India-Myanmar Relations

Trafficking of drugs takes place overwhelmingly through land borders followed by sea and air routes. Given the vulnerability of the borders to drug trafficking, India has tried to tackle the problem through the strategy of drug supply and demand reduction, which involves enacting laws, co-operating with voluntary organisations, securing its borders and coasts by increasing surveillance, as well as seeking the active cooperation of its neighbours and the international community.

• Pushpita Das
• 2012
• IDSA Occasional Papers

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

Regulated borders with greater emphasis on developing people-to-people contact and cross-border trade initiatives are likely to yield greater security benefits as against a closed border.

• Pradeep Singh Chhonkar
• February 06, 2017
• IDSA Comments

Given that both India and Indonesia have a common interest in preserving their respective democratic, multi-ethnic and multi-religious polities, they need to work together to induce Myanmar to control the violence against the Rohingyas.

• Gautam Sen
• December 15, 2016
• IDSA Comments

The message President Kyaw took back from New Delhi is that India stands ready to support Myanmar in every possible way on its march to security, reconciliation and prosperity.

• Ashok Sajjanhar
• September 02, 2016
• IDSA Comments