India-Myanmar Relations (PSIR Optional)

Myanmar is the only country with which India shares both a long land frontier and a settled maritime boundary in the east, and the only one that is simultaneously a South Asian neighbour and a member of ASEAN. That double membership is not a curiosity of cartography: it is the reason every eastward ambition India has — Act East, the Bay of Bengal, the economic revival of the North-East — runs physically through Myanmar, and the reason a civil war in Rakhine and Sagaing registers in New Delhi as a domestic problem rather than a foreign one.

The Geography That Makes Myanmar Unlike Any Other Neighbour

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• The 1,643 km land border runs along four Indian states — Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram — and on the Myanmar side along Sagaing Region and Chin and Kachin States.
  • Every one of those Indian states has had an insurgency; every one of those Myanmar units is contested territory. The border is not a line between two settled administrations but a seam joining two peripheries.
  • It is hill country, densely forested and almost entirely unfenced, which is a physical fact with more policy consequence than any treaty in the relationship.
• Myanmar is India’s only eastern neighbour with both a land and a maritime boundary, the latter running through the Bay of Bengal, the Coco Channel and the Andaman Sea.
  • The maritime boundary agreement of 23 December 1986 delimited it, and it has never been disputed since — one of the very few completely uncontested boundaries India possesses.
  • India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands lie closer to Myanmar’s coast than to the Indian mainland, which is why the Andaman and Nicobar Command reads Myanmar’s littoral as part of its own operating environment.
• Myanmar’s 2,276 km coastline gives any power established on it a second front on the Bay of Bengal — the strategic proposition that has driven Indian anxiety about China in Myanmar for three decades.
• It is the only ASEAN member with a land border with India, and simultaneously a member of BIMSTEC and the Mekong-Ganga Cooperation.
  • India joined BIMSTEC’s predecessor grouping in 1997 alongside Myanmar’s accession in December of that year; Myanmar’s presence is what converts BIMSTEC from a South Asian rump into a bridge across the Bay.
  • Myanmar’s ASEAN membership in July 1997 meant that from that moment India’s Myanmar policy and India’s Southeast Asia policy became the same policy.

India’s boundaries with Myanmar are the least disputed it has anywhere; what crosses them is the most dangerous.

The Colonial Inheritance and the Question of the Indian-Origin Community

Burma as a Province of British India

• Burma was annexed in stages and made a province of British India after the third Anglo-Burmese war, with the final annexation of Upper Burma proclaimed on 1 January 1886.
  • Administrative separation came only with the Government of India Act 1935, which took effect on 1 April 1937 — Burma became a distinct British colony with its own governor and legislature.
  • Fifty-one years inside the Indian administrative system is why Burma’s law, currency, civil service and commercial classes were so heavily Indian, and why the relationship began with a burden of intimacy that neither side had chosen.
• The exile traffic ran both ways, and it is the sharpest single image of the shared past.
  • Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, was deported after 1857 and died in Rangoon in 1862, where his grave remains a dargah.
  • Thibaw, the last king of Burma, was deported in the opposite direction after 1885 and died at Ratnagiri in 1916.
• The religious link is older and deeper than the colonial one: Buddhism travelled from India to Burma, and Bodh Gaya remains the destination of Burmese pilgrimage, restored in part by Burmese patronage.
  • Modern Indian governments — particularly after 1998 — have used this Buddhist connection deliberately as a cultural instrument of engagement, restoring the Ananda temple at Bagan and offering scholarships and heritage conservation.

The Community That Was Dispossessed

• At independence there were between 700,000 and 800,000 people of Indian origin in Burma, concentrated in Rangoon’s commerce, the professions, the police and the moneylending sector.
  • The Chettiar moneylenders had come to own a very large share of the paddy land of Lower Burma through foreclosure during the Depression, which fixed the community in Burmese nationalist memory as an instrument of colonial extraction rather than as fellow subjects of it.
  • The pejorative kala attached to them, and the resentment was economic and racial at once.
• Dispossession began before the coup, under a democratic government.
  • The Land Alienation Act of 1948 barred the sale of land to non-nationals; the Land Nationalisation Act of 1949 reclaimed Indian-owned land.
  • Over 10,000 Indians were dismissed from Burmese government service in 1953.
  • Nehru’s response was studiedly muted — he facilitated repatriation but advised Indians in Burma to take Burmese nationality and settle, treating their grievance as subordinate to the state-to-state relationship.
• The rupture came after Ne Win’s coup of 2 March 1962 and the Enterprise Nationalisation Law of 1963.
  • Wholesale nationalisation of trade, banking and industry destroyed the community’s economic base; bank accounts were closed and businesses seized without meaningful compensation.
  • Roughly 300,000 people of Indian origin left Burma in the years that followed, many arriving destitute in Madras and Calcutta, and the episode became a standing grievance in Indian domestic politics.
• The consequence for the relationship was structural, not sentimental: the diaspora that might have been India’s constituency inside Burma was removed, leaving India with no domestic lobby in Yangon at precisely the moment China was building one.

Phase One: Solidarity Between Nehru and U Nu, 1948–1962

• Burma became independent on 4 January 1948, five months after India, and the two governments began as the closest of the new Asian states.
  • Nehru and U Nu exchanged visits almost annually across the whole period, and the personal relationship carried the official one.
  • India supplied arms to Rangoon for its counter-insurgency campaigns in 1949, when the Burmese state was fighting communist and Karen insurrections and its survival was genuinely in doubt.
• The Treaty of Friendship signed at Rangoon in July 1951 committed the two to “everlasting peace and unalterable friendship”, and Nehru cancelled a substantial part of Burma’s debt to India in 1954.
• The ideological convergence was as important as the diplomacy.
  • Both states adopted non-alignment, pan-Asianism and a socialist-inflected developmental economics, and both sought leadership of the decolonising world.
  • After India and China signed the Panchsheel agreement in April 1954, Nehru pressed Burma to adopt the same five principles with China, which it did two months later — India acting as sponsor of its neighbour’s China policy, a role it would never occupy again.
  • India and Burma were among the initiators of the Bandung Conference of 1955, the line that runs to the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.
• Two flaws were present from the start and would define everything after.
  • The diaspora question was already corroding the relationship while the leaders were embracing.
  • The Sino-Burmese relationship was deepening in parallel, with a boundary settlement and a treaty of friendship in 1960 — Burma balancing between two large neighbours, which is what it has done ever since.

