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31-01-2024
NEW DELHI: Just over a week ago, India’s federal home minister Amit Shah announced a plan to fence the open border with neighboring Myanmar.
He said India would secure the rugged 1,643km (1,020-mile) boundary the same way in which “we have fenced the country’s border with Bangladesh”, which is more than twice as long.
Shah said the government would also consider scrapping a six-year-old free movement agreement, allowing border residents from India and Myanmar to travel 16km into each other’s territory without a visa. He gave few details of how the fence would be built, or over what timeframe but the move would be fraught with challenges some experts say the mountainous terrain makes a fence all but impossible. And India’s plans could destabilize the equilibrium that has existed for decades between peoples in the border area, as well as stirring up tensions with its neighbors.
The move to fence the border involving the four north-eastern Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram appears to have come against the backdrop of two major developments.
First, the escalation of the conflict in Myanmar since the military coup in February 2021 posed a mounting risk to Indian interests. Some two million people have been displaced in the fighting, according to the UN. In recent weeks, ethnic rebels claimed to have taken over the crucial town of Paletwa in Chin state, disrupting a key route from Myanmar to India.
Second, ethnic violence sparked by an affirmative action row erupted last year in Manipur, which shares a near-400km border with Myanmar. Clashes between members of the majority Meitei and tribal Kuki minority have claimed more than 170 lives and displaced tens of thousands of people.
The government in Manipur, led by Indian PM Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has spoken about a “large number of illegal migrants” and said the “violence was fueled by influential illegal poppy cultivators and drug lords from Myanmar settling in Manipur”.
Last July, India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar informed his counterpart Than Swe from Myanmar’s military-led government that India’s border areas “were seriously disturbed”. He said that “any actions that aggravate the (border) situation should be avoided”, and raised concerns about “human and drug trafficking”.
Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center, an American think-tank, believes the move to fence the border is “driven by India’s perception of a growing two-pronged security threat on its eastern border”. (Int’l News Desk)
