Five years after Myanmar's military coup of February 2021, the civil war that followed shows no sign of resolution. The Tatmadaw — Myanmar's military junta — has lost control of large swaths of the country's periphery to ethnic armed organisations and People's Defence Forces aligned with the National Unity Government. The Three Brotherhood Alliance — the Arakan Army, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, and the Ta'ang National Liberation Army — controls most of Myanmar's borderlands. Airstrikes, village burnings, and mass displacement define everyday life across Chin State, Sagaing, and Kachin. And the consequences of this ongoing war are no longer contained within Myanmar's borders.

For India, which shares a 1,600-kilometre border with Myanmar across four northeastern states — Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram — the civil war is not a distant humanitarian crisis. It is an active security challenge, a connectivity problem, and a strategic competition with China, all at once. Managing it is one of the most complex and underappreciated tasks facing India's foreign policy and security establishments in 2026.

What Is Spilling Across India's Border

The most immediate security consequence of Myanmar's civil war for India is the flow of people, weapons, and narcotics across a porous, mountainous frontier.

Since the 2021 coup, over 69,000 Myanmar refugees have taken shelter in India — the majority in Mizoram, which shares deep ethnic ties with Myanmar's Chin State through the Zo-Kuki-Chin community. The refugee flows have not been uniform: Mizoram, under its state government, has taken a humanitarian approach to the influx; Manipur, already torn by its own ethnic conflict between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities, has viewed the cross-border arrivals with considerably greater alarm. The central government's decision to scrap the Free Movement Regime — which historically allowed borderland communities to cross without passports — and reduce the visa-free corridor to 10 kilometres has added bureaucratic friction to a human reality that predates any bilateral agreement.

Weapons flows are the more immediate security concern. India's NIA has linked multiple caches of arms and ammunition recovered in Manipur to Myanmar-based insurgent groups operating along the international border. The August 2024 attacks in Moirang and Koutruk in Manipur — featuring drones, rockets, and IEDs — involved weaponry suspected to have crossed the border from Myanmar. Micro-payload drone drops have surged 30% in 2025, and the India-Myanmar border is one of the primary vectors through which this technology and the groups using it are entering India's security environment.

Drug trafficking is the third dimension. Myanmar's borderlands adjoin the Golden Triangle, one of the world's largest synthetic drug production zones. Tatmadaw-affiliated militias and ethnic armed groups have used drug trafficking as a revenue source throughout the war, and the conflict's disruption of normal trade routes has intensified narcotics flows toward India's northeast — a region that has already seen a significant surge in drug usage over the past decade.

The Insurgency Complication

India's northeastern insurgent landscape has historically had deep roots in Myanmar. The NSCN-K, the ULFA-I, and multiple Manipur-based armed groups have maintained camps and rear bases in Myanmar's Sagaing and Chin regions for decades. The Tatmadaw, which managed these groups as a lever of pressure on India, is now losing control of the very territories where these camps are located — creating a vacuum that India's security establishment is navigating carefully.

In July 2025, India conducted drone strikes against insurgent camps in Myanmar's Sagaing region — targeting ULFA-I positions near the Indo-Myanmar border in Arunachal Pradesh. India confirmed the strikes in January 2026. The strikes killed multiple senior ULFA-I commanders and represented a significant escalation in India's cross-border counter-insurgency posture — the clearest signal yet that New Delhi will not allow Myanmar's chaos to provide sanctuary for groups targeting Indian territory.

The killing of 10 insurgents by the Assam Rifles in Chandel district of Manipur in May 2025 — involving PDFs aligned with Myanmar's NUG — created a different and more complex situation. The NUG, which the international community broadly regards as Myanmar's legitimate government-in-exile, disputed India's account of the incident. The episode highlighted the fundamental tension in India's Myanmar approach: it must counter the insurgent groups that threaten its northeast, while maintaining working relationships with the ethnic armed organisations and NUG forces that now control most of Myanmar's India-facing borderlands.

The China Dimension

No analysis of Myanmar's civil war can ignore China. Beijing has played a complex, multi-sided role in the conflict — maintaining formal relations with the Tatmadaw while providing significant support to some ethnic armed groups, particularly in the north. China's interests in Myanmar are straightforward: it wants stable access to the ports, pipelines, and overland trade routes that constitute the Myanmar leg of its BRI connectivity architecture. The Tatmadaw's loss of control over border regions directly threatens those interests — which is why Beijing has been the most active external mediator in the conflict, brokering ceasefires between the junta and ethnic armed groups in northern Myanmar.

For India, China's growing influence over Myanmar's ethnic armed organisations — including groups that control territory adjacent to India's border — is a strategic concern of the first order. A Myanmar whose borderlands are effectively under Chinese strategic influence is a Myanmar that could be used to pressure India's northeast, disrupt India's Act East connectivity projects, and complicate India's border management at a time when it is already stretched across two major frontiers.

India's Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project — connecting India's landlocked northeast to the Bay of Bengal through Myanmar — runs through Chin and Rakhine states that are now contested or controlled by ethnic armed groups. The India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, central to India's Act East vision, passes through Manipur and Myanmar's Sagaing region. Both projects are severely delayed by the civil war. Every year of delay is a year in which China's own connectivity projects — running through Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar — extend their lead over India's alternative corridors.

What India Must Do

India's Myanmar strategy requires a fundamental recalibration — from managing a predictable relationship with a single military government to navigating a fragmented landscape of ethnic armed organisations, a government-in-exile, a weakened junta, and China's active involvement.

Three things are essential.

The first is direct engagement with ethnic armed organisations controlling India-facing border areas. NSA Ajit Doval's July 2024 engagement in Naypyidaw was a start. But India needs deeper, sustained relationships with the Chin Brotherhood, the Arakan Army, and other groups whose territory India's connectivity projects must traverse and whose cooperation India's border security requires. These are not comfortable relationships — but they are necessary ones.

The second is a differentiated state-level approach. Mizoram's humanitarian absorption of Chin refugees and Manipur's security-first posture reflect different ground realities that a single national policy cannot adequately address. New Delhi must give state governments the flexibility to manage their specific border communities while ensuring that national security and immigration policy objectives are not compromised.

The third is accelerating border infrastructure. The CIBMS expansion, the fencing programme, and the surveillance enhancement along the India-Myanmar border are all underway — but the pace must match the evolving threat. A contested, fluid border with no stable interlocutor on the other side demands the most technologically sophisticated border management system India can deploy.

Myanmar's civil war will not end soon. India's northeastern border will remain contested, complex, and consequential for years to come. Managing it well — with the diplomatic sophistication, security capability, and strategic patience it demands — is as important to India's security as any of the more visible theatres it is managing simultaneously.

The Hind covers policy, power, and strategic affairs from India's perspective. Views expressed are analytical and editorial.