Myanmar’s Parliament has chosen the military leader, Min Aung Hlaing, as the country’s president, giving his role as the country’s head of State an official stamp. The army chief has been the de facto head of Myanmar since the military coup in 2021 against the democratically-elected government of the Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi. Over the past five years, Myanmar’s military rulers have found that some countries — like China — are willing to work closely with their undemocratic regime. But they have also found that some others that want to keep the ties robust, such as India, are not fully comfortable with a regime that has no formal legitimacy. And others, including many governments in the West, are simply unwilling to be seen in the same room as uniformed generals leading an unelected junta. The elections in December were, as per most independent observers, neither free nor fair. Yet for the military, they offered a veneer of democracy.
These developments in Myanmar do not make New Delhi’s complex balancing act with the country easier. India’s status as the world’s largest democracy and the fractured political and geographical landscape of Myanmar mean that New Delhi has had to maintain relations with both the military government and Opposition groups. Since the 2021 coup, Myanmar has been ravaged by a civil war, and opposition groups aligned with the former government of Ms Suu Kyi have controlled sections of the Myanmar side of the border with India. Coordinating with them has been a critical security imperative for Indian security officials. But as the recent arrests of American and Ukrainian nationals, who illegally crossed over into Myanmar from Mizoram, show, the Indian government remains rightly concerned about other international forces trying to use the chaos and the instability of Myanmar to create challenges that New Delhi might have to deal with. In this instance, the arrested foreign nationals have been accused of working with rebel groups in Myanmar and potentially trying to destabilise India’s Northeast. Under such circumstances, New Delhi has a natural need to tighten ties with Myanmar. How India and the West go about balancing their engagement with the junta along with their support for Myanmar’s democracy will remain an intriguing and challenging endeavour.