Episode #266: Namaste to Nowhere
“There is a gap that has to be bridged, both on the Indian and Myanmar side as well,” says Makepeace Sitlhou, an independent Indian journalist who covers the country’s northeastern border region.
Northeast India is a geographically isolated region, connected to the rest of the country only by a thin strip strip of territory called the “Siliguri Corridor.” Though geopolitically important, this area is otherwise overlooked, even within India itself. “We're the Third World part of the Third World,” jokes Makepeace, who adds that a “tyranny of distance” is also at play here. “It really doesn't help us much to be represented, or to be heard by the power centers.” She adds that, because New Delhi is so far away, the central government is a “weak, regional player” there.
Makepeace highlights that people from this region are often mistaken for foreign nationals from Southeast Asia or East Asia by other Indians—the area is a mosaic of cultures, languages, and dialects, with inhabitants tracing their origins to Tibet, Myanmar, Thailand, and China. “There’s been so much intermingling between ethnicities and races from all of these regions in Southeast Asia, South Asia and Indian mainland,” Makepeace says. “So, it’s a region that does not really have a very well defined, homogenous, ethnic identity.”
Kimi Colney, a Mizoram-born journalist currently working for the Assam-based independent media outlet EastMojo, also joins the episode. “There’s a lot of marginalization of the media in the northeast,” she adds, reinforcing the points made by her colleague. She has been covering the refugee crisis along the India-Myanmar border since 2016, and has observed, surprisingly, that even well-educated Indians are mostly unaware of the huge impact of the 2021 military coup on that area of their country.
This is felt most profoundly in two northeastern states, Mizoram and Manipur. Touching upon the former first, Kimi describes how Mizoram’s Chief Minister has welcomed Chin refugees fleeing violence; notably, his decision bucked the direct orders of Prime Minster Modi’s administration to expel them. Kimi believes this defiance stems from the close, ethnic ties between the Mizo and Chin peoples. “It’s like you are separating people of the same family,” she says. And while Kimi doubts that Modi would override the local government to forcefully oversee deportations, she does worry about the potential scrapping of the Free Movement Regime (FMR). Discussed in depth during a recent interview with Angshuman Choudhury, this policy allows local communities on both sides of the border to cross it and travel up to 16 kilometers into the neighboring country.
Despite the goodwill, however, life in Mizoram is far from stable for those fleeing conflict. The town is now brimming with over 7,000 refugees, and has little sustainable funding to manage the growing calamity. “It’s really a humanitarian crisis! People literally run out of food. There is little aid from INGOs, much less than in Thailand,” Kimi says.“There were these cold, hard floors, and people of all ages, and a lot of children, [even] nursing mothers, they just put a bedsheet so that they can sleep there.” Additionally, refugees cannot find employment or attend school, and as Shalini Perumal pointed out in a previous episode, they face added struggles if they try to look for opportunities in other parts of the country. “Our state government is very poor, and it makes me sad,” she says. “I reach out to people through Instagram and raised funds for [the refugees] for maybe another month.”
In addition, Kimi notes concerns that some refugees are engaged in widespread drug smuggling, which has also placed the continued status of the FMR in jeopardy. She gives the example of a survey conducted of political science students at the university in Mizoram, who said, said “‘We are okay with continuing to visit each other and crossing the border, but doing it legally.’” Although these concerns apply to just a small number of Chin refugees, they seem to be having an outsized, negative impact on the overall receptivity of the people in Mizoram. “It’s hard to see a bright future,” Kimi adds, referring to the hope of any peaceful harmony coming soon to the region.
Makepeace describes a very different official response by Manipur authorities, attributing it partly to politics, partly to geography, and partly to the particular ethnic mix found here. Looking first at the political reality, while Mizoram has one regional party, Manipur has several, and the ruling, majority party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), adheres to the central government’s orders and caters to the majority Meitei community, who are Hindu. But sizeable ethnic minority communities, such as the Nagas and Kuki-Zo, live in the mountainous areas of the state, and share a strong cultural connection with peoples on the Myanmar side of the border. During the first two years of the crisis, these minorities communities quietly supported the influx of refugees under the radar, knowing that the Hindu majority BJP would not be receptive to supporting non-Hindu refugees. But at the time, there were not the large numbers of refugees that were crossing into Mizoram, so it was manageable.
However, Makepeace explains that as the BJP became more aware of the situation, they used the refugee issue to foment a political conflict with the minority Kuki-Zo community in particular. She describes how, in 2023, they conducted a survey of refugee camps in Manipur, in large part to spark xenophobic hysteria among the Hindu majority that illegal immigrants were “taking over” the region. The BJP, in turn, used that public sentiment to paint the entire Kuki-Zo community as illegal immigrants through their shared kinship with the refugees they were sheltering. This campaign led to the forced displacement of local communities, and deepened the divisions within Manipur, leading to both formal and informal segregation based on ethnicity, which continue to perpetuate conflict and violence today.
