Mutual Interest Brings India and Myanmar Closer

News Desk:

Bilateral relations between Myanmar and India have improved considerably since 1993, overcoming tensions related to drug trafficking, the suppression of democracy and the rule of the military junta in Myanmar. Myanmar is located south of the states of Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh in Northeast India. The Indo-Burmese border stretches over 1,600 kilometers. India provided considerable support when Myanmar struggled with regional insurgencies. However, the overthrow of the democratic government by the Military of Myanmar led to strains in ties. Along with much of the world, India condemned the suppression of democracy and Myanmar ordered the expulsion of the Burmese Indian community, increasing its own isolation from the world. A major breakthrough occurred in 1987 when the then-Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi visited Myanmar, but relations worsened after the military junta’s reaction towards pro-democracy movements in 1988, which resulted in an influx of Burmese refugees into India. However, since 1993 the governments of the Indian Prime Ministers P. V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee changed course and began to establish warmer relations between the two nations, as part of a wider foreign policy of increasing India’s participation and influence in Southeast Asia. Recent development of Economic relations, Infrastructure initiatives, India-Myanmar-Thailand Friendship Highway, Kaladan Multi-modal Transit Route etc. are creating a new dimension of bilateral relation among both the countries. In 2017 during a visit to Nay Pyi Taw (Naypyidaw), Prime Minister Modi announced that India would offer gratis/no-cost visas to all Myanmar citizens visiting India. India’s engagement of the Burmese military junta has helped ease the regime’s international isolation and lessen Burma’s reliance on China. Despite of ongoing bilateral relations, the movement of insurgents became a concern for both the countries. India had been claiming for long days that some of the insurgent groups are taking shelter in Myanmar. But due to various political and economic reasons, Myanmar did not cooperate with India wholeheartedly. But very recently the situation is getting changed.

Ethnic insurgents opposed to New Delhi’s rule have maintained cross-border sanctuaries in Myanmar since the late 1960s. Previously, these rebel groups were known to trek through northern Myanmar’s rugged and mountainous terrain into China, where they historically have received guns and military training. That support first came after China and India fought a brief but bloody border war in 1962, making the two Asian powers into bitter rivals. Although China’s direct support for the groups ceased in the mid-1970s, Manipuri and Assamese rebel leaders are still given sanctuary in China’s southern Yunnan province. Beijing also maintained contacts with Naga rebel factions, including the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) a group comprised mainly of Nagas from India which established a presence in Thailand and traveled frequently to China. The NSCN-IM is distinct from the NSCN-K, which is named after Shangwang Shangyung Khaplang, a Myanmar Naga leader who died in June 2017. Until early 1988 there was only one NSCN but as frictions grew between the Indian and Myanmar Nagas the latter chased the former out of their until then joint bases in northwestern Myanmar. The NSCN subsequently split into the NSCN split into the NSCN-K and NSCN-IM. Most of the rebels from ULFA and Manipur remained with NSCN-K because only that faction could provide them with the sanctuaries they needed to maintain their insurgency in India. NSCN-IM’s militants then regrouped south of the NSCN-K’s area, but, more importantly, sent activists to Thailand where they began to work politically through local NGOs. One of them was Anthony Shimray, the NSCN-IM’s main arms procurer who paid several visits to China before he was apprehended at Kathmandu airport in September 2010 and spirited off to India. Details about his gun-running activities came out during his subsequent trial in New Delhi. In 2016, Shimray was released from prison so he could participate in peace talks between his armed outfit and the Indian government in what have been mostly inconclusive talks.

Photo-1: Anthony Ningkhan Shimray

Shimray is currently the military chief of the NSCN-IM, whose remaining troops are known to be in camps in India’s Nagaland. But some NSCN-IM fighters may still be on the Myanmar side of the border. Tirong Aboh, a member of Arunachal’s legislative assembly, his son and nine others were killed in an ambush in an Indian area adjacent to Myanmar. An Indian Home Ministry spokesman said he suspected NSCN-IM was behind the attack and that the rebels had come from across the Myanmar border.

