A frontier gambit

None of this is happening far from India. Rakhine borders Chin State, which touches Mizoram, and beneath the fighting runs the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Project — the corridor on which India has spent nearly two decades and hundreds of crores of rupees. When completed it would link Kolkata with the Indian Northeast through Myanmar by sea and river, bypassing the narrow Siliguri corridor also known as “chicken’s neck”, the Siliguri corridor is the only landlink between mainland India and its Northeastern state, sandwiched between Nepal and Bangladesh.

The sensitive area, important for security reasons, requires careful handling by India, “Not just in the Arakan (another name for Rakhine), but also in the Chin and Kachin areas, much of the border area is not within Myanmar’s military control,” Rajiv Bhatia, former Indian ambassador to Myanmar, said.

“So clearly for handling practical issues of border management, my understanding is that our authorities have to deal with the ethnic organisations. But that runs along with India’s full commitment to the unity and integrity of Myanmar. And this also happens, as the Indian side keeps the Myanmar side fully informed,” he added.

India’s engagement with rebel groups such as the AA has been measured. It is engaged without endorsement, and to safeguard its 1,643-kilometre (km) shared border with Myanmar — a country that has been racked by civil war since the February 2021 military coup, pitting the military Junta against pro-democracy forces, and more than 78 years of ethnic conflicts ever since the state’s inception.

That measured approach is now being tested in real time, a few hundred km from where the fighting continues to burn through Rakhine’s coast. “Kaladan passes through the Rakhine State, of which 90 per cent is with the AA. So there is a security problem,” Bhatia said.

“My understanding is that construction is going on very slowly and subject to security being assured by the AA. There has been quite some fighting between the Myanmar military and the AA, especially in the southern coastal areas because, both from the air and from naval vessels, the Myanmar Army is busy attacking AA positions. Clearly, these are tough times for people living in the area.” he added.

India also faces a massive refugee influx from Myanmar in its northeastern states with Mizoram, a state of barely 1.2 million people, having absorbed the bulk of India’s Myanmar refugee population.

According to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, in May 2023, more than 40,000 refugees from Myanmar were reported living in Mizoram and 8,250 in neighbouring Manipur, part of a nationwide total of over 74,600 refugees from Myanmar. More than 54,100 of them have arrived since the February 2021 coup.

Most refugees are from the Chin community, which has close ethnic and family ties with the indigenous Mizos of Mizoram, making the Indian state a natural haven.

UNHCR maintains no field office in Mizoram, so the task of registration and support has fallen on the state government and civil-society groups, chiefly the Young Mizo Association and the Presbyterian church. Mizoram has continued sheltering refugees despite a 2021 Union Home Ministry advisory directing border states to identify and deport undocumented Myanmar nationals. 

In April 2026, a conscription drive by the Chin National Army, one of several armed ethnic groups fighting the junta, forced dozens of Chin nationals across the border into Mizoram. This adds to a specific Chin refugee presence in India, now estimated by UNHCR at over 86,200.

Mizoram’s own displacement figures, which include refugees, internally displaced people from Manipur’s ethnic violence, and arrivals from Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts, have hovered near 38,000, according to data presented by State Home Minister K Sapdanga.

With the AA takeover of Rakhine, the refugee crisis has aggravated — Chin and Rohingya communities have been displaced as the AA has tightened its grip on the state. There is a pattern: Whenever there is an escalation in Myanmar’s civil war, there is a massive influx of refugees in the bordering countries of Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Rakhine is particularly sensitive, as a genocide case against Myanmar’s military rulers over its treatment of the Rohingya is before the International Court of Justice, with a verdict pending.

“As anti-junta forces take over Myanmar’s northwestern Sagaing Division and adjacent Chin State, the presence of anti-India rebels in Myanmar is under huge pressure; many have headed home to fish in newly troubled waters,” said Sudeep Chakravarti, executive director of the Stepwell Centre for Asian Futures at Ahmedabad University and author of the book Eastern Gate: War and Peace in Nagaland, Manipur and India.