Makepeace adds that there are also rumors that the Burmese Peoples’ Defense Forces (PDF) are aiding Kuki-Zo groups in their fight against the Meitei, and even carrying out attacks against the Meitei-dominated, Manipur police. This is something that the National Investigative Agency (or NIA, India’s version of the FBI) has investigated, “though "there’s [as yet] been no evidence to back it up,” Makepeace says.
To make a very complex and volatile situation even more so, some radical, insurgent Meitei groups who had been taking shelter across the border from Indian authorities have recently returned to Manipur, because their safe havens have been disrupted by fighting in Myanmar. Rather than facing consequences for their prior, anti-government activity, they have become aligned with the Meitei-majority state's aggressive stance against the Chin and other ethnic groups. This re-alignment reflects the complicated and shifting dynamics in the region, where past insurgencies and current political objectives intersect. Some of these radical Meitei groups have begun conducting incursions into the predominantly Kuki-Zo and Naga hill regions, motivated by that spurious claim of their being “illegal immigrants.” Makepeace laments, “It really is a war that has been driven by purposeful disinformation.” Moreover, as if to confound the situation even further, the NIA has claimed that the attacks on the Kuki-Zo were launched not by radical Meitei insurgents, but rather by Naga separatists!
Makepeace finds it difficult to draw a conclusion about how the Indian central government may act in the region in the future. As Sanjay Gathia shared on a recent podcast episode, New Delhi has worked at developing a good diplomatic relationship with the Myanmar military, based on their Act East and Neighborhood First policies that prioritize regional security. And as Makepeace has noted in her recent reporting, the involvement of the Kuki National Army Burma (KNAB) in fighting alongside the PDFs against the junta has further heightened Indian concerns over national security. Yet due to the prevalence of disinformation and the complexity of the situation—and using New Delhi’s allowance of Meitei insurgents to return to Manipur without consequence—Makepeace reaches a similar conclusion as Gathia, and believes that the central government’s intelligence gathering and its realpolitik decisions are out of alignment with what is really happening on the ground.
Makepeace and Kimi recently traveled to Mae Sot, a town on the Thai-Myanmar border around which are several large refugee camps. For a Burmese escaping conflict, Mae Sot is hardly an easy place to make a life. As Kenneth Wong said of the town in an earlier episode, “You're put between two, very painful choices: to either stay on the Burma side and face possible arrest, torture and death, or come to Thailand side and deal with corrupt systems that gives you mobility only if you are able to afford to pay for it. So there is a lot of resentment among the refugee population that they are forced [between] these two difficult choices.”
However, Kimi and Makepace also experienced something else, and characterize Mae Sot as “a really up-and-coming town ... almost like Chiang Mai.” They saw Burmese refugees who, despite the challenges of displacement, had found ways to build a semblance of normalcy in their lives, and carve out a place for themselves in the local economy, running small businesses like restaurants and shops, in stark contrast to the grim realities back in northeast India. “I wish the refugees in Mizoram could come here to Mae Sot, because here they have support from the government. I know there are a lot of restrictions... but they have it better than the refugees in Mizoram,” says Kimi. “Mizoram does not have any funds to sustain itself … It’s a crisis! Some villages are supporting a refugee population that's bigger than the village population.”
To Makepeace, the main difference between the refugee situations in Mae Sot and northeastern India (which she has written about in Himlal Southasian) is the government’s view of the crisis. She explains how those coming to Mae Sot have benefited from a more developed infrastructure and a somewhat stable economic environment. The Thai government, while restrictive in many ways, has allowed a level of integration that is simply unthinkable in Mizoram and Manipur. “It's apples and oranges,” says Makepeace. “It’s a difference of the way that the power center in Thailand has developed Mae Sot as a place… it used to be a ghost town, but the government saw potential in it with many migrants coming in across the border.”
To their dismay, they found little knowledge, or even interest, among the Burmese democratic leaders they met in Thailand about how Burmese refugees are faring in India’s northeast corridor. “It’s really hard to digest the fact that the the NUG and the CRPH here has very little knowledge of what is going on that side of the border, our side of the border,” Kimi says. “To be able to form a National Unity Government, this is something that they really have to work on.”
Makepeace concurs. “It’s a National Unity Government!” she exclaims. “I think it’s important for them to also be aware of what is going on in the India border, as it is important for Indian government or for Indians to know what is going on in their eastern borders.”