India, Bangladesh, And The Pragmatic Necessity Of Engaging Myanmar – OpEd
New Delhi’s decision to roll out the red carpet at Hyderabad House for Myanmar’s newly minted President, U Min Aung Hlaing, marks a profound moment of reckoning for Indian foreign policy. Min Aung Hlaing’s five-day visit to New Delhi—his first foreign trip since exchanging his military fatigues for civilian attire following a highly managed parliamentary vote—presents a stark normative paradox.
For a nation that proudly projects itself as the world’s largest democracy, hosting a leader facing severe international scrutiny from the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court cracks its “democratic mirror.” Yet, in the cold calculus of New Delhi’s national security establishment, the state reception was not an endorsement of tyranny, but a calculated necessity driven by unyielding geographic realities.
The central dilemma of contemporary Indo-Myanmar relations lies in this sharp friction between India’s internal democratic identity and its external strategic choices. By officially welcoming Min Aung Hlaing, India offers a veneer of international legitimacy to an administration born from a brutal 2021 coup and solidified through a January election widely condemned by the West as a sham. The moral cost is high, temporarily isolating New Delhi from traditional democratic partners who view the engagement as an act of profound hypocrisy.
However, Indian diplomats operate on a different axiom. Geopolitical vacuums are quickly filled, and if India refuses to engage the de facto sovereign in Myanmar, it cedes its eastern flank entirely to adversarial forces. Three primaries interlocking strategic necessities drive India’s willingness to absorb this reputational damage.
First and foremost is border security. India and Myanmar share a highly porous 1,643-kilometer land border alongside a sensitive maritime boundary in the Bay of Bengal. For decades, India’s Northeast has been plagued by insurgent groups that maintain safe havens in the thick jungles of Myanmar’s Sagaing Region and Chin State. Whenever India has alienated the central authority in Myanmar, these insurgent groups have operated with total impunity. Furthermore, the post-coup chaos has triggered an explosion of transnational crime, specifically the trafficking of synthetic narcotics and the rise of sophisticated cyber-scam networks. Maintaining functional law-enforcement coordination with the central government is a matter of immediate domestic security for India’s northeastern states.
The second, and perhaps most urgent, driver is the shadow of Chinese expansionism. Following Western sanctions, Myanmar’s economic and military dependence on Beijing has expanded drastically. China has pushed ahead with the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, gaining access to deep-water ports at Kyaukphyu. This gives Beijing a highly desirable overland route to the Indian Ocean, bypassing the choke point of the Malacca Strait. A blanket diplomatic boycott of Min Aung Hlaing by India would leave Beijing as the only one with leverage over the regime. By hosting the Myanmar President, New Delhi gains a crucial diplomatic hedge that allows Myanmar to balance its dependence on China by keeping its channels open with another major Asian power.
Last but not least, Myanmar is the literal land-bridge for India’s “Act East” policy, connecting its landlocked Northeast, with the huge markets of Southeast Asia. Flagship infrastructure projects, such as the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project and the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, represent millions of dollars of Indian strategic capital. Because these transit routes pass through territory nominally under the purview of the central government, abandoning engagement would indefinitely freeze India’s regional integration strategy.
However, by granting diplomatic legitimacy to a suspected war criminal, New Delhi provides a dangerous blueprint for other nations. Ultimately, this engagement risks inspiring other regional actors including ASEAN to abandon democratic benchmarks and re-engage with the regime. In the process, India erodes its own moral standing to advocate a rules-based global order, demonstrating that realpolitik can triumph over international justice.
By placing all its diplomatic capital on President Min Aung Hlaing, India also risks alienating powerful rebel groups, like the Chin National Army or the Arakan Army, which actually control the physical borders and transit routes. If these forces achieve long-term autonomy, New Delhi’s close alignment with a widely despised central regime could severely backfire on its local connectivity projects.
Strategic Position of Dhaka
This strategic recalibration in New Delhi forces a parallel, highly pragmatic response from neighboring Bangladesh. Dhaka cannot view the engagement of India through a normative prism, but it has to deal with its own dual-track diplomacy to ensure its national security. Hosting over one million Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh is structurally forced to engage with whoever holds the instruments of state power in Myanmar to keep the possibility of a sustainable, voluntary repatriation alive.
For Bangladesh, engagement with Min Aung Hlaing’s central government is must for ensuring long-term sovereign guarantees, while cooperation with local rebel forces addresses immediate border survival reality. With the Arakan Army now effectively controlling the entire frontier along the Naf River, Bangladesh needs to initiate functional, de facto communication channels with the rebel forces to manage border disputes, coordinate localized security and curb lucrative illicit trade.
In order to protect its international reputation and fundamental policy stances on the Rohingya genocide, Dhaka is extremely cautious about giving Min Aung Hlaing’s government any official diplomatic legitimacy. Dhaka will continue to work with ASEAN, China, and the UN to coordinate humanitarian aid and keep an eye on the border situation in its capacity as a regional stabilizer.
