At least 52,000 members of the Chin ethnic community have taken refuge across the border in India since the military took power in Myanmar in February 2021, their influx resulting in a mixed reception.
It is not hard to find a reason for the exodus of Chin citizens. Chin State, one of the original component parts of the Union of Burma and now the least developed region of Myanmar, has suffered more than most states as the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s army, tries to enforce its rule across the country.
Categorised by the military as particularly rebellious, seven of its nine townships remain under martial law. The air force has targeted several towns, a sign says the Chin Human Rights Organisation (CHRO) that efforts to impose army rule on the ground have been unsuccessful.
Chin State has a troubled history of crackdowns during earlier attempts to enforce army rule across the country in 1962 and again in 1988. The Chin people are Christian and considered by the army to be of doubtful loyalty to central authority in a country which operates according to the spirit of its dominant religion, Buddhism. Chins who opt to join the army, one of few non-agricultural opportunities open to them, come up against a Tatmadaw rule that prevents members of ethnic minorities from rising above the rank of captain, meaning power lies with officers from the dominant Bamar community.
With a population of less than half a million in Chin State, the Chin people will never attract international attention as the predominantly Muslim Rohingya people of nearby Rakhine state have done. An army pogrom against the Rohingya in 2017, allegedly following attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, led to a mass exodus to Bangladesh where nearly a million Rohingya continue to live in the vast Kutupalong and Nayapara refugee camps near Cox’s Bazaar.
The situation of the Chin people is little different except they are Christian rather than Muslim and their nearest international border is with the north-east Indian state of Mizoram. The Chin and Mizo people are related as are the Kuki who reside mainly in Bangladesh. Their languages are mutually intelligible and they share a Christian faith. Crossing the ill-defined border into Mizoram, the Chin have been welcomed as brethren, including by the Mizo National Front-ruled state government.
India’s central government is less happy about “illegal immigration” by non-Hindus. They associate the border with Myanmar with the smuggling of narcotics and weapons, the latter in support of so-called Indian Insurgent Groups, or IIGs, who operate in India and take refuge in Myanmar. Like the ethnic armed organisations or EAOs in Myanmar, IIGs are fighting in India for greater autonomy or to maintain their control over fiefdoms.
India’s Assam Rifles, who maintain security along India’s north-eastern border, routinely cross into Chin State in pursuit of IIGs. Zalen News, a Chin newspaper, allege two such incursions from southern Mizoram this month (March) into the township of Paletwa, where the Chinland Defense Force and the Kuki-Chin National Army operate.
Concern about security along its border with Myanmar, which also affect the states of Manipur and Nagaland, led the Indian government to adopt a policy of collaboration and dialogue with the military government led by senior general Min Aung Hlaing that took power after the 2021 coup. That policy has lately come under attack by factions in India that believe the government should take a more sympathetic attitude towards the Chin arrivals and be less supportive of the Naypyitaw-based government.
Gautam Mukhopadhaya, a former Indian ambassador to Myanmar, accuses the government of “misplaced faith in the Myanmar Army as the best guarantor of India’s security interests vis-à-vis both IIGs and China”. He calls India’s approach to IIGs “a transactional relationship… not one for which India needs to be beholden to the Tatmadaw.” In articles for The Wire, the former ambassador calls for India’s government to resist a military-based relationship and “judiciously to steer Myanmar to a more constructive path”.
He says that unless India’s government starts to talk to the underground National Unity Government (NUG), which consists mainly of Myanmar citizens elected to the country’s parliament before the coup, it risks losing influence in Myanmar. “Post-coup, a perception has grown in political quarters in Myanmar and [among] observers outside that, notwithstanding its pro-democracy rhetoric, India [like China] is assisting and supporting the Tatmadaw including through military supplies,” he writes.
Meanwhile Myanmar army’s aerial onslaught on Chin State continues in an effort to end rebellion and bring the state under army rule, seemingly with no thought for its civilian inhabitants. Za Uk, deputy executive director of the Chin Human Rights Organisation (CHRO), says morale in the army is low and they are running out of ammunition adding “they don’t have the ground-forces to capture Chin State so have to rely on air power.” CHRO has documented photographically the destruction of the town of Thantlang, close to the border with Mizoram.
In February the insurgent Chin National Army (CNA) took control of the town including its police station, a centre of power, a claim not disputed by the Tatmadaw who resorted to daily bombardments from the air in an effort to retake the town. It has been reported that at least two air force bombs have landed in India and as recently as 12 January an air force jet flew over Indian territory.
CHRO estimate that Myanmar’s military government controls less than 10 per cent of Chin State, well below the nationwide estimate of central control which ranges from 25 to 50 per cent. Unless it can substantially increase its control over territory the military’s government’s plan to hold national elections, an attempt to reinforce its own control, looks destined to fail. For Ambassador Mukhopadhaya, elections are a lost cause as he believes real power in Myanmar is shifting towards the NUG and ethnic armed organisations, like the Chin National Army.
The Tatmadaw are not about to lose the civil war raging in Chin State and around the country. Nor are they close to winning peace or controlling most of the country’s territory as the conflagration in Chin State and exodus of refugees to India demonstrate. This is a difficult issue for India’s government with its own concern about insurgent activity in its north-eastern states. It has so far ignored calls to take a more robust stand towards Myanmar’s military rulers, and to stop selling the country both weaponry and electricity.
India's prime minister Narendra Modi fears any distraction from his year in the international limelight as chair of the G20 group of nations. So far, he has been content to leave attempts to negotiate a ceasefire to the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Myanmar is a member. That may change if the continuing arrival of refugees in India’s north-east deepens India’s own security concerns.
