The War Next Door- Myanmar’s Civil Collapse and Indian policy
By Mya Htut
Rahul Deans note - This is the first of my articles from guest writers. The conflict in Myanmar as hitherto been seen in India, only from the lens of the Indian media, many of whom have never visited the country or have a particular interest in reporting on it. I have therefore found an analyst from Burma willing to share his thoughts in this exclusive writeup, on the situation in his country, in the context of the recent drone strike on ULFA rebels.
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In the pre-dawn hours of 13 July 2025, over 150 reportedly
Israeli and French-made drones swept across the Sagaing region, striking
various Indian insurgent camps across the border into Myanmar. The United
Liberation Front of Asom- Independent (ULFA-I) claimed three senior leaders
were killed and many further injured. The strike comes in wake of growing
tensions between the democratic-aligned Myanmar coalition and Indian security
forces. Many are quick to link this to the ongoing Myanmar civil war, but in broader
context they are part of a longstanding counterinsurgency issue that India has
faced from the northern Sagaing Region. India officially denies that the drones
were conducted by India. The so-called "Indian insurgents" are a
grouping of various separatist groups seeking separation for parts or all of
India's Northeast. While they have opportunistically based themselves in
Myanmar, they are almost entirely uninvolved with Myanmar's civil war.
Counterinsurgency along the border
More relevant to India's role in Myanmar's civil war is an incident in May
when Assam Rifles killed 10 soldiers under the command of the Myanmar
democratic coalition's People's Defence Forces (PDF) along the border with
Manipur. This came following the context of Prime Minister Modi's phone call
with the Myanmar military junta's leader after the devastating earthquake in
late March, which has prompted discourse recently regarding where India stands
in respect to Myanmar's current civil war.
The India-Myanmar border has been a source of security
tensions between the two countries for several decades. Prior governments of
Myanmar and India have long held key ties in the realm of counterinsurgency.
Since the late 1980s, insurgent groups from India's Northeast have exploited
Myanmar's porous borders and ongoing civil wars to establish camps and bases of
operations in Sagaing, Chin and Kachin regions. Back then, Myanmar was ruled by
the State Peace and Development Council military, one of the history's longest
ruling military juntas. After a crackdown on Myanmar's 8888 revolution in 1988,
the Myanmar junta sought to resolve the country's long-running civil war.
Senior General Than Shwe, trained in psychological warfare, implemented a
brutal "Four Cuts" doctrine starving out insurgent-held areas and
targeting sympathetic ethnic minority areas and stoking internal divisions
within the rebels. New Delhi backed a democratic Burma but balanced relations
with Rangoon’s military regime, finding a shared security interest in bringing
the porous and sparsely populated Burmese northwest under the control of
Rangoon.
Of the various joint operations, India and Myanmar conducted
several joint operations against the so-called "Indian insurgents".
In 1995, Operation Sunrise saw the two root out the ULFA and the National
Democratic Front of Boroland from the Mizoram border. However, joint operations
ceased after the Jawaharlal Nehru Award was awarded to democracy activist Aung
San Suu Kyi. On 9 June 2015, Operation Hot Pursuit saw Indian Army Special
Forces cross into Myanmar to ambush and destroy several National Socialist Council
of Nagaland camps across the border from Manipur. By then, Myanmar's policy had
moved to denying that they would allow Indian insurgents to base operations out
of Myanmar.
But soon, Aung San Suu Kyi would gain power after the country's democratic transition in 2015. With PM Modi's Act East policy in 2019, India and Myanmar would arrange a new joint operation called Operation Sunrise in Feb-Mar 2019, targeting and destroying several rebel camps along the Indian border- including against the rising Arakan Army and the ULFA. With the civil war dying down through various ceasefires and treaties within Myanmar, India also sought an economic interest in counterinsurgency operations. The Kaladan Project was announced as a multimodal infrastructure project connecting Mizoram to the port of Sittwe to connect the Northeast to the coast through a series of roads to bypass Bangladesh.
However, this newfound cooperation was rapidly changed by
the 2021 Myanmar coup d'etat when the new State Administration Council junta
seized power from the democratically elected government. In the following
months, protests escalated into civil war with several local militias called
People's Defence Forces (PDFs) engaging in armed resistance against the SAC
junta. Members of Myanmar's Parliament formed the National Unity Government
(NUG) and organised the PDFs into their Ministry of Defence over the coming
years. Through a variety of factors, extremely powerful Ethnic Armed
Organisations (EAOs) resumed war against the junta, with varying levels of
alignment with the NUG and the PDFs in 2021, breaking the ceasefires of
the 2010s.
For New Delhi this came to a head more significantly in
October 2023 when the Arakan Army launched a rapid offensive taking Paletwa and
then all of Mrauk U District in northern Rakhine within a couple months
effectively seizing the entire Kaladan Project area. Since then, the Arakan
Army has grown to around 50,000 active soldiers and its closely allied groups
in Chin State have had major security implications for Mizoram and Manipur. New
Delhi found itself in the unenviable position of the Arakan Army- one of its
former security threats- quickly becoming a leader in the democratic coalition
fighting against the military junta in Myanmar.
