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A PUBLICATION OF
THE RESEARCH CENTRE FOR EASTERN
AND NORTH EASTERN REGIONAL STUDIES,
KOLKATA (CENERS-K)
The Calcutta Journal of Global Affairs
(Lines, Peoples and Movements in the Indo-Myanmar Borderland)
Northeast India, situated at the crossroads of South, Southeast and East Asia, is at a dynamic crossroads. With over 98 percent of its geographical area as international borderland, the region occupies strategic significance while also accentuating India’s national security vulnerability. As a result, the region is viewed primarily from a core-centric security lens by both the colonial and postcolonial state. The ongoing fencing along the India-Myanmar border is an example of security-centric border policy. New Delhi’s preoccupation with security concerns has sustained a border outlook designed for colonial purposes. The region, largely absent from both Indian and global imagination, has now re-emerged as a zone of domestic priority as well as international cooperation. India’s pursuit of the Act East Policy (AEP) and the broader geopolitical shift to the Indo-Pacific have made the region highly strategic. As the ‘gateway to Southeast Asia’ and now the Indo-Pacific, the region is being re-evaluated. The success of AEP and the integration into the Indo-Pacific will, however, require a radical re-imagination of the Northeast, particularly the Indo-Myanmar borderlands, as Myanmar is the only land border between India and Southeast Asia. The India-Myanmar borderland, inhabited by Indigenous communities, constitutes a meeting point of peoples, cultures and goods. It is a space where interconnections go beyond the lines and challenge the ‘spatially exclusive’ notion of borders as geographical containers of society. The paper argues that existing border policies and colonial-era state structures, continued by the (post)colonial state while marginalising borderland communities, also limit India’s national and security interests. While critiquing the top-down, security-centric concept of border, the paper calls for a new border thinking which will ensure freer flow of people, goods and ideas. A border thinking that will restore permeability in a more integrated region without altering the existing borders and thereby reduce the future propensity for tension and conflict. This requires a border-thinking view that sees borders and borderlands as connectors and commons, rather than walls or lines erected to keep the ‘others’ out. Such a policy will not only benefit borderland communities but also strengthen India’s much-needed strategic presence and influence in Southeast Asia and the broader Indo-Pacific region.
Keywords: border and borderland, Northeast India, territoriality, borderland community, new border thinking
Introduction
In February 2024, the Ministry of Home Affairs (India) announced the revocation of the Free Movement Regime (FMR). The FMR was initially introduced in 1968 and further streamlined under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government as part of the Act East Policy for a deeper and enhanced relationship with Southeast Asia. The FMR was aimed at facilitating people’s movement, allowing residents along the border to cross up to 16 kms without a visa. The scrapping of the FMR unilaterally by India in early 2024 was not without cause. It was a decision formulated in the backdrop of the military coup in Myanmar (2021) and the ethnic conflict in Manipur (since May 2023).
The Government of India’s decision to revoke the Free Movement Regime (FMR) is justified by the complex security situation marked by the control of the border region by Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs), coupled with illegal cross-border movements of both people and goods, including drugs, arms and other consumer items. The identification of the region as a breeding site for drug trafficking, insurgent movement, and narco-terrorism further bolsters the argument for border fencing.
The border policies and initiatives, as important as they are from a security perspective, do not consider the concerns and welfare of the communities and groups living along the border. As is the case with the unilateral scrapping of the FMR, the decision was taken without consulting or taking into consideration of the local communities along the India-Myanmar border whose lives will be altered irreparably by the decision. This is an example of how borderland communities are marginalised, and their concerns and well-being sacrificed to serve the security needs of the core. The classic dilemma of ‘state versus people’ continues to haunt the state-making and nation-making process, particularly so in the postcolonial and developing states.
This paper argues that a new border thinking is required to break out of this dilemma. A border thinking that includes all stakeholders, not only in terms of benefits but also in terms of potential contributions. Such a border thinking will not sacrifice the periphery for the security of the core but actively engage with local actors and borderland communities as significant and equal partners. The paper also argues that a core-centric security approach not only marginalises the borderland communities but is also not viable for the state in the long run, especially with the growing importance of the region in light of the AEP and Indo-Pacific policy for India.
