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Myanmar
This Week in AsiaPolitics

India ramps up Myanmar border patrols as it weighs junta demand to return police

  • About 48 Myanmar citizens, including eight police officers, have taken refuge in Mizoram state, with India ‘unlikely to act in haste’ in returning them
  • But New Delhi has increased border patrols and is also expected to start deporting Rohingya in an effort to appease Myanmar

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Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar gather outside a mosque on Sunday in Jammu city. At least 168 of their number face possible deportation back to Myanmar. Photo: EPA-EFE
Pranay Sharma
While the Indian government has yet to respond to Myanmar’s request to send back eight police officers who crossed into India last week in a bid to escape the turmoil back home, it has asked its paramilitary unit deployed at the border to step up patrols and turn away anyone from Myanmar without a travel permit or visa.
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It is also expected to start deporting scores of Rohingya – members of Myanmar’s Muslim minority – who have ended up in India over the years after fleeing persecution in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar, news reports said. The United Nations says there are 16,000 Rohingya registered in India, but many more are living in the country undocumented. Several thousand live in Jammu and Kashmir, the only region in Hindu-majority India where Muslims form the largest group of residents.
The Indian nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has for years asked local authorities to identify and deport any Rohingya in their districts. Jammu’s inspector general of police, Mukesh Singh, told Agence France-Presse last week that local officials would send details of 168 Rohingya refugees to New Delhi, although questions remained about whether they could be sent back to Myanmar or should be kept in designated camps for now.

India and Myanmar share a 1,643km long border, which meets China in the north and Bangladesh in the south. The border separates the four Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram from the Myanmar states of Chin and Kachin, as well as Sagaing division. There are two official immigration and custom posts along its length.

The two sides also have a so-called Free Movement Regime, which allows tribes living along the border to travel 16km on either side without visa restrictions, so long as they carry the requisite permits. Altogether, there are an estimated 250 villages with nearly 300,000 inhabitants on either side of the border, as well as more than 100 small and large informal crossings, making it difficult to stop all traffic between the two sides.

But retired Lieutenant General Shokin Chauhan, the former director general of the paramilitary group deployed at the border, the Assam Rifles, said India and Myanmar had a protocol agreement to “cooperate with each other in anti-insurgency operations and also hand over any [hostile] person if they manage to cross over.”

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An estimated 48 people, including the eight police officers, have crossed into India in recent days as Myanmar’s junta continues its crackdown on protesters opposed to the February 1 coup, which brought down the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. They have all taken shelter in Mizoram, an Indian state across from Myanmar’s southwestern Chin state.
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