In particular, in May 2023, ethnic violence erupted in
Manipur between the Kuki-Zo people and the Meitei. Prior to the Rakhine
offensive, Chin State was one of the most successful theatres in the Myanmar
civil war for the democratic coalition with various Chin forces seizing over
85% of the state and continually sieving down the remaining major towns.
Between 2,000 and 10,000 Chin refugees streamed into Manipur inflaming tensions
as they found themselves aligned with the Kukis. When violence broke out in Manipur,
largely unrelated to the Myanmar war, Meitei factions allegedly fought on the
side of the junta within Myanmar. The Kukis within Myanmar were largely aligned
with the PDF of Kalay and received weapons and support within Myanmar from the
Kachin Independence Army (KIA). Prior to the conflict in Manipur, security
officers had found and arrested several militants, both Kuki and Meitei, who
had attempted to enter India. This all led to India's plans to fence off the
border with Myanmar- a lengthy task for the 1,000 mile (1600km) long
mountainous and heavily forested border.
In 2025, the latest change in India-Myanmar border
security came after the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Mandalay
on 28 March 2025. With 5,456 direct fatalities recorded, the humanitarian
crisis hit the war-torn country hard. The humanitarian response quickly became
political as the military junta directed resources towards repairing its
capital in Naypyidaw and denying aid workers access to the epicenter in Sagaing
Township, which was and remains controlled by the NUG's PDF forces. India
became one of the first on the scene delivering significant aid and personnel
to establish a field hospital in the city of Mandalay. However, as part of the
aftermath, PM Modi made a phone call to SAC junta leader Min Aung Hlaing.
Although it was a necessity to land planes in junta-controlled Yangon, the
disaster response period saw many other countries, including Malaysia and
Norway, accidentally give diplomatic legitimacy to the SAC junta. Nonetheless,
India has faced significant criticism by the democratic coalition.
In context, one can make the argument that the events of
2023 played out to put India into natural alignment with the junta. The
democratic government that had renewed joint security interest in 2019 had
become deeply entrenched and allied with EAOs like the Arakan Army. The Chin
theatre of the Myanmar civil war had spill-over implications into India's own
internal issues in Manipur. And once the national government of India became
alerted to Myanmar to provide earthquake relief it faced pushback from the democratic
coalition.
So in May when Indian security forces killed 10 soldiers
directly in the chain of command of the democratic NUG government, the incident
became viral within Burmese social media as it built upon perceptions of Indian
support for the junta. Given the loose nature and porous border, it's likely
that such incidents have occurred before, without much coverage. Furthermore,
there is still no conclusive evidence of the NUG's claims that Indian troops
had entered Myanmar to attack the soldiers.
Comparisons to Other Neighbours
India is not Myanmar's only neighbour either. A large part
of the impetus for the 2019 Act East policy was to circumvent Bangladesh and to
integrate and develop the Northeast. Bangladesh, too, has had its fair share of
issues from Myanmar's civil war spilling over. In 2017, Myanmar launched a
campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, a majority-Muslim ethnic
group in northern Rakhine after simmering religious and ethnic tensions that
grew since 2013. After the massive refugee crisis from this campaign,
Bangladesh's Myanmar policy has been heavily focused around repatriating the
refugees to Myanmar to reduce strains on its own resources. After the 2023
Rakhine offensive, the Arakan Army slowly conquered the entire
Bangladesh-Myanmar border, pushing out the remaining militant Rohingya groups-
who had become unlikely allies of the junta in the area. In contrast with
India's issues in Manipur, Bangladesh has been allegedly allowing Rohingya
militants to recruit from the refugee camps in Bangladesh. Allegedly, by having
Rohingya refugees return to Myanmar to fight the Arakan Army, they are, in
effect, repatriating Rohingya. In addition, Bangladesh is facing the reality
that the Arakan Army is effectively the government of Rakhine state. Its 2025
refugee repatriation plan failed after the junta lost the Battle of
Maungdaw.
Thailand too has seen spill-over, with the Myanmar Air Force
violating Thai airspace multiple times since 2021 on various sieges of rebel
forts on the Thai-Myanmar border. However, Thailand's Myanmar policy dates back
much earlier as the primary ethnic group on its western border seized control,
and have maintained control since 1948. With time, Thailand has been able to
contain spill-over and manage the refugee crisis through negotiations and
arrangements with the Myanmar military. When the border city of Myawaddy was
captured in 2024, the Thai military helped evacuate fleeing junta officials
without antagonising the rebels, mostly by leveraging the interest of mutually
shared trade interests. Unlike with India's limited scope of counterinsurgency,
spill-over of Myanmar's wars into Thailand has been a long-running primary
security issue for Thailand that the Thai military has had time to dedicate
resources to preventing conflict within Thailand and managing refugee crises.
