India-Myanmar Relations

The intensification of drug trafficking across the Indo-Myanmar border presents a significant challenge to both political and socio-economic stability in the region. This illicit trade not only exacerbates insurgent activities in Northeast India but also poses a serious threat to the country’s internal security. The porous and inadequately monitored border facilitates the movement of narcotics, creating a permissive environment for transnational criminal networks.1 These vulnerabilities have been further compounded by Myanmar’s enduring political instability following the 2021 military coup, elevating the issue to a matter of national security.2 Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) of Myanmar operating along the border have increasingly engaged in drug trafficking as a means of financing their campaigns against the junta regime.

• Manashi Parashar
• October-December 2025
• Journal of Defence Studies

The nature of the Indo-Myanmar border offers numerous challenges for effective border management.

• Rohit Raj
• February 10, 2025
• IDSA Comments

Ongoing conflicts involving groups such as the Arakan Army and the Myanmar military junta have delayed the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project.

• Om Prakash Das
• July 22, 2024
• IDSA Comments

While the free movement regime did facilitate the hill tribes to maintain cross-border links, it also allowed insurgents and traffickers to freely enter and exit the country.

• Pushpita Das
• January 17, 2024
• IDSA Comments

Given Myanmar’s geostrategic significance and the continuing insurgency threat, disturbances in Myanmar pose a direct and serious policy challenge to India. A calculated realistic approach weighing the evolving ground situation alone will deliver the objectives of India’s foreign policy.

• Udai Bhanu Singh
• January 24, 2022
• IDSA Comments

India must continue to engage with the Tatmadaw, even as it supports the efforts of the UN and the ASEAN to restore democratic processes and prevent violence and conflict in Myanmar.

• Udai Bhanu Singh
• May 21, 2021
• IDSA Comments

Being highly porous, poorly guarded and located along a remote, underdeveloped, insurgency-prone region and proximate to one of the world’s largest five opium producing areas, the India–Myanmar border is vulnerable to the activities of insurgents and drugs and arms traffickers as well as criminals. Although the Indian government has been alive to the threats that emanate from a poorly guarded India–Myanmar international border, its attention towards the problem has been woefully inadequate.

• Pushpita Das
• November 2018
• Strategic Analysis

The Rohingya crisis is not just Myanmar’s domestic problem but a regional issue and it needs to be tackled at the regional level in a more comprehensive way.

• Sampa Kundu
• September 08, 2017
• IDSA Comments

The success of India's diplomacy will lie in the extent to which it can induce Naypyitaw to take a long view in the interests of its own political stability, internal security and social harmony.

• Gautam Sen
• August 16, 2017
• IDSA Comments

While decades of counterinsurgency operations and peace processes have taken the sting out of the region’s major insurgencies, collaboration between groups continues to pose security challenges, particularly in the exploitable border areas adjacent to the upper Sagaing Region of Northwest Myanmar.

• Alex Waterman
• August 10, 2017
• IDSA Comments