From Bilateralism to Pluralist Challenges: The Manipur Crisis (2023-) and Myanmar’s Civil War (2021-)

In June 2026, Min Aung Hlaing made a five-day visit to India, his first since the Tatmadaw-supported Union Solidarity and Development Party won the façade elections held between December 2025 to January 2026. While speculations ripened over his intent to seek legitimacy at Bodh Gaya in India, seeking  blessings at the place of Buddha’s enlightenment, the visit was rather compelled by an entangled cross-border situation that both India and Myanmar face.  

Since the 2021 coup d’etat, Myanmar’s economy has shrunk by 16%, with the highest inflation in Southeast Asia, and a three-fold increase in fuel prices, fertilizer shortages, and frequent power cuts, disincentivizing foreign investment. It is the only country in South-East Asia whose economy did not recover to pre-COVID. As the Tatmadaw reels under sanction fatigue from the Western Bloc, it has increasingly started to look towards China and Russia as partners. Yet, as Hlaing chose to visit India first, the choice begs reconsidering dynamic regional alignments. 

A weakened economy has strengthened the influence of China vis-à-vis ’s strategic investments, including infrastructure, rare earth minerals, energy corridors, port development, etc., between Yunnan Province and coastal Myanmar, in a bid to break India’s possible chokehold over the Malacca Straight. The Myanmar coast would give China access to the Bay of Bengal, increasingly limiting India’s Act East strategy in recent years. Myanmar’s Central Bank has liked Kyat with the Renminbi, increasing dependence on China for stable currency exchange. 

At the same time, India’s strategic policies to integrate India’s North-East with ASEAN markets, including the Kaladan Multi-modal Transit Transport Project and the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, have faced repeated delays due to regime instability in Myanmar and Thailand. 

Despite President Hlaing’s role in overturning Aung San Suu Kyi’s 2021 mandate, India, unlike the Western Bloc, hasn’t pursued isolation of the Tatmadaw, rather adopting a pragmatic approach to multi-track diplomacy, engaging all sides to ensure that ‘Myanmar should not allow its territory to be used against India.” 

The aggravated impact of distressed communities across the border in Myanmar adds another layer of complexity to the ethnic conflict in Manipur between the Meithei, the Kuki-Zo and (now) the Nagas, a state bordering Myanmar, further fanning South Asian insecurities over border issues, human movement, secessionism and trafficking. Cross-border ethnic affinities between the Kuki-Chin, has crossed domestic policy with international relations. While refugees have come to be increasingly securitized under the present Hindutva-nationalist BJP-government in Delhi and India established a hard border against Rohingya refugees, the influx of Chin refugees has received varied treatment, given the cross-border affinities that the ethnic group shares with Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram. 

The arrival of Myanmar refugees has further intensified the ethnic polarization between the Kuki-Zo, who share kinship ties with tribes across the Arakan, as against the Meithei-led Manipur government who view the refugees in strictly statist terms, i.e., as illegal refugees. Nagaland and Mizoram, on the other hand, has been driven by a humanitarian, community-centric approach, in favour of the Free Movement Regime (FMR), as against the Union government’s policy of fencing which has limited informal trade, as it has come increasingly under the influence of the EAOs, adversely affecting border communities. 

Myanmar’s instability has further intensified the Golden Triangle’s trafficking of human, arms and drugs over the porous border, which has financed secessionist forces, who used FMR to find sanctuary amongst Arakan tribes, launching campaigns against Indian Armed Forces, across 1960s-80s. India wants to break this convergence by implementing stricter border governance. Creation of a systemic proto-state by the Arakan Army in the Rakhine State of Myanmar provides possible shelter for black market of war, eliminating economic limitation of secessionists and militia alike, across both countries. 

With regime instability across South Asia, including economic turmoil and youth movements overthrowing regimes, New Delhi has become increasingly wary of external influence in the region. Yet, even as North-East India has seen an upswing in investments during the Modi government, the region has been prone to secessionist movements and ethnic militarization for decades, shrinking opportunities and local instability and increasing the risk of radicalisation. 

While India has prioritized a stable neighbourhood over democratic transition in Myanmar, in dealing with a fragmented security environment at the border, India has remained open to engaging with the Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) as well. Myanmar remains strategically indispensable to India’s North-East connectivity, trade and security.

With the recent five-year Military Cooperation Agreement, 2026, Russia has increased its stake in defence, energy and nuclear cooperation, with the intent of stabilising the Tatmadaw regime as a strategic partner in South-East Asia. For Myanmar, Russian arms edges against overreliance on China. Closer diplomatic relations with India serves the same purpose. Between China and India, Myanmar is strategically located to counterbalance each with the other. The Tatmadaw has consistently hedged the two Asian powers to defend against intervention. President Hlaing’s visit additionally counters Western sanctions, legitimized by the world’s largest democracy. 

While the Tatmadaw has gained territory in recent months from ethnic armed organization, the emergence of a united resistance under the newly instituted Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF) may indicate more coordinated resistance across multiple fronts. With an ongoing conflict in Manipur and cross-border fraternity running thick, the Tatmadaw would not want the ethnic militia to have aid or safe harbour across the border, forcing the Tatmadaw into a prolonged low intensity conflict. With the Tatmadaw and the ethnic militia plus the National Unity Government in a deadlock, with neither side attaining decisive victory, Myanmar’s civil war is likely prolonged with minute gains and setbacks creating indefinite human security crises.

For Myanmar the deadlock is dire. With popular support for the EAOs, while the Tatmadaw may gain tactical advantages, and may gain diplomatic recognition in the international community, the junta rule would always remain under support stress from a lack of popular support. Increasingly looking for foreign intervention to sustain itself, thereby exacerbates dependence to keep Myanmar’s economy afloat. 

Cross-border conflicts reflect a complexity to the way states engage with ethnic conflicts within domestic borders. Not only does the conflict in Myanmar further fuel Chinese intervention in South Asia for New Delhi, but it also sustains the conflict in Manipur. 

Absence of a coherent political initiative to restore trust amongst communities in Manipur and a limited strategy of policing boundaries between conflicting ethnic communities have hindered peace efforts in Manipur, leaving Manipur stranded as a hinge-state vacuum. Further, para-state actors, including local state governments in India do not seem to be on the same page. There has been a liminality between New Delhi and armed groups engaged in the Manipur conflict, with the Indian government’s apparent indifference initially, and attempts to trivialize the conflict at the national level.

Unlike in an inter-state conflict where the Indian state could engage military response against cross border movement, responses to asymmetric agents, be it the refugees of war, secessionist organizations that have operated across North-East India over decades, trafficking networks or the communities-in-conflict. A more nuanced approach is needed. 

The multiplicity of non-state stakeholders has created a situation where neither New Delhi nor the Tatmadaw is able to bilaterally decide issues that overlap into each other’s geographic territories. India must shift from its policy of securitization, through fencing and restrictions on movement, to a multi-pronged approach, encompassing community-owned developmental interventions, multicultural engagement and self-representational democracy. Additionally, India’s engagement with the Tatmadaw needs to be flexible and measured, preventing strategic paralysis in case the winds of war take a turn, requiring informal engagements with EAOs as well, especially since they control significant swathes of the border and the informal trade across it.