilometres long, also backed the plan. Chief minister N. Biren Singh blames the FMR for allowing groups involved in Manipur’s current ethnic-based conflict, dubbed Indian Insurgent Groups or IIGs, to take refuge in Myanmar from the Assam Rifles, the Indian paramilitary force responsible for security along the border. The state’s political leaders hope that restricting cross-border movement will help quell the serious unrest in the state. In March the chief minister announced the repatriation of 77 Myanmar nationals including women and children.
SOME GROUPS UNHAPPY
But Nagaland in the north and Mizoram to the south – with 215 kilometres and 510 kilometres long borders with Myanmar respectively – protested at the plans because their tribal communities straddle what they regard as an artificial boundary created when Britain ruled both territories.
Nagaland’s chief minister Neiphiu Rio told reporters: “My village is on one side (of the border) and my kheti (farmland) is on the other. So there has to be a workable formula.” His deputy, Yanthungo Patton, said suspension of the FMR “will seriously disrupt the age-old historical, social, tribal, and economic ties of the Naga people living on both sides of the international border.”
The state assembly passed a resolution asking central government to reconsider its proposals because “traditional land holding system straddles across the international border in many areas, and people have to cross the international border on a daily basis for their normal cultivation activities”.
Mizoram’s ruling Zoram People’s Movement also opposed restrictions on free border crossing as did civil organisations such as the Young Mizo Association and Zo United. Chief minister, Lalduhoma, said fencing the international border would mean accepting the demarcation imposed by the British during colonial period without consulting the Mizo people.
Mizos, the dominant group in Mizoram, and the Kuki-Zomi minority group of Manipur belong to the same Zo tribal or ethnic community as the Chins of Myanmar and Kuki-Chins of Bangladesh. Sometimes known collectively as ‘Zofas’, their traditional homeland, known as Zogam or the land of the Zo people, once embraced the area now encompassed by the Mizoram and Chin states.
Mizoram’s ruling party, which leads the only northeastern government not allied with prime minister Modi’s BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, has given support to Chin people fleeing Tatmadaw aggression in Chin State, much to the annoyance of the Delhi government. As many as 35,000 migrants are said to have moved from Chin State to Mizoram since the February 2021 military takeover. Most have crossed the steel bridge connecting the Myanmar border town of Khawmawi with Zokhawthar, enrolling their children in schools in the border area. Others make their way onwards to the Mizoram capital, Aizawl.
DELHI RETHINK
Meanwhile there are indications that Delhi is reconsidering its relationship with the military junta in power in Naypyidaw. There are healthy trade relations between the neighbours and India is believed to have supplied the junta with weapons as well as a submarine and played a role in modernising the Tatmadaw, while expressing its concern at the military leaders overthrew of the country’s democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy in 2021.
India has committed to a plan to build a 3,200 kilometres road connecting Guwahati in Assam to Bangkok in Thailand via Mandalay and Yangon in Myanmar. A plan to connect the port of Kolkata to Sittwe in Myanmar is in doubt following the capture in January of the strategic town of Paletwa by the Arakan Army, which is now thought to control most of Rakhine State. Junta control of Sittwe port is now under threat as it is of the nearby Chinese-built port of Kyaukphyu. Of the Arakan Army’s recent advance, an anonymous source told the Hindu newspaper “It is a matter of time before they establish control over the entire State of Rakhine, an unprecedented situation.”
Some commentators believe that since the start of the Operation 1027 offensive of the Three Brotherhood Alliance – named for the October date it commenced – Delhi has started to question whether the junta can win what is undoubtedly a civil war against fighters of the large number of Ethnic Armed Organisations and Peoples Defence Forces (PDFs). Estimates of how little of the country’s territory is under central government control range from 25 to 50 per cent. In Chin State, junta-controlled territory is said to be as low as 10 per cent and following the latest rebel offensive the figure for Rakhine State may soon approach that.
The junta that rules Myanmar is an international pariah, shunned even by ASEAN, the regional organisation of which it is nominally a member. In early December its principal backer, China, considered switching sides after the regime lost control of the strategic trading township of Laukkai, heart of the Kokang region on Myanmar’s border with China.
CHINESE INTERVENTION
Then on 14 December China’s top diplomat Wang Yi announced it had negotiated a ceasefire between the junta and the insurgents, apparently reaffirming Beijing’s support for the government of Senior General Ming Aung Hlaing. China is far and away the main supporter and trading partner of Myanmar, a fact that causes some anxiety in Delhi. It has allegedly sold the junta $250 million worth of arms including fighter aircraft.
Delhi has said little publicly about recent developments in Myanmar, but clues to official thinking can be gleaned from the words of former Indian ambassadors to Yangon, where Myanmar’s diplomatic community are based. Writing last year in The Wire, an Indian on-line journal, former Indian ambassador Gautam Mukhopadhaya argued that unless India’s government starts to talk to the underground National Unity Government (NUG), which loosely coordinates the insurgency of EAOs and PDFs, it risks losing influence in Myanmar.
Another former ambassador to Yangon, Rajiv Bhatia, wrote recently in the Hindu newspaper that the unrecognised NUG “has defied the odds” winning many battles through the Peoples Defence Forces including in rural Bamar areas where EAOs have not traditionally been active.
Saying the military “has never faced such a dismal situation” as its defeat at the hands of the Three Brotherhood Alliance, and pointing to “considerable discontent within the military against its current
leadership”, Bhatia said the Indian government should be engaging with the National Unity Government, which is mainly made up of deposed former parliamentarians, as well as with some of the rebel groups.
BROADENING SPACE
“India should balance its friendly ties with the military government by broadening the space for engagement with other shareholders.” In this way, argued Bhatia, India can protect its national interests, while not interfering in Myanmar’s internal affairs.
He also called on his government to negotiate the release from solitary confinement of the country’s former leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. It would be surprising if India’s current ambassador to Yangon was not giving similar advice to that of two of his predecessors.
For the next two months India will be preoccupied with its own exercise of democracy, while trying to maintain stability and security in the border state of Manipur. By the time the promised fence is built along the international frontier there is a strong likelihood that different forces will be in control in Myanmar.
Originally published as the cover story in Mizzima Weekly Issue 3 on 25 April 2024.
