Myanmar’s president Min Aung Hlaing — the former junta commander who seized power in a February 2021 coup — began his first official overseas visit on Saturday, travelling to India for a five-day trip that will include meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Droupadi Murmu, as well as sessions with Indian business leaders. Reuters reported that the visit, confirmed by India’s Ministry of External Affairs, covers border security, drug and arms smuggling, and access to Myanmar’s rare-earth deposits. The presidency itself dates from a January 2026 election widely dismissed as fraudulent by Western governments and human rights groups. The five-year civil war triggered by the coup has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions; analysts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies told NPR that the military is now “mounting a comeback” on the battlefield, aided by Russian and Chinese drone technology.
The received wisdom
The human rights community’s objection to normalising relations with Min Aung Hlaing is not merely deontological; it is also strategic. Receiving a junta chief who orchestrated a coup, dissolved an elected government, and presided over five years of atrocities — including air strikes on civilian villages and the deliberate destruction of healthcare infrastructure — sends a signal to every other would-be coup maker in the developing world that military seizures of power carry acceptable diplomatic costs. India’s willingness to host the visit while ASEAN still formally bars Myanmar’s generals from its summits, and while the country’s UN seat remains in the hands of an ambassador appointed by the deposed Aung San Suu Kyi, represents a specific form of moral lagging: one democratic country providing cover that enables another’s democracy to remain suppressed. The Thailand-pushed ASEAN virtual meeting with Myanmar’s new foreign minister, criticised by rights groups as a “slippery slope,” only deepens that concern.
A different read
The rights framework, however principled, has an empirical problem in the Indo-Pacific: strategic abstention from engagement with difficult regimes rarely improves the conditions of the people living under them, and often cedes influence to actors with fewer compunctions.
India’s interest in this visit is threefold, and each element is entirely intelligible from a realist perspective. First, border security: India and Myanmar share approximately a thousand kilometres of porous frontier, through which weapons, drugs, and insurgent networks have flowed in both directions since the coup. A Myanmar in complete chaos — or consolidated under Chinese patronage — is materially worse for Indian security than a Myanmar with some stake in Indian goodwill. Second, rare earths: China has already leveraged its control of Myanmar’s critical minerals sector as part of its broader export-restriction strategy; India’s interest in direct access is a legitimate counter to Chinese supply-chain dominance. Third, counter-China: New Delhi’s calculation that diluting Beijing’s monopoly on Naypyidaw’s foreign relationships is worth the diplomatic awkwardness of a presidential handshake is not obviously wrong.
The deeper question is whether engagement actually achieves these goals or merely whitewashes the regime. The historical record on this is mixed but not uniformly pessimistic. Western engagement with post-Tiananmen China did not liberalise Chinese politics, but it also did not prevent Taiwan from becoming considerably more democratic or South Korea from transforming during the same period. India’s engagement with Myanmar’s military during the 2011-2021 partial civilian era produced some infrastructure cooperation but limited security dividend. What seems clear from the current situation is that isolation has not worked either: the civil war has not dislodged the military, the resistance forces are now “in serious trouble” and “beginning to collapse” per IISS analyst Morgan Michaels, and Beijing has continued deepening its presence throughout.
The most honest framing may be that India is not choosing between engagement with a bad regime and a better outcome; it is choosing between engagement and Chinese monopoly. Former Indian ambassador Gautam Mukhopadhaya put it plainly: the bottom line from New Delhi’s perspective is “what they can get out of it in terms of raw materials, rare earths and business propositions”. That is not a humanitarian argument, but it is a real one, and democracies sometimes have to make it without hiding behind the language of partnership and shared values.
What would make engagement less morally costly is conditionality — explicit, publicly stated expectations about humanitarian access, media freedom, or prisoner releases — which India appears entirely unprepared to impose. Modi’s government is not ideologically inclined toward human rights pressure, particularly when applied to neighbours it views through a security lens. The cost of that reticence will be borne by the Burmese people, who are watching their country’s diplomatic rehabilitation proceed while the civil war grinds on.
What to watch
- The Beijing visit: Analysts expect Min Aung Hlaing to travel to China to meet Xi Jinping shortly after the India trip. The sequencing — India first — may reflect a negotiating tactic to demonstrate that Myanmar is not wholly dependent on Beijing.
- ASEAN formal re-admission: Thailand has been pushing for a gradual normalisation; whether the India visit provides cover for a full ASEAN re-engagement will become clear at the next ASEAN leaders’ summit.
- The UN seat: Myanmar’s UN representation remains under the control of the pre-coup ambassador. How long that anomaly persists now that regional normalisation is accelerating is a concrete test of institutional principle versus realpolitik.
- Rare-earth deal terms: India was already exploring a rare-earth arrangement with Myanmar rebels in late 2025; how the government-to-government track interacts with those negotiations will reveal how much leverage New Delhi actually extracted.
— J