The paper begins with a discussion on the concept of border and borderland. This is followed by situating the Northeast India region located at the crossroads of South, Southeast and East Asia. This will set the tone of the paper by highlighting the strategic significance and vulnerability of the region. The next section, which forms a major part of the paper, is a critical analysis of the India-Myanmar borderland. The section highlights the complexities and ambiguities of the India-Myanmar border, which completely neglects the borderland communities. The section calls for bringing people into the border calculus, followed by a brief discussion on the ongoing border fencing. The concluding section highlights the limitations of a top-down, security-centric border policy from both a national interest perspective and the perspective of borderland communities. Thus, necessitating a move away from the binary state versus people and calls for a new border thinking which is both inclusive and sustainable for long-term policy objectives.
Border continues to be the primary institution around which geopolitics and power are organised. It is the confluence of ‘territory, power and the state ‘, a space which defines “who is inside and who is outside, who is an enemy and who is a friend”.1 This stems from the narrow perspective of borders, in which borders are viewed as walls to protect the core, often at the cost of the border region. Borders appear as neat lines between states on maps, demarcating the boundaries of a nation-state as a “bounded space” and, in a sense, act as the “geographical container of modern society”. 2
The idea of a fixed border/line is blind to the “community, livelihood and ethnic links” and the border region is often reduced to a buffer-zone.3 The border region came to be understood as a tool for safeguarding the “more populous and developed interior areas”. 4 The core-centric approach to the border was briefly challenged both from the point of fairness and efficiency. The short-lived optimism of a ‘borderless world ’ however, is now replaced almost worldwide by an intensifying trend of “tightening control at state borders” as the border question veered to the forefront of political agendas in many countries.5 The world today is experiencing a steady and documented shift from ‘open border policy’ to building border walls and fences.
While borders are seen as neat, fixed lines separating nation-states, the ground reality in the borderland areas cannot be further from this. Borderland is a region that “straddles along, or across one or more international borders”.6 José Antonio Lucero, in his brilliant ethnographic study of the Tohono O’odham
1 Isak Niehaus, “Violence and the Boundaries of Belonging” in Violence and Belonging: The Quest for Identity in Post-Colonial Africa, ed. Vigdis Broch-Due (Oxon: Routledge, 2005): 84.
2 Anssi Paasi, “Bounded spaces in a ‘borderless world’: border studies, power and the anatomy of territory,” Journal of Power 2, no. 2 (2009): 234.
3 Shivshankar Menon, “Fault Lines: Reflections on South Asian Frontiers,” CSEP Working Paper (New Delhi: Centre for Social and Economic Progress, 2021), accessed on November 17, 2025, https://csep.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Fault-Lines-Reflections-on-SA-Frontiers-1. pdf.
4 Shyam Saran, How India sees the world: Kautilya to the 21st century. (New Delhi: Juggernaut Books, 2017), 69.
5 Dorte Jagetic Andersen and Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola, Borderlands Resilience: Transitions, adaptation and resistance at borders (New York: Routledge, 2022), 1.
6 Andersen and Prokkola, Borderlands Resilience, 5.
Nation, showed that borderlands are contact zones, imagined geographies that produce both order and violence. 7 It is “a place where things happen”8, a place where the state starts tracing borders and where immigrants cross over from one state to another. Borderlands are spaces of interconnections, the meeting point of peoples, histories and goods. It is a space where relationships and interconnections go beyond the line (border), “exploring alternative social and political imaginaries”. 9 In a sense, borderlands and border regions are a place of negation of the state’s power and reach.
In the borderland, peoples and communities “have historically had to find their ways to cope with and within the structures of two or more states, as well as their transitions”.10 As a result, borderland communities had to “accommodate within national space by occupying a marginal space; they became the ethnic minorities who were different culturally from the national majority”.11 Borderland and borderland communities’ perspective is a particularly relevant critique of the core-centric and security-centred perspective of the border. It goes against the notion of “a spatially exclusive definition of political identity, the rigid separation between those people within the territorial space pursuing ‘universal’ values (politics) and those outside practising different, and inferior values”.12
It would be presumptuous to imagine borders as neat, fixed lines of separation because not all borders are territorially identifiable; borders can also be “ephemeral and/or impalpable, non-visible and located in zones that defy a straightforwardly territorial logic”.13 Thus, the idea of border as fixed concept it itself a challenge to the state-making and nation-building process. Equally
7 José Antonio Lucero, “Friction, Conversion, and Contention: Prophetic Politics in the Tohono O’odham Borderlands,” Latin American Research Review Vol. 49, No. S1 (2014):172.