Phase Two: Estrangement, 1962–1988

• Ne Win’s coup of March 1962 set aside U Nu, dissolved parliament and installed the Burma Socialist Programme Party as a one-party state. India condemned it.
  • Within seven months India was at war with China, and Rangoon’s neutrality on the Sino-Indian war was read in Delhi as tacit support for Beijing.
  • The “Burmese Way to Socialism” combined autarky with a xenophobic nationalism that hit foreign communities hardest — and hit Indians hardest of all.
• China’s simultaneous sponsorship of the Communist Party of Burma insurgency from 1962 made the CPB the best-armed of Burma’s many rebellions and poisoned Sino-Burmese relations for two decades, a complication India was in no position to exploit.
  • The anti-Chinese riots of 1967 ended the era of paukphaw — sibling — relations, and Beijing’s reaction was far sharper than India’s had been over its own dispossessed.
  • By the late 1970s China had begun restraining the CPB; the party dissolved in 1989, and its ethnic remnants became the armed groups China still influences today.
• Cooperation nonetheless survived at the level where both states had an identical interest.
  • The land boundary agreement of 10 March 1967 settled the frontier, prompted on both sides by Naga and Mizo insurgencies that used it.
  • There were episodic joint counter-insurgency operations in the border areas, and Ne Win visited Delhi while Lal Bahadur Shastri visited Rangoon in the mid-1960s.
• Relations cooled again in the 1970s. U Nu, exiled by Ne Win, was granted asylum in India, which Rangoon treated as a hostile act.
  • Burma’s withdrawal from the Non-Aligned Movement in 1979 removed the last shared multilateral platform.
  • Indira Gandhi visited in 1969; the next prime ministerial visit was Rajiv Gandhi’s in 1987 — a twenty-year gap that measures the estrangement exactly.
• The one durable achievement of the period is the maritime boundary agreement of 1986, negotiated quietly and never questioned since, which stands in instructive contrast to the boundary litigation that has occupied India’s other maritime neighbours.

1988–1993: The Pivot from Declared Values to Stated Interests

India’s shift from being the democracy movement’s loudest Asian champion to being the junta’s most useful large neighbour took barely five years. It is the clearest episode of value-to-interest substitution in Indian foreign policy since 1947, and it is worth reconstructing carefully because both the criticism and the defence of it are strong.

India as the Democracy Movement’s Only Asian Friend

• The 8888 uprising of August 1988 was crushed by the army, and the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) took power in September.
• India was the first and the only Asian country to condemn the new junta. No other government in the region did.
  • The Indian embassy in Rangoon turned its library into a makeshift hospital for injured demonstrators and channelled financial support to activists.
  • All India Radio began Burmese-language broadcasts on the repression, read by U Nu’s daughter — state media used as an instrument of ideological opposition to a neighbouring government.
  • Refugee camps were opened in Mizoram and Manipur for those who fled, and Indian territory became the rear base of the exiled Burmese democratic movement.
• The commitment was sustained after the junta annulled the 1990 election the NLD had won and kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest from July 1989.
  • Narasimha Rao publicly welcomed her Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
  • In 1993 India conferred on her the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding — the country’s highest honour for a foreigner, awarded to a prisoner of a government India was at that very moment beginning to court.

The Three Drivers of the Reversal

• Insurgent sanctuaries. Naga, Manipuri and Assamese groups were operating out of Sagaing, Chin and Kachin territory, and no Indian counter-insurgency campaign in the North-East could succeed without the cooperation of whoever actually governed the Myanmar side. That was the army, and only the army.
• China. After 1988 Beijing became Yangon’s principal patron almost overnight — arms, aid, infrastructure and diplomatic cover — while everyone else withdrew.
  • Reports in 1992 of Chinese signals-intelligence facilities on the Coco Islands and Hainggyi crystallised an Indian fear that a Yunnan-to-Bay-of-Bengal corridor could carry soldiers as easily as goods.
  • The Coco Islands sit barely 30 nautical miles north of India’s Andaman group, which is why the reports mattered so much even though their accuracy was always contested.
• Energy and the eastward turn. Myanmar’s offshore gas was becoming commercially interesting, and Look East, launched under Narasimha Rao in 1991, required a land bridge that only Myanmar could provide.
• The turn was executed by the diplomatic establishment rather than announced politically. Foreign Secretary J.N. Dixit’s visit in March 1993 was the first high-level contact since 1988 and was understood on both sides as the confirmation of a policy change.
  • Dixit’s own later formulation was that the review was driven by “Myanmar’s geostrategic importance for India”, and above all by the need to ensure Myanmar did not become the exclusive sphere of a power with which India had uneasy relations.

“It was equally important to ensure that Myanmar does not become part of an exclusive area of influence of other powers in the region with whom India has uneasy relations. China, for instance.”

