The Central government appeared over the moon that India was the first country that Myanmar’s military ruler Min Aung Hlaing visited after assuming office as President, with Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri making a point of it at a briefing about the five-day visit that began on May 30. In other words, Min Aung Hlaing did not visit China first. Nonetheless, it was his first welcome abroad after his election as President in April 2026, and his first to India since he usurped Aung San Suu Kyi’s mandate in 2021.

The first stop at Bodh Gaya was important for Hlaing, and perhaps even his main reason for visiting India first, in the hope that the blessing of the Triple Gem would confer on him more legitimacy than the dubious election through which he converted himself into a civilian President. (In Buddhism, the “Triple Gem” refers to the three core components of the faith: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.)

The National Unity Government (NUG), a civilian body of parliamentarians formed right after the coup d’etat in 2021 that deposed the government and which describes itself as the real government of Myanmar, issued an appeal to India for “principled engagement in support of the people of Myanmar”.

“At this critical moment, as the people of Myanmar continue their determined struggle for democracy, the position taken by India, the largest democracy, will be remembered as an important historical marker shaping the future of people-to-people relations between the two countries,” the NUG said.

The only thing that may have given some comfort to Myanmar’s five-year-long resistance against the military regime is that Min Aung Hlaing did not get a “state” welcome in Delhi. The visit was categorised as “official”, and the welcome was therefore not an all-out one.

India believes that it cannot afford to ignore the military regime, as that would leave the field open to China. In the Foreign Secretary’s words: “History has shown that disengagement doesn’t give us any results that are better than engagement, and it certainly doesn’t produce democratic change if that is what we are interested in; on the other hand, disengagement only produces a vacuum that others go on to fill, then to our detriment. And those others have no interest in democracy, I can assure you about that.”

India would also know, though, that this is not a race it can hope to win. Min Aung Hlaing does not need to visit China first to prove his loyalty to Beijing. China has propped up the military regime with money and arms to protect its strategic interests. It has built a port at Kyaukphyu in Myanmar’s Rakhine state. Before the US-Israel war on Iran, ships from West Asia dropped off their cargoes at Kyaukphyu, from where a pipeline transported them to Kunming in south China. Gas from Myanmar’s own offshore gas fields in the Bay of Bengal is similarly transported.

The Chinese-built Muse-Mandalay highway, connecting central Myanmar to China’s Yunnan province is a thriving trade corridor. The Chinese also have leverage with ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) in the north-eastern borderlands, enough to play truce broker—once in 2024 between an EAO and the military, and as recently as two weeks ago between two warring EAOs—when the conflict threatens its mining interests and energy infrastructure in that region.

India, on the other hand, is struggling to complete its two flagship infrastructure projects, namely the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway and the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, over two decades after they were first proposed. Both were delayed first by hurdles on the Indian side. Since 2021, the year of the armed uprising against the coup, and New Delhi’s early distancing from the pro-democracy uprising, work on both projects has been unfeasible in stretches that are active conflict zones. No new deadlines have been set for completion of the projects.

Meanwhile, the Myanmar regime has not quite kept New Delhi’s faith. One of India’s justifications for engagement with the regime is the security of the north-eastern States, and that the Myanmar military will deny safe havens to insurgent groups. But truth be told, from the time of the coup the military has co-opted half a dozen of these groups to combat pro-democracy fighters and EAOs who have joined hands with civilian resistance groups, especially in the Sagaing area.

While Min Aung Hlaing was in New Delhi, an exchange of fire between Assam Rifles and the Myanmar military over the Manipur border exposed the gap between expectation and reality. And the regime’s military operations in Chin state, including aerial bombardment, continue to send displaced people across the border into Mizoram.

A rare earth opportunity

Undeterred by the setbacks, India is now exploring a different, more ambitious geopolitical opportunity in Myanmar. This one is located in the geologically rich Kachin state, where access to the country’s reserves of heavy rare earth minerals (HREEs) is controlled by the anti-regime Kachin Independence Army (KIA).

After months of fighting in 2024, KIA took control of two places in the state, namely Chipwi and Panga. Both are said to have large reserves of the dysprosium and terbium HREEs. The Chinese run the mining operations, shipping the extracted material over the border to Yunnan for processing. The Kachin mines are key to China’s dominance over the global rare earth supply chain.

According to one study by a Myanmar think tank called ISP-Myanmar, based in Yangon earlier but in exile since the coup, China’s largest supply of rare earths from 2017 to 2024 was from Myanmar. The Chinese work directly with the KIA as the military regime has little say in Kachin.

Last year, a Reuters report claimed that India had started working with the KIA, which controls large tracts of Kachin state, to collect samples from the region, and that two Indian companies, one of them a public sector undertaking, had been deployed for the task.

Misri confirmed at his briefing that “issues related to critical minerals and rare earths did come up during the discussions” with Min Aung Hlaing, and that this had been the subject of bilateral discussions “for some time”.

The visit, he said, had led to the “understanding” that the two governments and “entities” from the two countries “would continue to stay in touch... and take forward cooperation in these areas”.

Challenges ahead

It is not clear what “understanding” India reached with Min Aung Hlaing in Delhi on this issue. The regime has very little presence in Kachin. Rather, its pragmatic acceptance of China’s arrangement with the KIA is now both a governance model and a business model. The KIA sets the taxes on exports and takes the money, much of which goes towards the war against the regime. China has accepted the KIA as the de facto regional government.

If India’s plan ever gets off the ground, it would face a number of challenges in this rare earth hub. Firstly, while the KIA may welcome a new actor to help it break the monopoly hold of China in the area, for a country mentally in a place where a Bollywood film on the 2020 Galwan military confrontation had to be fictionalised, sanitised of all anti-China content and have its name changed, stamping on Chinese feet in Kachin must count as high-risk activity. Unless, of course, China “allows” India in.

Secondly, transporting the material, if that stage is reached, will be tough as connectivity between Kachin and India’s nearest border in the north-east is poor.

A third challenge is the international stigma that appropriation of “conflict resources” carries. That may not count for much in today’s world, where rules are broken with impunity by the most powerful nations. But the environmental costs and impact of such exploitative mining on local communities may be greater and last longer than the conflict itself.

According to studies, the chemicals used in the extraction process contaminate the land and water sources, making the land uncultivable, can cause diseases, and leave the land prone to landslides.

It says something about Myanmar’s complex situation today that the NUG, which has positioned itself against mining that the Myanmar military profits from, is silent about the massive increase in mining in Kachin under the KIA, because they are on the same side.

The KIA is the third EAO with which India, after largely keeping away from anti-regime entites, has initiated contact for tactical purposes The other two are the Chin Defence Force and the Arakan Army. Contact with these two is aimed at ensuring that the Kaladan project, which passes through both Rakhine and Chin territory, does not sink entirely amid the fighting. All three groups are anti-regime.

It seems India is now reconciled to the reality that Myanmar’s centre is not strong enough to win, and that the pro-democracy fighters and the EAOs at the periphery are not so weak as to lose.

Myanmar is often described glowingly by Indian diplomats as the country at the intersection of the government’s policies of “Neighbourhood First, Act East” policies, and MAHASAGAR or Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across the Region.

In reality, each one of these policies has struggled to gain traction in Myanmar over the years. India’s engagement with the regime has not helped its interests or strategic objectives, and its transactional engagement with some anti-regime EAOs without a broader engagement with the NUG has not helped it make friends with the people.

Nirupama Subramanian is an independent journalist who has worked earlier at The Hindu and at The Indian Express.

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