8 Walter D. Mignolo and Sebastian Weier, Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics (Bristol: E-International Relations, 2017): 22.
9 Roluahpuia, “Border nation: Indigenous peoples, state, and the border in Indo-Myanmar borderlands,” Journal of Borderlands Studies Vol.39, No. 1 (2024): 134.
10 Andersen and Prokkola, Borderlands Resilience, 5.
11 Swargajyoti Gohain, “Border Studies and Northeast India,” in Sociology of/in North- east India (2018: special issue), Department of Sociology, Dibrugarh University.
12 John Agnew, “The territorial trap: The geographical assumptions of international relations theory,” Review of international political economy Vol. 1, No. 1 (1994): 63.
13 Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams, “Lines in the sand? Towards an agenda for critical border studies,” Geopolitics Vol. 14, No. 3 (2009): 583.
important and often neglected is the fact that borders are not permanent; history is replete with accounts of the making and re-making of borders and the creation of new kinds of borders. In that sense, to assume or adhere to a single notion of border is self-defeating. The existence of borderlands despite borders is a case in point. Should borders then be viewed and treated as “barriers to movement and interaction, or act as an interface by creating a meeting point”?14
In this context, the paper challenges the narrow, security-driven concept of the border and calls for a new border thinking. Through a study of the India- Myanmar borderland, the paper critically analyses the concept of borders as lines or walls separating nation-states. It calls for a more inclusive and expansive understanding of borders that can cater to both national interests while securing borderland communities as stakeholders, and not as a liability or a tool for securing the core.
Northeast India, which forms the India-Myanmar borderland, constitutes an in-between space and is a tragic case of marginality and peripherality. The region is largely absent in the mainstream Indian psyche and constitutes “a forgotten frontier both in Indian and global imagination”. 15 Geographically located at the crossroads of South, Southeast, and East Asia, the region is not only a meeting point of different regions but also of peripheries.
The region is even more vulnerable because its only immediate contact with the ‘mainland’ India is the narrow Siliguri corridor in North Bengal, often described as the chicken’s neck and thereby “accentuating its (Indian) national security vulnerability”.16 New Delhi’s security-centric approach to the region mainly stems from the fact that 98 per cent of the region’s area is international borderland. Thus, boundaries, though exclusivist and zero-sum, continue to
14 Munmun Majumdar, “India–Myanmar border fencing and India’s act east policy,” India Quarterly Vol. 76, No. 1 (2020): 60.
15 Jabin T. Jacob, “The India-Myanmar borderlands: Guns, Blankets and Bird Flu,” Cahiers de Spirit/Spirit Working Papers (2010): 2.
16 Lydia Walker, States-in-Waiting: A Counternarrative of Global Decolonisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024): 30.
be “necessary markers of individual sovereignties and cherished symbols of nationalism” 17 from the state’s perspective.
The region is at a dynamic crossroads of geopolitical reconfiguration and is particularly significant in the context of the Act East Policy (AEP) for India and the larger geopolitical shift to the Indo-Pacific. The region, once known and shunned for conflict and violence, began to be seen in a new light. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the region came to be viewed with a potential for transnational opportunities, as evident in the slogan ‘Northeast- the gateway to Southeast Asia’. This was further consolidated with the rebranding of the ‘Look East Policy’ to ‘Act East Policy’ in 2014 under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, which came to power at the Centre.
Against this backdrop, Northeast India, as a marginalised region, is being re-evaluated and viewed as a resource and labour capital. With its strategic location and geographical proximity to Southeast Asia and the rapidly evolving Indo-Pacific, the region has now “resurfaced as a zone of domestic priority as well as international cooperation”. 18 Thus, the region, because of its location, is extremely strategic and vulnerable at the same time.