— J.N. Dixit

The Case Against the Pivot and the Case For It

• The honest verdict is that both sides of the ledger are correct, and the reason the debate never closes is that the two goods — democratic solidarity and territorial security — genuinely could not both be had.
• The scholarly consensus is that India’s reversal was belated in execution as well as unattractive in principle: although the policy changed in 1991–93, tangible results appeared only in the early 2000s, after Jaswant Singh’s “Eastern strategy” as Foreign Minister and the shift to treating trade as an instrument of foreign policy.
  • Than Shwe’s visit in 2004 was the first Myanmar head-of-state visit to India in twenty years.
  • The UPA governments from 2004 continued and intensified the engagement, and Manmohan Singh’s visit in 2012 — meeting Thein Sein and Aung San Suu Kyi on the same trip — was the moment India tried, briefly, to hold both halves of its old position at once.

The Opening of 2011–2020 and the Contest of Suitors

• Myanmar’s controlled liberalisation under Thein Sein from 2011 — the dissolution of the SPDC, Aung San Suu Kyi’s release, the NLD’s return to legal politics and its 43 seats in the by-elections of 2012 — removed the awkwardness of India’s position without removing its difficulty.
  • The NLD’s landslide of November 2015 and the government it formed in 2016 were welcomed in India, and Manmohan Singh’s 2012 visit had already established the practice of meeting both the government and the opposition.
  • Suu Kyi visited India in November 2012, delivering the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture and returning to the Delhi college where she had studied — an attempt to repair a personal connection India had cultivated and then set aside.
• Liberalisation cut both ways for India, and this is the analytically important point.
  • Myanmar’s international options multiplied. Sanctions lifted, and Japan, the United States, the European Union and South Korea entered a field India had previously shared only with China.
  • Japan cancelled about US$3.7 billion of Myanmar’s debt after Shinzo Abe’s 2013 visit and became the largest source of concessional finance — a competitor India could not match on terms.
  • India therefore lost its privileged access without gaining a completed project: it was now one suitor among many in a country that could choose.
• The evidence that Myanmar was hedging against China rather than embracing it came from Naypyidaw itself.
  • Thein Sein suspended the Chinese-financed Myitsone dam in 2011 and the Letpadaung copper mine faced sustained protest — read in India as proof that Burmese nationalism would limit Chinese dominance.
  • That reading proved only half right: the projects stalled, but China’s overall position kept growing.

Security Cooperation: The Relationship’s Most Functional Pillar

The Shared Insurgency Problem

• The 1967 boundary cut through the homelands of communities on both sides, and the groups that fight the Indian state and those that fight the Myanmar state occupy the same terrain.
  • NSCN factions, principally NSCN-Khaplang, have held camps in Sagaing and have at times been the dominant armed authority in the Naga Self-Administered Zone.
  • The United Liberation Front of Asom (Independent) relocated its leadership across the border after Bhutan’s Operation All Clear closed its Bhutanese camps.
  • Manipur valley-based groups — the People’s Liberation Army, UNLF, PREPAK and KYKL — have used Myanmar territory as rear base, training ground and arms conduit.
• The arms pipeline is the part India can least control, and it runs through China.
  • The United Wa State Army, the largest and best-equipped ethnic armed organisation in Myanmar, is the single largest source of weapons for North-East insurgents and is closely aligned with Beijing.
  • China’s relationship with the UWSA is a strategic asset it values more highly than its relationship with any Myanmar government, which is the structural reason India’s counter-insurgency cooperation with Naypyidaw can never fully solve the arms problem.
• Narcotics compound it. The border faces the Golden Triangle, and the flow has shifted from heroin to methamphetamine, with the Moreh and Champhai axes as the principal entry points and Manipur and Mizoram as the first markets.

The Operations, and What Each Demonstrates

• Operation Golden Bird, April–May 1995 — the single most instructive episode in the relationship.
  • The 57 Mountain Division tracked a large insurgent column moving a weapons consignment landed on the Arakan coast, north through the Mizoram jungles toward Manipur; Myanmar sealed its side of the border to close the trap.
  • The operation ran forty-five days and produced 38 insurgents killed and well over a hundred captured, with substantial arms recovered.
  • The Myanmar army then withdrew mid-operation, and the reason was the Jawaharlal Nehru Award to Aung San Suu Kyi. The dragnet opened and the survivors escaped into the Chin Hills.
  • No other episode states the values-interests tension so exactly: India’s highest civilian honour to a democrat cost it a counter-insurgency operation in the same season.
• Annual winter campaigns from 2000, resumed and strengthened through 2000–01, institutionalised what Golden Bird had shown was possible when politics did not intervene.
• The cross-border operation of June 2015. After an ambush in Chandel district, Manipur, on 4 June 2015 killed eighteen soldiers, Indian special forces struck camps across the border on 9 June.
  • The operation was publicised aggressively in India and denied by Myanmar, which insisted no incursion had occurred — a reminder that Indian domestic messaging about such operations is itself a cost to the relationship.
• Operation Sunrise, 2019, was the high point of coordination — two armies operating simultaneously on their own sides of the line rather than one crossing it.
  • Sunrise I, February–March 2019, cleared camps threatening the Kaladan corridor while the Myanmar army struck NSCN-K positions.
  • Sunrise II, May–June 2019, targeted NSCN-K, ULFA, NDFB and the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation, with more than sixty militants detained.
  • In 2020 Myanmar handed over 22 insurgents — including senior NDFB and NSCN-K cadres — the most substantive single act of cooperation the relationship has produced.
• The institutional scaffolding is real: National-level and Sectoral Level Meetings between the armies, a Joint Consultative Commission, training slots for Myanmar officers in Indian academies, and joint naval exercises since 2003 with Myanmar’s participation in MILAN.
  • India has supplied offshore patrol vessels, sonar, torpedoes and, in 2020, a Kilo-class submarine, the first India ever transferred to another state.

The Honest Limits

• Myanmar’s army has never fully cleared the sanctuaries, because it has never had either the capacity or an unqualified incentive to do so — Indian insurgent groups have at times been useful to it against its own ethnic armies.
• Since February 2021 the point is moot: the Tatmadaw does not control most of the relevant borderland, so an agreement with it about that territory is an agreement about something it cannot deliver.
• The arms flow has reversed direction. Weapons looted from Myanmar police and army posts during the civil war have moved into Manipur, feeding a conflict inside India rather than merely sheltering one.

