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