NSCN-K, meanwhile, entered into a ceasefire agreement with Indian authorities in 2001 but unilaterally abrogated it in March 2015. The group struck a ceasefire agreement with the Myanmar Army in 2012, making it the only insurgent group to have entered ceasefire agreements with two governments of separate sovereign states. The National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) is a Naga nationalist insurgent group operating mainly in Northeast India, with minor activities in northwest Myanmar (Burma) until 2012. Two major factions of NSCN include NSCN (K), led by S. S. Khaplang; and NSCN (I-M), led by Isak Chishi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah are actively operating. On November 6, 2015 in response to an attack on an army convoy in Manipur India designated NSCN (K) a terrorist organization under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. India’s Ministry of Home Affairs labels NSCN a major insurgent group. Ethnic Nagas in remote northern Myanmar have long provided sanctuary to insurgents who launch armed raids into northeastern India and then retreat back across the border beyond the reach of Indian security forces. Myanmar’s inability or unwillingness to uproot those rebel sanctuaries have been a persistent thorn in the side of the two neighbors’ bilateral relations, contributing to mutual mistrust and suspicion over the years. But that arguably began to change in January, when more than 400 Myanmar troops drove the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Khaplang (NSCN-K) from its headquarters at Taga in the northern Sagaing Region.

Photo-2: Sagaing Region

NSCN-K shared the camp with militants from the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and other rebel outfits from Manipur in northeastern India fighting against New Delhi’s rule in the Seven Sisters region, a term for the contiguous states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. On June 3, 2019 during a press briefing at the Defense Services Museum in the capital of Naypyitaw, Myanmar army Major General Tun Tun Nyi said operations will continue against the NSCN-K and the other India-based insurgent groups it is sheltering. There have been few reported casualties in the assault so far, as the Myanmar military has relied mainly on heavy artillery fire rather than ground offensives to drive the rebels from their camp. Still, the attack has deprived the insurgents of their important camp and sanctuary in Myanmar, and thus will certainly affect their ability to launch cross-border assaults into India as they attempt to regroup while on the run. Myanmar’s shift from veritable inaction to offensive operations comes after India launched a cross-border attack in June 2015 on the NSCN-K in response to an ambush the previous month that killed 19 Indian soldiers in Chandel, Manipur. But Myanmar’s move against the NSCN-K more notably comes at a time the country’s autonomous military is desperately seeking another big power counterbalance to China.

There had been an enormous influence of China over Myanmar for last couple of decades. The infrastructure projects like Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is underway. It is assisting China for establishing a strategic trade corridor connecting landlocked southwestern part of that country through Myanmar down to the Indian Ocean. Those big ticket projects, including a US$1 billion port project at Kyaukphyu, a high-speed rail and thousands of kilometers of pipelines, come with loans and credits which could transform Myanmar into a Chinese client state, similar to its status in the 1990s and early 2000s. Considering that situation Myanmar wants a powerful ally like India at her side to face any unforeseen eventualities including through arms sales and other strategic cooperation.

The first India-Myanmar bilateral military exercise 2017(IMBAX – 2017) was held from November 20 to 25 in Umroi in Meghalaya. The joint exercise is the first of its kind military training exercise on United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (UNPKO) between India and Myanmar. The aim of this bilateral training event is to train the Myanmar delegation for participation in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations under the UN Flag. The Exercise includes participation of 15 officers from Myanmar Army and 16 officers from the Indian Army who participated over a period of six days training. In March 2018, the Indian and Myanmar navies conducted a maiden joint exercise in the Bay of Bengal, where India has reported numerous incursions by Chinese submarines. The second India-Myanmar bilateral Army exercise ‘IMBEX 2018-19’ was conducted at Chandi Mandir Cantonment, a military cantonment of the Indian Army located in Panchkula district at the foot of the Sivalik Hills adjoining Panchkula city in Haryana. The Myanmar military’s recent move against the Indian rebels in Sagaing should thus be viewed through a wider geo-strategic lens.

In January 2019, NSCN-K has been chased out of its main bases and five of its top leaders have been arrested and charged under Myanmar’s colonial-era Unlawful Associations Act for harboring insurgents from the Indian side of the border. The absence of any heavy fighting during and after the fall of Taga, seems to be aimed at isolating NSCN-K from its rebel allies from India and to force them to take part in peace talks that have been held in Naypyitaw between the Myanmar army, government, and certain but not all ethnic armies. Recently NSCN-K’s spokesman Joseph Lamkang said to a local online publication in Assam, that his group will not sign the Myanmar government’s Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) and that it will continue its fight for “sovereignty” of the Nagas. But as security cooperation between India and Myanmar is fast improving and apparently entering a potentially potent new stage, Myanmar’s Nagas face increasingly uncertain prospects. On this recent setback of the insurgent groups of Northeast India stationed in the Indo-Myanmar bordering areas, there might be some counter role of China in future but the ongoing economic priority and numerous infrastructural development projects might induce them to become extra cautious and calculative.