The Free Movement Regime and the Hardening of the Border

The India–Myanmar boundary was drawn by British administrators through the middle of living communities, and for seventy years both states managed that fact by not enforcing it. The decision to reverse that arrangement is the largest change in India’s border policy in the east since 1967, and it has been taken while the country on the other side is at war with itself.

What the Regime Was

• The arrangement dates from India’s Passport Rules of 1950, which exempted hill communities living along the frontier from documentary requirements — a recognition that the boundary had divided Naga, Kuki-Chin-Mizo and other kinship groups rather than separating two peoples.
  • The permitted depth was originally 40 km on either side and was progressively reduced, settling at 16 km, with stays of up to two weeks on a border pass.
  • Burma maintained a mirror arrangement from 1948; the regime was reciprocal, not an Indian concession.
• It sustained an entire border economy — markets, seasonal labour, cross-border schooling and health care, marriage and clan networks, and a large informal trade in rice, bamboo, betel, textiles and motorcycles that never appeared in any trade statistic.
• Its costs were equally real: the same freedom carried insurgent movement, small arms, methamphetamine and undocumented migration, and there was no biometric record of who crossed.

The Decision to End It

• The Union Home Minister announced the scrapping of the Free Movement Regime on 8 February 2024, together with a decision to fence the entire 1,643 km border.
  • The stated grounds were the internal security of the North-East and the preservation of the demographic structure of the border states — the second formulation being the contested one.
  • The trigger was the Manipur conflict from May 2023, in which cross-border movement of arms and people was treated by the state government as a principal aggravating factor.
• The formal notification has still not issued. What operates instead is an administrative tightening: a border-pass system, rolled out from December 2024 through a set of designated crossing points with biometric capture, and movement narrowed from 16 km to about 10 km.
  • The regime is therefore best described as announced and partially implemented through a permit system rather than legally abolished — a state of suspension that suits a government facing opposed state governments.
• The Cabinet Committee on Security approved fencing in September 2024 at a cost of about ₹31,000 crore over roughly a decade, executed largely by the Border Roads Organisation.
  • Progress is slight. Only about 30 km of the 1,643 km had physical fencing by 2025, under two per cent, and the terrain makes the projected timelines optimistic.
  • The gap between the announcement and the concrete is itself the story: the policy has already imposed its political costs while delivering almost none of its security benefits.

The States Do Not Agree

• The federal dimension is genuine and unusual: border management is a Union subject, but its costs fall almost entirely on states that have voted against it.
• The deeper political consequence — how the scrapping interacts with the ethno-political architecture of the North-East, the Naga peace process and the Kuki-Zo question — belongs with the study of ethnic conflict and insurgency in the region, where the argument can be made properly.

A boundary that two states agreed in 1967 not to enforce is now being fenced by one of them while the other has ceased to control its side of it.

Connectivity: Where the Relationship Is Tested and Where It Fails

The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project

• The project’s purpose is to give the North-East sea access that does not pass through the Siliguri corridor — the twenty-odd kilometre isthmus on which the entire land connection of eight states presently depends.
  • Conceived in 2003 and agreed with Myanmar in 2008, at an original cost of about US$500 million since substantially exceeded.
  • The route: Kolkata to Sittwe by sea (539 km); Sittwe up the Kaladan river to Paletwa (158 km); Paletwa by road to Zorinpui on the Mizoram border (108 km); and Zorinpui onward to Aizawl (about 110 km).
• The Indian half is finished.
  • India took operational control of Sittwe port in May 2023, the first cargo vessel arriving that month; the terminal is run by India Ports Global, making it India’s second overseas port operation after Chabahar.
  • The Zorinpui–Aizawl road was completed in March 2024, and a further upgrade of the Mizoram stretch has been sanctioned.
• The Myanmar half is in rebel hands.
  • Paletwa fell to the Arakan Army in January 2024. The Arakan Army now holds the completed Paletwa–Kaletwa road, along with Pauktaw, Ponnagyun, Kyauktaw and Mrauk-U, and controls the approaches to Sittwe itself.
  • It levies a transit charge of roughly 5 per cent on commercial traffic moving between Mizoram and Chin State — a non-state actor taxing an Indian sovereign connectivity project.
  • The remaining 42 km of the Paletwa–Zorinpui road has earthwork done but no bridges or surfacing, and the work can only proceed with the Arakan Army’s acquiescence.
• The deadline has moved from 2014 to 2023 to 2027, and the third date is credible only if the Arakan Army wants it to be.
  • The corridor’s urgency increased sharply after the change of government in Bangladesh in August 2024, because the Chattogram transhipment alternative can no longer be assumed.

The India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway

• The highway runs Moreh in Manipur through Mandalay to Mae Sot in Thailand, about 1,360 km, and was agreed in 2002 with a succession of missed completion dates.
  • Roughly 70 per cent is complete, and almost all the incomplete portion is in Myanmar.
  • India funded and built the Tamu–Kyigone–Kalewa road (about 150 km) and the reconstruction of 69 bridges on the Tamu–Kalewa–Kalemyo stretch, plus repairs to a further 73 wartime bridges.
• The Kalewa–Yagyi section, about 120 km, is the binding constraint. Awarded in 2018 at roughly ₹1,177 crore for completion by 2021, it remains unfinished, and Sagaing — the region it crosses — has been among the most violently contested areas of the civil war.
• Proposals to extend the highway to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, and to admit Bangladesh, are meaningless until Myanmar’s own stretch exists.

