Why India is rolling out welcome mat for Myanmar’s Min Aung Hlaing

_ Myanmar leader Min Aung Hlaing’s first trip to India since being sworn in as president signals New Delhi’s recognition of the strongman’s political status as it seeks to counter mounting Chinese influence, according to analysts. The five-day visit, which began on Saturday at the personal invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is aimed at strengthening ties with one of Myanmar’s key regional partners. Despite Western sanctions imposed after the February 2021 coup, India has maintained working relations with Myanmar’s generals due to the country’s strategic importance to Delhi’s own security. Hunter Marston, director for Southeast Asia at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, said the invitation represented “a de facto recognition of the strongman’s political status”, noting that the two leaders met last April on the sidelines of the Bimstec summit in Bangkok. “The only difference is that now Delhi has no pretence of engaging Min Aung Hlaing as the leader of Myanmar’s new government and doesn’t seem to care about the optics,” Marston said. Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s former military chief and junta leader, was installed as president in April following an election widely panned as orchestrated to maintain the military’s tight grip on power. His last visit to India was in 2019 as military chief, before seizing power in the 2021 coup and launching a crackdown on opponents that has since spiralled into a nationwide armed conflict and humanitarian crisis. Min Aung Hlaing departed Naypyidaw on Saturday morning, landing at Gaya International Airport in Bihar, state media reported. He was scheduled to meet Indian President Droupadi Murmu and Modi on Monday, alongside government officials and business representatives, to discuss ways to deepen bilateral ties. India would like to move forward with the Kaladan Multimodal Transit Transport project (KMMT), a 109km (68-mile) corridor linking Paletwa in Chin state to Zorinpui on the border with India’s Mizoram state. The project has faced years of delays due to fighting between the military and the Arakan Army and allied resistance groups. Advancing it would require a stronger military presence in Chin State to stabilise the corridor, Marston said. Naval cooperation was also high on Delhi’s agenda, Marston said, adding India viewed “Myanmar as an important partner in projecting its military power at sea and fending off Chinese domination of its maritime periphery” – in the Bay of Bengal especially. Sreeparna Banerjee, an associate fellow in the strategic studies programme at India’s Observer Research Foundation, said the visit reflected a growing trend of “functional engagement” with Myanmar’s military leadership, which regional actors increasingly treat as an “unavoidable stakeholder”. The timing was telling, she said, as it followed earlier visits to Naypyidaw by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, when he and Min Aung Hlaing discussed border stability, and UN Special Envoy Julie Bishop. Delhi inviting Min Aung Hlaing for a state visit lent “symbolic value for the junta, helping project a degree of international acceptance, though not necessarily political endorsement”, Banerjee said. While some of India’s security concerns – insurgency, arms and narcotics trafficking, refugee flows and scam compounds along the border – could have been pursued through lower-level channels, she said Delhi appeared to have concluded that direct engagement was now unavoidable. Htwe Htwe Thein, a Myanmar-born associate professor of international business at Curtin University in Australia, described the visit as “pragmatic engagement, rather than moral endorsement”. Myanmar was simply “too strategically significant to ignore”, she argued, adding that its spiralling instability had become a regional crisis that “neighbours cannot afford to simply wait out”. “The choice of India as the first presidential foreign trip is symbolically meaningful. Min Aung Hlaing wants to show that he received support not just from China,” Htwe said. She said the visit was aimed at dealing with the reality on the ground, including Indian investments in Myanmar’s infrastructure projects and Delhi’s “deep concerns” about Chinese influence filling any vacuum left by India. “India just couldn’t afford to cede the relationship entirely to China,” Htwe said. “Hosting Min Aung Hlaing as president is, in part, India telling itself and the region: we are still here.” For Modi, hosting the visit also sends the message that India’s Neighbourhood First policy applies to all neighbours equally, according to Htwe. Apart from the KMMT, other key projects in play include the Myanmar-India-Thailand Trilateral Highway and several border infrastructure and energy networks. Htwe was clear-eyed about the moral cost, however. “India’s reception of Min Aung Hlaing is not nuanced statecraft; it is a betrayal,” she said. “That India, the world’s largest democracy, has the appetite to host someone widely regarded as an international criminal is not just a political choice, but a reputational one.” Regional human rights watchdogs and anti-junta resistance forces have argued that Modi’s invitation serves to legitimise a regime that is carrying out ground military operations, daily air strikes and cluster bombings against its own population. Asean Parliamentarians for Human Rights called on India to withdraw recognition of the junta, with chairwoman Mercy Chriesty Barends, a member of Indonesia’s parliament, condemning Myanmar’s leader. “Min Aung Hlaing is not Myanmar’s legitimate president,” she said in a statement. “He is the architect of a brutal coup that overthrew a democratically elected government and has since presided over a campaign of mass atrocities against his own people.” Htwe also asked if India’s invitation had come with conditions attached such as a pause in aerial bombings. If not, then India would have given Min Aung Hlaing “a diplomatic ‘gift’ while asking nothing in return for the people still dying across its border”, she added.

Why India is rolling out welcome mat for Myanmar’s Min Aung Hlaing

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The military leader’s first presidential trip to New Delhi signals pragmatic engagement as India moves to counter rising Chinese influence

The military leader’s first presidential trip to New Delhi signals pragmatic engagement as India moves to counter rising Chinese influence