New Delhi’s border policy and initiatives have been shaped exclusively for security purposes. Independent India, as the successor state of British India, inherited a very security-centric imperial boundary, and India’s “obsession with security interests over the last sixty years” facilitated the continuance of territorial boundaries designed for a colonial purpose.19
Indo-Myanmar Borderland A
top-down, security-centric border policy stems from a narrow and faulty understanding of borders as a point to project state power, walls to protect the core and borders and borderlands as frontiers or buffer zones. Such a rigid and security-centric notion of the border is a result of the idea that total control of the state over its territorial space is
17 Menon, “Fault Lines”.
18 Pratnashree Basu and Soumya Bhowmick, “Re-envisioning Northeast for India’s ‘Act East’,” Observer Research Foundation (2021), accessed on February 13, 2026, https://www.orfonline. org/expert-speak/re-envisioning-northeast-for-indias-act-east.
19 David Vumlallian Zou and M. Satish Kumar, “Mapping a Colonial Borderland: Objectifying the geo-body of India’s Northeast,” The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 70 No.1 (2011): 165.
essential, and without which the state would be ‘just another organisation’. 20 The result is a narrow and rigid definition of state sovereignty which denies ‘alternative possibilities’. 21 The India-Myanmar border is a classic case of a security-driven border and power projection between the two ‘nation-states’.
During colonial times, the Northeast region, which constitutes the India- Myanmar borderland, “British rule amounted to little more than the occasional outpost beyond which the land was terra incognita”. 22 This was also the case with both the Indian and Burmese (now Myanmar) kingdoms and administrations before British colonial administration too. Ironically, once the lines were drawn, the region became the space where both India and Myanmar trace the start and end of their territorial sovereignty.
However, once the lines were drawn, the region quickly transformed into an objectified geo-body for the state’s territorial reach and power projection. The formal separation of India and Burma (now Myanmar) in 1937 seemed self-evident to the un-initiated but the ground reality tells a completely different story. Along the border, “a murky sense of finality” with a complex and contested process continues23 more than generally acknowledged. Berenice Guyot-Réchard, through her extensive cartographic and human-geography works, aptly described this murkiness in the following words: “where Burma ended, and India began was anything but clear in 1937”. 24
The Indigenous borderland communities inhabiting the region, with a fluid and different worldview of space and place, find themselves trapped in this imposed border. Because of their different worldview on space and place, the Indigenous communities in the borderland also constitute one of the most
20 Agnew, “The Territorial Trap”, 63.
21 Rob B. J. Walker, “Security, sovereignty, and the challenge of world politics,” Alternatives Vol.15, No. 1 (1990): 14.
22 Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (New Delhi: Fourth Estate, 2025): 45.
23 Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, “Tangled lands: Burma and India’s Unfinished Separation, 1937– 1948,” The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 80, No. 2 (2021):1.
24 Guyot-Réchard, “Tangled lands,” 4.
debilitating conceptual challenges to nation-state sovereignty and the idea of fixed territoriality.
Sangamitra Mishra, in her work on the changing frontiers and spaces in Assam, showed that the British initially had to contend with the “overlapping territoriality and sovereignty” of the place25 but this position gradually changed. For colonial administrative purposes and the extension of British control, boundary-making and assigning fixed boundaries were pursued aggressively by the colonial administration in the region. The colonial boundary making and assigning fix boundaries to the previously fluid area is “a confrontation between indigenous and colonial notions of political space”. 26 India and Myanmar as successor states of the Raj inherited the imperial boundaries. Independent India continued the “obsession with security interests”, and its territorial boundary policies remained “shaped by colonial concerns”.27
Neatly drawn cartographic lines and top-down national boundaries conceal human movements and cross-border connections. A critical analysis of India’s border approach and policy reflects the exigencies of India’s foreign policy. The tensions with its neighbours, including China, Pakistan/Bangladesh, and Burma, on the one hand and on the other, “the perceived otherness of the region’s inhabitants”. 28
Treating the separation of India and Myanmar (Burma) as self-evident or ‘fait accompli’, the international border between India and Myanmar in one broad stroke erased (in principle) the existence, needs and experiences of the inhabitants along the border while “silencing the violent and unfinished historical processes that had apportioned it between India and Burma under colonial rule”.29
The borderland areas have always been and continue to be treated as “spaces controlled by nation-states whose boundaries demonstrate demarcations of power contestations and the politics of identity that seek to preserve
25 Sanghamitra Misra, “Changing frontiers and spaces: the colonial state in nineteenth-century Goalpara,” Studies in History Vol. 21. No. 2 (2005): 222.