Border Trade and the Local Economy

• The India–Myanmar Border Trade Agreement of April 1995 established formal trade at designated points: Moreh–Tamu (Manipur), Zowkhathar–Rihkhawdar (Mizoram) and Avangkhu (Nagaland).
  • The Rhi–Tiddim road, built with Indian assistance to connect Mizoram’s Zowkhathar crossing to Tiddim in Chin State, is a second axis whose completion has been repeatedly deferred by the conflict.
• Formal border trade has effectively collapsed. Successive closures — demonetisation, the pandemic, the coup, the Manipur conflict and the end of the barter regime — have pushed almost all activity into informal channels, and the crossings have functioned more as refugee and smuggling routes than as trade points.
• Multilateral connectivity frameworks have run into the same wall.
  • The Mekong-Ganga Cooperation, launched in 2000 with Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, has delivered culture, tourism and scholarships rather than infrastructure.
  • The BCIM corridor — Bangladesh, China, India, Myanmar — grew out of China’s Kunming Initiative of 1999 and was revived after 2013, but India allowed it to lapse as its reservations about the Belt and Road hardened.
• The contrast with China is stark: China’s land trade with Myanmar has been an order of magnitude larger than India’s throughout, and the Muse–Ruili crossing alone has handled multiples of everything on India’s border combined.

Trade, Energy and What India Could Not Buy

• Bilateral trade reached about US$1.95 billion in 2025–26, up roughly a quarter on the previous year, with Indian exports around US$0.8 billion; India is now Myanmar’s fourth-largest trading partner.
  • A rupee–kyat trade settlement mechanism became operational in January 2024, an instrument of sanctions-resilience as much as of trade facilitation.
  • The declared target of the two governments is US$5 billion, restated in 2026.
• Energy is the clearest case of India losing a contest it had entered first.
  • ONGC Videsh holds 17 per cent and GAIL 8.5 per cent of the Shwe gas field in blocks A-1 and A-3 off Rakhine, with POSCO as operator — a genuine Indian stake in Myanmar’s largest gas discovery.
  • India could not build a pipeline to take the gas, because a route through Bangladesh failed politically and a route through the North-East failed commercially. China built a double pipeline from Kyaukphyu to Kunming in five years and took the offtake on a thirty-year contract.
  • Indian companies therefore own a share of gas that flows to China — the single most economical statement of the asymmetry between the two countries’ performance in Myanmar.
• Power is the area with genuine new movement: an MoU on cross-border electricity interconnection was agreed in 2025, and India has explored supplying power into Chin State, including Paletwa township, across territory the central government does not hold.

The Development Partnership

• India’s development assistance portfolio in Myanmar is worth roughly US$1.5 billion, of which close to US$1 billion has been extended as grant rather than loan — a deliberate contrast with lending-led Chinese finance.
  • The Union Budget for 2026–27 allocates ₹300 crore to Myanmar, a modest figure that nonetheless places it above Bangladesh in India’s neighbourhood aid table.
• The visible institutions are educational and technical rather than monumental.
  • The Myanmar Institute of Information Technology at Mandalay and the Advanced Centre for Agricultural Research and Education at Yezin were built and staffed with Indian support.
  • Industrial training centres at Pakokku, Myingyan, Monywa and Thaton train technicians, and Myanmar takes one of the largest national quotas of ITEC training slots.
  • A Border Area Development Programme funds schools, health centres, roads and bridges on the Myanmar side of the frontier, on the theory that a developed border is a quieter one.
• Cultural and heritage work carries the Buddhist connection into policy.
  • The Archaeological Survey of India restored the Ananda temple at Bagan and undertook conservation after the 2016 earthquake damaged the temple complex.
  • Scholarships under the Mekong-Ganga Cooperation were raised from 36 to 100 places from 2026.
• The Rakhine State Development Programme — housing and infrastructure in the districts the Rohingya fled — is India’s chosen instrument on that question, and its logic is that displacement is a development failure before it is a human-rights one.
  • Its weakness is that it was designed with a central government that has since lost the state to the Arakan Army.

The Maritime Dimension and the Bay of Bengal

• The maritime relationship has been the quietest and the most consistently successful part of the partnership, precisely because it is insulated from the politics of the land border.
• Joint naval exercises have run annually since 2003, and Myanmar’s navy participates in MILAN, the multilateral exercise the Indian Navy hosts from Port Blair and Visakhapatnam.
  • Coordinated patrols along the settled maritime boundary began in the 2010s and have continued through the coup, one of the few channels never suspended.
  • Myanmar naval vessels made their first port calls to mainland India in 2013, and India has supplied offshore patrol vessels, sonar and training to build a navy it would rather see Indian-equipped than Chinese-equipped.
• The strategic content is straightforward: India wants intelligence on Chinese activity along Myanmar’s coast, wants Myanmar’s littoral to remain a place where the Indian Navy operates freely, and wants the Andaman and Nicobar Command’s approaches uncomplicated.
• Myanmar is also the hinge of India’s Bay of Bengal architecture — the only member of BIMSTEC bordering India by land and the only bridge between its South Asian and Southeast Asian halves.
  • BIMSTEC’s connectivity agenda has effectively stalled on Myanmar’s crisis, which is the clearest demonstration that the Bay of Bengal cannot be organised around a country in civil war.

Since the Coup of 1 February 2021

The Tatmadaw’s seizure of power on the morning the new parliament was to convene reopened every question the 1993 pivot had settled, and did so in far worse conditions: not an authoritarian state India could deal with, but a state that has lost control of the territory India cares about.