India’s insurgency problems in Northeastern states like Manipur has also been partly exacerbated by the situation in Myanmar. “India’s engagement with Myanmar’s rulers over the past decade-and-a-half has largely been to negate the influence of anti-India rebels of the Naga, Meitei, Assamese, Bodo, and Kamtapuri ethnicities who found sanctuary in that country,” Chakravarti said.

“When the President of Myanmar came to India a few weeks back, he gave an assurance to the Indian government that they will ensure that from the border region or from the Myanmar soil, nothing is done to harm the interest of India,” Bhatia said.

“So that remains their official position. Now, whether they’re in a position to implement this assurance, that is debatable.”

India has stepped up its efforts to deal with the refugee and border problems by starting fencing on the border. Alongside it, the government has moved to scrap the Free Movement Regime, which for decades let border residents cross up to 16 km into each other’s territory without a visa. This arrangement had allowed the ethnic ties to flourish until Myanmar’s civil war cast a shadow on it.

“All bets have been off in Myanmar since the end of 2023,” Chakravarti said about potential business ties. “So, all investors in Myanmar have had to deal with every player above and beyond the Tatmadaw (the Myanmar military). India scrambled late.”

However, the junta’s bloody week in Rakhine is not proof of the military regime losing its grip nationally. “In overall terms, the Myanmar military is in a much better position today than it was last year,” Bhatia said.

“Because most of the country is either under their control or seeing serious fighting, not in the north, not in the east, not in the centre. It is that western part where fighting sporadically keeps going on”.

After the military conducted general elections in three phases between December 2025 and January this year, Though major opposition groups like Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy were dissolved or banned, and voting could not happen in active war zones, the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party claimed a predictable victory. 

Min Aung Hlaing stepped down as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and was officially selected as State President in April, the military regime has thus established a de facto legitimacy. “They’ve been talking to the political parties. And above all, the President of Myanmar has been travelling, gaining much legitimacy in Russia, China, India, Vietnam, Thailand, and so on,” Bhatia explains.

China has always had deep roots in Myanmar, not just in diplomacy but in hard infrastructure. The civil war has changed its character. China has spent decades as Myanmar’s largest trading partner and single biggest source of foreign investment, with the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor running from Yunnan through Mandalay to the Bay of Bengal. China has supplied the junta with fighter jets and air-defence systems even as it maintains parallel lines to the ethnic armed groups controlling the corridor’s route.

“Look at what China did. The Myanmar-China crude oil pipeline runs 771 km from Madé Island off Kyaukpyu in Rakhine across Myanmar to Ruili in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, in the process traversing the heart of Rakhine State, the Magway Region, the Mandalay Region, and Shan State,” Chakravati explains.

A 300,000-tonne crude oil terminal has been built on Madé Island, with an annual capacity for storing and moving 22 million tonnes of oil. State-run China National Petroleum Corporation, or CNPC, runs the pipeline as a joint venture with the state-run Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise, or MOGE. This helps China transship oil from West Asia and elsewhere and reduce dependence on the Strait of Malacca.

“The second pipeline, the 793 km-long Myanmar-China Gas Pipeline, begins at Ramree Island, also in Rakhine, just to the west of Madé and, running mostly parallel to the oil pipeline, also ends at Ruili in China’s Yunnan Province.” Chakravati added.

China didn’t arrive at its approach overnight. When a rebel alliance including the AA seized swathes of territory along China’s border in late 2023, its own pipelines and trade routes were suddenly at risk too.

That’s why, as fighting spread, China simply started talking to whoever controlled the ground its pipelines crossed. “This potential squeezing of its crucial energy pipeline has kept Chinese negotiators at work 24/7,” Chakravarti said. “Not just with the AA, the main rebel force in the vicinity, but with rebel forces all along the pipelines”.

While China’s inroads are primarily driven by its geopolitical interests and through infrastructure, India’s approach has been to keep its interests safe and deal with whoever is in power.

“India deals with whoever is in power; engagement is recognition of political reality, not endorsement,” Bhatia said. “Without stability and cooperation on the ground, progress is extremely difficult.”

For now, renewed fighting every week, whether in Rakhine or in other parts of the country, presents new challenges for India’s Myanmar policy.