26 Misra, “Changing frontiers and spaces,” 222.
27 Zou and Kumar “Mapping a Colonial Borderland,” 165.
28 Elisabeth Leake, “Where national and international meet: Borders and Border regions in postcolonial India,” The International History Review Vol. 44 No. 4 (2022): 856.
29 Guyot-Réchard, “Tangled lands,” 4-5.
distinctiveness”. 30 The first Prime Minister of independent India and the architect of India’s foreign policy, Jawaharlal Nehru, was very clear and particular about this. It is apt to recall Nehru’s position on the significance of the Himalayas,
“From time immemorial, the Himalayas have provided us with a magnificent frontier. We cannot allow that barrier to be penetrated because it is also the principal barrier to India”. 31
The region is largely seen from a security prism to control and monitor the movements of goods, capital and people. Such a security-centric and narrow view ignores the “centrality of the border and how borders shape and influence everyday politics and notions of ethnic identity.”32 The changes emanating from the border-making and state-making of independent India and Myanmar, both infrastructural and cross-border mobilities on the borderland communities, are huge. However, no questions are asked as to “how political borders and border securitisation hinder the vernacular and regional resilience strategies in the face of environmental, economic and socio-cultural change” 33 affects these communities.
When there are complex and layered cross-border connections, including trade, family ties, migration, and movements of people, as in the case of the India- Myanmar borderland, can a fixed drawn line really cut off these connections? Is it right or practical to even draw such lines? For instance, when Burma was formally separated from India in 1937, about one-fifth of the Naga population was assigned to Burma and the four-fifths on the Indian side. 34 Several other communities faced the same fate, the Mizo community landed in India, now forms the state of Mizoram, “separated from their Chin and Kuki kinsmen”.35 This intricate web of relations and ties “undercut British attempts to territorialize the region into a series of bounded spaces” 36 and now a state policy of the post- colonial state.
30 Susan M. Walcott, “Bordering the Eastern Himalaya: Boundaries, Passes, Power Contestations,” Geopolitics, Vol.15, No. 1 (2010): 78.
31 John W. Garver, Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001): 404.
32 Roluahpuia, “Border Nation,” 133.
33 Andersen and Prokkola, Borderlands Resilience, 5.
34 Dalrymple, Shattered Lands, 48.
35 Guyot-Réchard, “Tangled lands,” 5.
36 Guyot-Réchard, “Tangled lands,” 5.
This raises important questions about India’s border policy and its approach to borderland communities. The British colonial border policies continue to inform and shape the current policies and approaches. The continued colonial gaze on the border region explains the securitisation and marginalisation of the border region and its inhabitants. In other words, the Indian state and, by extension, the state of Myanmar is still trapped in the classic dilemma of ‘state versus people’ over which should be prioritised in border policy and management. To break out of this dilemma will require moving out of the colonial gaze, to forge a new border thinking.
To imagine and conceptualise alternative thinking where borderlands and border communities are not viewed as trouble spots and problems to be solved. Rather, they would be conceived as bridges and connectors between peoples and regions. Such a policy will not only stand to benefit the borderland communities but also facilitate and enhance India’s much-needed strategic presence and influence in Southeast Asia and the larger Indo-Pacific region.
The borderland communities along the India-Myanmar border subscribe to a worldview with remarkable tolerance for “overlapping sovereignties, especially along indeterminate border zones”. 37 This worldview does not view the border as a territorial discontinuity of the state. Indigenous notions of maps and space are highly fluid, and within this worldview, the flow of culture, people and goods is not limited to the territorial construct. With the demarcation of the India- Myanmar border, borderland communities find themselves in a quagmire not of their making. The demarcation disrupted the way of life at the (imposed) border. The India-Myanmar border and boundary lines cut across longstanding ethnic and cultural ties as the international boundary does not match the lived realities38 of borderland communities. This exposes the tension between a statist, fixed-line approach to boundary-making and local communities that do not subscribe to the view of the border as fixed, immutable lines that divide peoples and groups.
Often in state and border-making, policymakers forget or choose to ignore that “culture is not co-terminus with political borders”.39 The Indigenous
37 Zou and Kumar, “Mapping a Colonial Borderland,” 165.
38 Leake, “Where national and international meet,” 859.
39 Walcott, “Bordering the Eastern Himalaya,” 66.
communities along the India-Myanmar borderland is a case in point. These borderland communities engage in “dense networks of interaction and exchange that shaped their lives”.40 The region’s diverse human landscape makes sense only when approached from a shared ethnic, cultural and socio-economic ties and practices.