India’s Hedge and Its Reasoning

• India’s response was calibrated to the point of minimalism: expressions of “deep concern”, calls for the release of detainees and a return to democracy, support for ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus — and no condemnation, no sanctions, no downgrading of contact.
  • India abstained on the UN General Assembly resolution of June 2021 calling for an arms embargo, and has consistently declined to join Western sanctions regimes.
  • Indian officials attended the junta’s Armed Forces Day and Myanmar’s ambassadorial appointments were accepted, while diplomatic engagement continued at foreign-secretary level.
• The reasoning is the same reasoning as 1993, in harder circumstances.
  • A 1,643 km border that cannot be secured without the cooperation of whoever holds the other side.
  • Connectivity assets already sunk in Sittwe and on the Kaladan road.
  • The certainty that any space India vacates is occupied by China within months, as it was after 1988.
  • The Rohingya precedent: India’s Bangladesh relationship carries the cost of Myanmar’s displacement, so India has an interest in Rakhine’s stability that sanctions cannot serve.
• The criticism is not that India engaged, but what it engaged with.
  • Continued Indian arms and dual-use supplies to the Myanmar military after the coup, documented by UN special rapporteurs and civil-society researchers, drew sustained criticism; India’s position has been that the transfers are small and not counter-insurgency related.
  • Indian democratic solidarity, so vocal in 1988, has been conspicuously quiet since 2021 — a silence that costs India the very distinction from China it usually claims.

The Territory the Junta Does Not Hold

• The civil war since 2021 has produced the largest loss of central control in Myanmar’s post-independence history, with resistance forces and ethnic armed organisations holding much of the periphery.
  • The Arakan Army is the dominant authority in Rakhine, holding most townships and pressing Sittwe and Kyaukphyu; it also runs a civil administration.
  • Chin resistance groups — the Chin National Front and the Chin Brotherhood — hold most of the Mizoram frontier, which means India’s border in that sector faces no Myanmar state at all.
  • The Kachin Independence Organisation holds Kachin, including the rare-earth mining belt.
• The roots of that fragmentation are older than the coup, which is why no settlement between Naypyidaw and Delhi can resolve it.
  • The Panglong Agreement of February 1947, signed by Aung San with Shan, Kachin and Chin leaders, promised full internal autonomy to the frontier areas; military rule abandoned it, and every ethnic armed organisation since has traced its claim to that abandonment.
  • The Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement of 2015 was signed by only a minority of groups; the UWSA and the Kachin Independence Organisation stayed out, both of them under Chinese influence.
  • The demand across the resistance is for genuine federalism, which is precisely what no Tatmadaw-drafted constitution has ever conceded.
• The military’s position improved through 2025–26 with heavy Chinese support.
  • Beijing-brokered pressure on the MNDAA and TNLA allowed the army to retake Lashio, Kyaukme, Hsipaw and Mogoke by March 2026, restoring part of the Mandalay–Muse corridor.
  • China’s ability to reverse the battlefield is a capability India does not possess and cannot acquire — the single most important asymmetry in the two countries’ positions.

The Staged Elections and Min Aung Hlaing’s Presidency

• The junta held the elections it had promised since 2021, in three phases: 28 December 2025, 11 January 2026 and 25 January 2026.
  • Voting took place in only about 265 of 330 townships, essentially those the army holds; large rural areas did not vote at all.
  • The regime claimed turnout of roughly 55 per cent, well down on the seventy per cent of 2015 and 2020.
  • The National League for Democracy had been dissolved for refusing to register under the new party law, and Aung San Suu Kyi and Win Myint remained imprisoned throughout.
  • The Union Solidarity and Development Party took the overwhelming majority — around 233 of 330 elected seats in the lower house — and with the 25 per cent of seats reserved for serving officers, military-aligned strength exceeded 85 per cent of the legislature.
• The transition was completed with precision.
  • Parliament convened on 16 March 2026 for the first time in five years; Min Aung Hlaing retired as commander-in-chief on 30 March, was elected President on 3 April 2026 and sworn in on 10 April.
  • The exercise converted a coup leader into a constitutional president without changing who governs — institutional redesign rather than transition.
• India’s public position was a study in calibration.
  • The Ministry of External Affairs said India “supports free, fair and inclusive elections” with the “participation of all political stakeholders” — a formulation that neither endorses nor condemns, and whose operative word is inclusive.
  • India did not treat the outcome as a legitimacy question; it did not join the United Nations, the United States or European partners in describing the polls as a sham, and it dealt with the new government from the day it was formed.

Min Aung Hlaing in New Delhi, 30 May – 3 June 2026

• The new President’s official visit to India, 30 May to 3 June 2026, was his first bilateral visit to a major democracy as head of state and the clearest possible statement of India’s operating policy.
  • The joint statement committed both sides to completing the Kaladan project and the Trilateral Highway, expanded cooperation in agro-processing, petroleum, energy and mining, and raised Mekong-Ganga scholarships from 36 to 100 from 2026.
  • Rare earths and critical minerals were the headline new item — an attempt to open a supply source outside Chinese control.
  • Myanmar reiterated that its territory would not be permitted to be used against India’s security interests, the standing formula of the relationship.
  • India reaffirmed support for Myanmar’s sovereignty and territorial integrity — language that, in a civil war, is not neutral.
• What the visit did not produce is as telling as what it did.
  • No new agreements of substance were signed, and the US$5 billion trade target was restated rather than approached.
  • The rare-earths opening runs into the fact that the Kachin mining belt is held by the Kachin Independence Organisation and its output is already contracted to Chinese buyers — India is bargaining with a government that does not control the resource.
  • Aung San Suu Kyi’s detention was raised, according to Indian accounts, but without public follow-through.
• The strongest reading is the one Rajiv Bhatia offered: the significance lay in the fact of the visit rather than in its content, while conceding that India still has considerable ground to cover before it can compete with Beijing’s presence.

“The visit, by the very fact that it is taking place, conveys the ultimate symbolism that Myanmar wants to follow an independent and balanced foreign policy.”