China, however, has taken a drastically different approach
to any other neighbour. The People's Republic of China has been a longstanding
partner of various Myanmar governments after the invasion of Myanmar by the
fleeing nationalist Chinese forces in 1951. With its massive interest in
developing Myanmar with its Belt and Road Initiative- the counterpart to the
Kaladan Project, Chinese officials from Yunnan province have been instrumental
in keeping its economic corridor and gas pipelines secure. The democratic
coalition and various rebel groups have protected Chinese assets, for the most
part. In addition, tacit support from China allowed the impactful Operation
1027 to occur where the rebels were able to seize the northern portion of Shan
State and its capital Lashio. Compared to India, China has been able to clamp
down on any potential separatist activity within its own borders in a way that
gives them the luxury of informally propping up separatists in Myanmar when it
suits their national interests. The Wa State, an effectively independent
country in eastern Myanmar, often acts as an intermediary to allow Beijing the
deniability of fomenting separatism in Myanmar. The strong hand that China has
also meant that it can choose to stop supporting the rebels. Recently, after
the rapid success of Operation 1027, Beijing seems to be balking at the idea of
massive swaths of rebel-controlled lands preventing trade between Myanmar and
China. In that regard, China has been using their leverage to pressure the rebels
to cease fire and has lent mercenary companies to the junta to protect their
far-flung assets in Rakhine state. Additionally, the informal relation that the
rebel territories are able to have with China allows trade to be used as
another tool of leverage. The KIA have been pressured to stop their siege of
the city of Bhamo by China implicating the massively profitable rare earth
materials trade from the KIA territory to China's growing EV market.
From these varying attitudes towards the war and spill-over
of Myanmar's other neighbours, it's clear that an effective way to manage
spill-over in the increasingly messy Myanmar civil war is to be able to engage
in some kind of informal agreements, trade and dialogue with the particular
rebel groups along that country's borders. For India, the issue stems from
having its own long-standing insurgency and its fears over Chinese influence
over the rebels. None of the other three countries face particularly
significant insurgents on their Myanmar borders, or have been able to contain
them. The strict territorial integrity expected in most of the world,
unfortunately, does not apply to Myanmar when there are dozens of largely
independent actors who control significant territory and resources within
Myanmar. Furthermore, Indian cooperation with the junta comes out of a general
suspicion given China's close ties with rebels in Myanmar- including the Arakan
Army on the Mizoram border. However, in broader context, such closeness is more
out of China' s own interest in protecting its border and is limited in scope.
Recent tensions between China and Myanmar's rebels make it clear that China,
despite its wishes, does not control the democratic coalition.
India's challenges
thus remain in repairing diplomatic goodwill, with the democratic coalition and
engaging with the rebels in a way that will help resolve India's own security
concerns with the Northeast, all while toeing the official diplomatic line of
not supporting insurgents in a foreign country. While India's other border
security issues with Pakistan and China appear like they can apply to Myanmar,
the chaos of the civil war paradoxically means that encouraging materials trade
with the rebels or informally entering arrangements with the rebels can give
India the same kind of geopolitical leverage that would allow it to influence
and control its border with Myanmar.
TOI - Drone strike
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/guwahati/ulfa-i-claims-3-cadres-dead-in-drone-strikes-on-myanmar-camps-army-denies/articleshow/122422413.cms
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/2/everyone-feels-unsafe-border-panic-as-indian-forces-kill-myanmar-rebels
http://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/myanmar-key-to-curbing-northeast-border-insurgency-115060700257_1.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-risks-global-heavy-rare-earth-supply-stop-myanmar-rebel-victory-2025-07-08/
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/army-crossed-border-to-target-militants-in-the-past-too/
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/fighters-myanmar-civil-war-aggravate-bitter-ethnic-conflict-india-2024-12-20/
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/40-myanmar-army-personnel-who-fled-to-mizoram-amid-conflict-sent-back-9026986/
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/thousands-refugees-flee-into-indias-mizoram-state-after-clashes-myanmar-2025-07-07/
https://www.financialexpress.com/business/defence-india-and-myanmar-jointly-destroy-insurgents-camps-know-all-about-operation-sunrise-1518328/
https://thediplomat.com/2024/02/has-the-indian-flagship-kaladan-project-in-myanmar-hit-a-dead-end/
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/pm-modi-meets-head-of-myanmars-military-government-min-aung-hlaing/article69411285.ece
https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/zzx5e271nm
https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/war-against-the-junta/aa-takes-complete-control-of-myanmar-bangladesh-border-after-seizing-maungdaw.html
https://www.khaosodenglish.com/news/2024/04/08/myanmar-army-in-myawaddy-asks-thailand-to-shelter-its-officials/
https://web.archive.org/web/20231021110008/https://www.thaipbsworld.com/thailand-pledges-support-of-national-ceasefire-agreement-in-myanmar/
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/thailand-scrambles-fighters-after-myanmar-jet-airspace-breach-2022-07-01/
https://web.archive.org/web/20230326065107/https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/02/limits-beijings-support-myanmars-military
https://www.bnionline.net/mm/news-109678
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/south-asia/china-using-myanmar-gambit-to-penetrate-in-south-asia-report/articleshow/104802512.cms
https://www.newsweek.com/china-india-asia-jungle-competition-oil-sale-ethnic-conflict-1863458
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