Myanmar Loved India. India Never Noticed. China Smiled.
annual seminar on 'Security Challenges of the Northeast and the Way Forward', jointly hosted by USI and Assam Rifles (Image Bhatiya on X)
For Ordinary Myanmarese, India Is the Land of Buddha. For New Delhi’s Strategists, Myanmar Remains a Blind Spot With Consequences.
By NIRENDRA DEV
New Delhi, March 14, 2026 — There is a quiet irony at the heart of India’s relationship with Myanmar. To an ordinary Myanmarese citizen, India is not a geopolitical actor or a competing power — it is the land of Buddha, a destination of profound religious longing. Yet New Delhi has never fully converted that deep cultural reverence into strategic currency. The result, analysts argue, is a neighbourhood policy that has chronically underestimated one of India’s most consequential neighbours.
We never truly know the people we should love — our neighbour. The phrase carries more diplomatic weight than it first appears.
The foundation for a stronger relationship has always existed. Age-old ethnic ties between India’s northeast and Myanmar provide a natural bridge. Decades ago, seasoned Burma-watchers established a strategic axiom that has never lost its force: the defence of Burma is the defence of India. “No sacrifice is bigger than what we need to do to ensure that India’s interests in Burma are protected,” as one expert put it.
Yet a persistent framing error undermines Indian policy. When Myanmar is categorised primarily as part of South East Asia, it quietly slips outside India’s immediate circle of strategic concern. That is both unfair and dangerous.
Former Indian Ambassador to Myanmar Rajiv Bhatia offers essential context. Myanmarese, he notes, are fiercely proud citizens deeply resistant to total dependence on Beijing. “They hate to become totally dependent and reliant on China,” Bhatia says — a sentiment that should, in theory, create significant opportunity for India. But capitalising on it requires understanding Myanmar on its own terms.
“One fundamental thing is that the nation-building in that country has not been completed,” Bhatia states plainly. The result is a fragmented, divided nation — and Indian policy, he argues, must be tailor-made accordingly rather than applied through a generic regional lens.
Myanmar’s challenges are structural and layered. The first is democracy — specifically the military’s suffocating dominance over civilian life and political institutions across the better part of seven decades. Bhatia notes, however, that India’s military diplomacy with Myanmar has been notably successful, and New Delhi is right to continue investing in that channel.
The second challenge is federalism. For over seventy years, Myanmar has wrestled with a fundamental question: how should power be distributed between the central government and its diverse ethnic and geographical regions? Bhatia is realistic about the limits of outside intervention. “Myanmarese will have to work it out themselves — nobody can help them,” he says.
The third challenge is economic development — chronically neglected precisely because the first two crises have consumed all available political oxygen.
Bhatia adds a dimension that reframes the entire discussion: “The future of Myanmar is linked to its past.” Understanding where Myanmar is headed demands that Indian scholars and policymakers study its history seriously. Central to that history are four elections —1990, 2010, 2015 and 2020 — each of which shaped the country’s present reality. In three of those contests, the National League for Democracy participated and won decisively, making unmistakably clear what the Myanmarese people want. That democratic mandate, repeatedly overridden by the military, exposes the single most defining tension in Myanmar today: a profound and dangerous disconnect between the people and the armed forces that rule them.
For India, the strategic imperative is clear. A neighbour that reveres your civilisational heritage, fears Chinese dominance and is navigating an existential political crisis is not a peripheral concern — it is a defining test of Indian foreign policy.
New Delhi cannot afford to keep getting it wrong.
(This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are author’s own.)
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