— Rajiv Bhatia

Humanitarian Response and the Refugee Divergence

• Operation Brahma, launched after the 7.7-magnitude earthquake of 28 March 2025 that killed several thousand people, was India’s most effective single act in Myanmar in a decade.
  • India was the first responder, delivering relief within hours, deploying an 118-member army field hospital at Mandalay with a sixty-bed treatment centre, an 80-member NDRF search-and-rescue team, and naval and air lift of tents, food, medicine and water purifiers.
  • It reprised the pattern India relies on across the neighbourhood — arriving first with public goods, which buys more durable goodwill than any strategic bargain.
  • Modi met Min Aung Hlaing on the sidelines of the BIMSTEC Summit at Bangkok on 4 April 2025, days after the earthquake, in the first such meeting since the coup.
• Refugees are where the Union government and a state government of India have taken publicly different positions on a foreign-policy question.
  • Something over 75,000 people have crossed from Myanmar into India since the coup; Mizoram’s own count is close to 29,000 Myanmar nationals across eleven districts, with civil-society estimates considerably higher, alongside displaced persons from Manipur.
  • The Ministry of Home Affairs instructed border states to refuse entry in March 2021 and ordered biometric registration from 2023.
  • Mizoram refused. Chief Ministers Zoramthanga and then Lalduhoma have both sheltered the arrivals on the ground that the Chin are the same Zo people as the Mizo, and the state government, churches and the Young Mizo Association have run the relief effort with little central assistance.
  • Manipur has taken the opposite line, registering, detaining and deporting, which maps exactly onto its position on the Free Movement Regime.
  • The phenomenon of cross-border displacement, and its security consequences for India, are treated with the study of illegal migration; what belongs here is the bilateral fact that India’s Myanmar policy is now being made in Aizawl as well as in New Delhi.

The Borderlands Argument

• The live policy debate is no longer whether to engage Naypyidaw, but whether engaging Naypyidaw alone can achieve anything at all.
  • Avinash Paliwal argues that India’s north-eastern frontier has always been governed by improvisation and local bargains rather than by grand strategy, and that a capital-to-capital policy misreads what actually determines outcomes there.
  • The borderlands case, argued by Sangmuan Hangsing among others, is that authority in western and northern Myanmar is now dispersed among ethnic armed organisations, resistance administrations and local institutions, so that connectivity, trade, humanitarian access and influence are negotiated locally or not at all.
• India has in practice begun to move, quietly and without acknowledging a doctrine.
  • The Ministry of External Affairs announced cross-border electricity supply to Arakan Army-held Paletwa in September 2024.
  • Officials met representatives of the Arakan Army, the Chin National Front, the Chin Brotherhood and the National Unity Government separately in New Delhi in November 2024 — the first structured contact of its kind.
  • Mizoram’s chief minister has met Arakan Army representatives directly, and an Arakan Army spokesman has stated publicly that the group is as invested in Kaladan’s completion as India is.
• The counter-argument deserves its weight.
  • Engaging armed groups risks the sovereignty principle India insists on for itself, and would be cited against India by others.
  • It antagonises whichever authority eventually consolidates, and India’s record of backing losing sides in Myanmar is not encouraging.
  • The groups themselves are not a single interlocutor — the Arakan Army, the Chin factions and the NUG have divergent and sometimes hostile aims.
• The sharpest formulation of the Indian dilemma is that the two arms of the Indian state are pulling in opposite directions.
  • The Home Ministry is fencing and sealing a border that the External Affairs Ministry needs open.
  • A hard border contradicts the connectivity objective that is the entire justification for engaging Myanmar in the first place.
  • It also alienates precisely the borderland communities and armed groups whose cooperation the connectivity projects now require.

China in Myanmar: The Asymmetry India Has Not Closed

• China’s position in Myanmar is not larger than India’s by a margin of degree; it is different in kind, and the difference is that China holds relationships on both sides of the civil war.
• Infrastructure and access. The Kyaukphyu deep-sea port and Special Economic Zone in Rakhine is the anchor — a project of about US$7.3 billion across three phases, with CITIC holding 70 per cent against 30 per cent for the Myanmar side, on a zone of roughly 4,300 acres.
  • Kyaukphyu’s purpose is the Malacca bypass: crude and gas landed on the Bay of Bengal and piped to Kunming in Yunnan, reducing China’s exposure to a strait it does not control.
  • The China–Myanmar Economic Corridor, agreed in 2018 as a BRI limb, adds road and rail from Kunming through Mandalay to Kyaukphyu — the “second coast” that Indian naval planners have written about for two decades.
  • Persistent reporting of Chinese signals facilities on Myanmar’s islands — Coco, Hainggyi, Manaung, Zadetkyi — has never been conclusively established, but the Indian Navy’s planning assumption is that a Chinese-supported network on that coast could complicate India’s freedom of action in the Bay.
• Arms and diplomatic cover. China has been Myanmar’s principal arms supplier since 1988, shielded successive governments at the Security Council, and after 2021 supplied the drones and hardware that reversed the military’s battlefield decline.
• Leverage over the armed groups is the decisive difference. Through the UWSA, the MNDAA, the TNLA and others along its own frontier, Beijing can broker ceasefires and break them, and has used both capabilities within the last two years to restore the Mandalay–Muse corridor.

• The one asset India holds that China does not is that Burmese nationalism has historically been more suspicious of China than of India — the Myitsone dam suspension in 2011 and the Letpadaung protests were directed at Beijing, and every Myanmar government has sought a counterweight.
  • This is why the sequence of Myanmar leaders from U Nu through Thein Sein to Min Aung Hlaing has kept an Indian door open even at moments of maximum Chinese dependence.
  • It is also why the analytically careful position is to deconstruct rather than assume a “Sino-Indian great game”: China’s leverage far exceeds India’s, and Myanmar’s own governments have consistently resisted manipulation by either. The relationship is better read as overlapping spheres of activity than as direct confrontation.

