On Oct. 15, the Myanmar junta, which calls itself the State Administration Council (SAC), hosted a grand ceremony to mark the eighth anniversary of the signing of the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) in Naypyitaw. According to the junta mouthpiece, The Global New Light of Myanmar, it was attended by the SAC’s top leadership on one side and seven signatory ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) on the other. The glitzy ceremony was also attended by high-level representatives from three neighboring countries of Myanmar—India, Thailand and China—who had served, among others, as “international witnesses” at the first signing ceremony in October 2015.
The Narendra Modi government In India sent its deputy National Security Advisor (NSA), Vikram Misri, to attend the ceremony. Before the ceremony, as per a report published in the junta mouthpiece, Misri personally met the junta chief, Min Aung Hlaing, and even appeared for a smiling photo-op. The mouthpiece claimed that both sides “frankly exchanged views on further plans of India to give a helping hand to the peace process of Myanmar and its firm belief in NCA.” This indicates India’s desire to potentially play a mediator’s role in the peace process, although it is unclear to what extent.
That New Delhi sent a representative from its top security office to attend the NCA anniversary ceremony is far from surprising. India’s all-powerful NSA, Ajit Doval, attended the first NCA signing ceremony with eight EAOs in 2015 as an “international witness.” Then, in 2018, when two more EAOs joined the agreement, Doval sent his deputy, Rajinder Khanna, to attend the ceremony. Interestingly, this year’s attendee, Misri, once served as India’s ambassador to Myanmar (2016-19), following which he was appointed as New Delhi’s envoy in Beijing. This background makes him particularly relevant to Myanmar.
Since October 2015, when India officially witnessed the NCA’s signing, it has consistently backed the ceasefire regime and the attendant peace process. Before the coup, this made some political and strategic sense. Despite the limited support that it received from Myanmar’s EAOs, its top-heavy bureaucracy, and lack of sincerity from the military’s end, the NCA-led peace process, which also entailed the Daw Aung San Suu Kyi government’s flagship “21st Century Panglong Conference”, was a decent start to ending the six decades-long civil war and initiating multi-stakeholder conversations towards building a genuine federal democratic union. From New Delhi’s vantage point, backing such a process was a logical way to ensure political stability in Myanmar while also balancing China’s overbearing influence as a key conflict mediator in the country.
But things have changed after the military’s 2021 coup d’état. Today, India is making a mistake by continuing to publicly back the NCA, which has become a caged bird under Min Aung Hlaing’s junta rule.
The NCA’s collapse
When the military launched the putsch in February 2021 and began a brutal offensive against dissenting civilians, including its ethnic minority people, it completely shattered whatever trust the NCA had managed to foster amongst various stakeholders. No national ceasefire agreement can operate without a bare minimum degree of trust between the warring sides, not least in a multi-ethnic country like Myanmar where consensus is anyway hard to come by.
The EAOs that voluntarily signed the agreement in 2015 did so out of their bona fide belief that the military would respect their political aspirations, allow a civilian-led peace process to steer the negotiations, and refrain from using the gun to impose its remit. With his mindless coup, Min Aung Hlaing shattered those unwritten promises, taking down the NCA-led process with him.
It was hardly a surprise, therefore, that all 10 signatories expressed great alarm after the coup (although five among them changed their tune just months later). One of the NCA’s most powerful signatories, the Chin National Front (CNF), walked out of the ceasefire agreement right after the coup and joined hands with the revolution. Months later, another major signatory—the Karen National Union (KNU)—slammed the military for violating the NCA and eventually rejected all offers of negotiation extended by the SAC.
It quickly became clear the NCA had collapsed. But, instead of ditching it, the junta is now strategically using the ceasefire agreement to sow seeds of discord within the ethnic opposition and create an illusion of national reconciliation. This is despite the glaring fact that the very act of launching a military coup was a fundamental affront to the ceasefire agreement. In a recent joint statement published right before the SAC-organized anniversary ceremony of the agreement, the CNF, KNU and another signatory, the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front (ABSDF), categorically affirmed that “a military coup is a violation of the NCA and nullifies the commitments made under the NCA.”
“The military’s repeated serious attacks that targeted civilians by using the Army, Air Force, and Navy forces are a flagrant violation of International Humanitarian Law and the NCA’s own provisions that are based on the same,” the statement, dated Oct. 13, noted. These are strong words by three EAOs that were once signatories to the ceasefire agreement, and cannot be ignored.
India’s miscalculation
India, by continuing to back the NCA process after the coup, has failed to read the new reality on the ground. The NCA is no longer an inclusive ceasefire regime. It has been reduced to a lopsided political instrument that one side—the junta—is using to legitimize its authority and induce certain EAOs to join its disingenuous endeavour. More importantly, the SAC is using the NCA as a cover for its brutal war against the ethnic minority people of Myanmar; to give its violent, counter-democratic and anti-federal politics of “national unification” a veneer of peaceful reconciliation.
This is reflected in the jarring fact that less than a week before the NCA anniversary ceremony, during which Min Aung Hlaing waxed eloquent about “genuine and sustainable peace”, the military bombed an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in the northern part of Laiza in Kachin State, killing at least 30 people, including 11 children. An Amnesty International investigation revealed that the junta used one of its largest aerial-delivered unguided bombs in the deadly attack, which came nearly a year after it killed at least 75 people in another lethal airstrike on an outdoor concert in Kachin State’s Hpakant Township.
For a senior Indian representative to visit Naypyitaw at the junta’s invitation and appear for a photo-op with the coup chief just days after this devastating attack on non-combatant civilians is just bad public diplomacy. But, more importantly, it indicates that India is willing to ignore the concerns of a majority of Myanmar’s ethnic groups, who have comprehensively rejected the NCA, simply to maintain warm relations with the junta (and access to Naypyitaw’s power corridors). This orthodox realpolitik approach is counterproductive to India’s own political and strategic interests in Myanmar, where the pro-democracy opposition and non-NCA EAOs enjoy far more popular support than the notorious junta and the NCA EAOs.
A key reason why India wants to remain involved in Myanmar’s peace process and potentially even insert itself in a limited mediating role is to balance the Chinese influence in the country. This is an understandable foreign policy goal. But, India’s strategy to achieve that goal is based on a serious miscalculation. China, unlike India, has longstanding relationships with a host of non-ceasefire EAOs in Myanmar’s north. These include the country’s largest EAO, the United Wa State Army. It is precisely this elaborate network of diverse connections across Myanmar’s complex ethnic battlespace that has allowed Beijing to exercise strong leverage over successive regimes in Naypyitaw and sometimes even unilaterally maneuver the peace process.
Even Thailand has maintained warm relationships with a broad set of EAOs based along Myanmar’s northeastern and eastern frontiers as part of its so-called “buffer zone” policy. This has given Bangkok wide wriggle-room in post-coup Myanmar. But India hasn’t cultivated any such consistent, in-depth, trust-based linkages with Myanmar’s EAOs, including those that are directly relevant to its strategic interests—the CNF and Arakan Army (AA). Both these EAOs continue to reject the NCA, and boycotted Sunday’s ceremony. New Delhi can’t overlook this reality, given that the CNF and AA control large swathes of territory in Chin and Rakhine states through which the India-funded Kaladan Multi Modal Transit and Transport Project (KMMTTP) passes.
But, by publicly supporting a peace process that these groups have rejected, India risks losing whatever access and goodwill it enjoyed with not just them, but also other EAOs across Myanmar. This includes another EAO that India once had warm relations with and often relied on for intelligence on anti-India insurgent groups in the northeast—the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). Today, the KIA is one of the main anti-junta EAOs that continues to wholly reject the NCA, provide frontal support to the revolution, and routinely attack SAC positions in Kachin and northern Shan states. It is also among the EAOs that the junta continues to attack relentlessly.
If the idea is to play a constructive role in Myanmar’s peace process, then India needs to change its strategy. It needs to engage with all ethnic stakeholders on the ground, rather than throwing its weight behind a one-sided ceasefire regime that is led by a discredited coup regime and has few takers. Only by broadening and deepening its engagement can it build sufficient leverage to play a meaningful and effective third-party role in any future process of national reconciliation. Most importantly, it needs to realize that no “peace process” that is steered by the junta will find wide acceptance in today’s Myanmar. The military is no longer a credible peace actor (if it ever was), and allying with it only discredits India’s own image in the country.
Angshuman Choudhury is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