The Rohingya Question in the Bilateral Frame

• The 1982 Citizenship Law, following the emergency immigration measures of 1974, stripped the Rohingya of citizenship and rendered them stateless; the 2017 military operations in northern Rakhine drove more than 700,000 into Bangladesh within months.
• India’s position has been consistently securitised and consistently unpopular.
  • Delhi has treated Rakhine as Myanmar’s internal affair, framed the violence around ARSA’s attacks rather than the state’s response, and abstained from multilateral texts naming Rakhine.
  • It has simultaneously argued that the root cause is underdevelopment, and funded housing and infrastructure in Rakhine under the Rakhine State Development Programme as its constructive contribution.
  • Operation Insaniyat delivered relief to the camps in Bangladesh in 2017 — assistance to the country bearing the burden rather than pressure on the country creating it.
• The one internationally credible process India could have supported went nowhere.
  • The Advisory Commission on Rakhine State under Kofi Annan, appointed in 2016, recommended reviewing the 1982 citizenship law and accelerating a verification process that had covered only a few thousand people in three years; its report was received days before the 2017 exodus began.
  • India abstained from the Bali Declaration in 2017 because it referred to violence in Rakhine — the clearest single illustration of what its Myanmar policy cost it in multilateral company.
• The consequences are borne almost entirely by Bangladesh, which hosts over 1.3 million Rohingya at Cox’s Bazar, including roughly 120,000 who arrived after the Arakan Army’s 2024 offensive displaced them again.
  • Repatriation has not begun in any meaningful sense, and the Arakan Army’s control of Rakhine has made the question harder, since any return must now be negotiated with an authority no state recognises.
• Inside India there are roughly 40,000 Rohingya, of whom over 22,500 are registered with UNHCR; India is not a party to the Refugee Convention and has no statutory asylum procedure, and its policy has been detention and attempted deportation, contested in court.
  • The phenomenon of refugee and migrant flows, and the legal framework governing them, belongs with the study of cross-border migration; the bilateral point is narrower and sharper — India’s Rohingya position was the price of its Myanmar policy, and it was paid to a government that no longer exists.

The Scholarly Debate

• Rajiv Bhatia, a former Indian ambassador to Myanmar, offers the standard Indian treatment and its most quotable inversion: India saw Myanmar as its gateway to ASEAN, while Myanmar saw ASEAN as its bridge to South Asia.
  • His prescription has been institutional rather than declaratory — an India–Myanmar Foundation for people-to-people exchange to match the China–Myanmar equivalent, sharing India’s experience of federal practice and parliamentary procedure, and sustained political attention rather than episodic summitry.
• C. Raja Mohan locates the failure precisely where it is: not in the absence of a vision but in India’s inability to translate vision into outcomes.
  • His further point is that India no longer enjoys privileged access in Myanmar and must compete with global business and other Asian states, which is a healthier discipline than the monopoly India briefly imagined it was contesting.
• Harsh V. Pant argues that Myanmar’s political transitions give India strategic space rather than strategic guarantees, and that the trajectory of the relationship has never been determined by whether Myanmar is a democracy.
  • With Sreeparna Banerjee he has framed the post-election position as India’s strategic bind.
• Avinash Paliwal supplies the historical depth — India’s eastern neighbourhood policy has been made through ad hoc bargains between security agencies, state governments and local actors, which is why a borderlands approach is a description of what India already does rather than a novelty.
• Constantino Xavier places the Myanmar failure inside a general Indian pattern: the constraint on neighbourhood policy is institutional and implementation capacity, not intent or resources, and India’s projects underperform because its delivery machinery does.
• Samir Das names the underlying tension neatly as a frontier dilemma — India’s eastern policy requires an open frontier for connectivity and a closed one for security, and every instrument that serves one damages the other.
• Amitav Acharya‘s account of the ASEAN Way explains why the regional organisation could not help: the Five-Point Consensus of April 2021 was agreed with the coup leader present and has never been implemented, because non-interference and consensus preclude enforcement.
• J.N. Dixit remains the authoritative voice for the 1993 pivot itself, and his framing — geostrategic importance, and the imperative of denying exclusivity to a rival — is still the operative logic three decades later.

“Managing relations with a fractured neighbour will require balancing principles with pragmatism — at a time when neither offers an easy exit.”

— Harsh V. Pant and Sreeparna Banerjee

Assessment

• What has worked. The boundary regime, land and maritime, is settled and uncontested. Security cooperation has been the most functional pillar, producing joint operations, insurgent handovers and a training relationship. Disaster response has been fast and effective. Engagement has kept a door open that closed for everyone else.
• What has not. Connectivity has failed on delivery — Kaladan after two decades, the Trilateral Highway after more than two, and border trade in collapse. Energy was lost outright. The sanctuaries were never cleared. And the democratic constituency India built in 1988 was abandoned without securing the interests for which it was traded.
• The structural verdict is that India’s Myanmar policy has been strategically correct and operationally inadequate — a diagnosis that recurs across India’s neighbourhood but nowhere as expensively, because Myanmar is the one neighbour whose cooperation is a precondition for a whole doctrine rather than a single relationship.
• The forward question is whether India can hold two policies at once.
  • A capital-to-capital relationship with a president it received in Delhi in June 2026, and a working relationship with the armed groups that hold the ground its projects cross.
  • A fenced border and an open corridor, reconciled inside a single doctrine rather than divided between two ministries.

The lesson Myanmar teaches about Indian foreign policy is not the familiar one about realism defeating idealism. It is that a state which chooses interests over values acquires an obligation to actually secure those interests, and that India’s difficulty for thirty years has been the second half of that bargain rather than the first. The border is settled, the engagement is intact, the projects are unfinished, and the neighbour is at war with itself.