In 2021, New Delhi directed border states to close borders to prevent the flow of refugees after the military takeover in Myanmar. Mizoram refused to prevent their Chin kin from finding sanctuary in India. 41 During the formal separation of India and Burma in 1937, the Mizo people found themselves on the Indian side of the border while their Chin were placed on the Burmese side of the border. 42 This shows that the affinity and relation with kins (in this context, Mizos and Chins) cannot be prevented or cut-off by a line (international border). Although the India-Myanmar borderland has been a site of continual movement of peoples and goods yet the “views and perspectives of the people inhabiting the border” 43 has rarely been contextualised as an important factor in border policy and initiatives, except for the short-lived free movement regime.
The idea of India and Myanmar (Burma) as distinct specialities is “rooted in colonial frameworks, assimilated by postcolonial political arrangements and nation-state-centric scholarship”. 44 As borderlands become a marginalised space, the divided people find themselves “relegated to the status of ethnic minorities on both sides of the border”.45
In what may be considered an attempt at moving away from the colonial frameworks that divided peoples who share language, ancestry and family ties, a Free Movement Regime (FMR) was instituted in 1968. 46 The FMR was aimed at facilitating peoples’ movement by allowing “residents to cross up
40 Guyot-Réchard, “Tangled lands,” 3.
41 Menon. “Faultlines.”
42 Dalrymple, Shattered Lands, 48
43 Roluahpuia, “Border Nation,” 133.
44 Guyot-Réchard, “Tangled lands,” 1.
45 Majumdar, “India–Myanmar border fencing,” 64.
46 Luke Rimmo Lego, “The end of the India-Myanmar Free Movement Regime: looking at cross- border trade, kinship, and security”. Accessed on December 12, 2025, https://blogs.law.ox.ac.
to 16 km without a visa”.47 The FMR sought to promote economic and social interaction between India and Myanmar while safeguarding the “rights of the tribal communities accustomed to free movement across the land borders”. 48
The free movement regime can also be seen as part of the global trend towards de-territorialization. The short-lived optimism of a ‘borderless world’ is now replaced almost worldwide by an intensifying trend of “tightening control at state borders” as the border question has prominently veered to the forefront of political agendas in many countries.49 There is a documented rise of shift from ‘open border policy’ to building border walls and fences. In this context, one may explain the ongoing India-Myanmar border fencing.
The Promise and Perils of Border Fencing I
n the backdrop of the military coup in Myanmar (2021) and the ethnic conflict in Manipur (since May 2023), the Home Minister of India, Amit Shah, announced the scrapping of the FMR. 50 The move clearly has been motivated by the complex security situation marked by the control of the border region by Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) coupled with illegal cross-border movements. The identification of the region as a breeding ground for drug trafficking, insurgent movement, and narco-terrorism further bolsters the argument for border fencing.
The important question then is whether the fencing can secure the border, stop cross-border movements of people, goods, arms, drugs and the like across the Indo-Myanmar border. The answer is a big ‘no’.51 What will most likely happen is increasing violence and the intractability of crimes. No doubt, the fencing will make movements more difficult, but it will also make the movements more desirable and increase the value of goods, arms, drugs, people and trafficking. The traffickers and peddlers will not stop their business just because there is no
uk/border-criminologies-blog/blog-post/2025/06/end-india-myanmar-free-movement- regime-looking-cross.
47 Lego, “The end of the India-Myanmar Free Movement Regime.”
48 Majumdar, “India–Myanmar border fencing,” 64.
49 Andersen and Prokkola, Borderlands Resilience, 1.
50 Lego, “The end of the India-Myanmar Free Movement Regime.”
51 Majumdar, “India–Myanmar border fencing,” 68.
free movement. In such a scenario, the local people will become collateral and be trapped in a cycle of trafficking and peddling with increased violence.
For the borderland communities who have been interacting socially, economically, culturally and politically since time immemorial, fencing would mean severing these ties. The culture, history and identity of the borderland communities are tied to these connections and ties. Fencing would mean disruption of their way of life, cut-off from relatives and kins across the imposed border.
The border fencing then is a policy aimed at preventing cross-border terrorism, illegal immigration, trafficking of goods, etc. at the cost of disrupting the way of life of borderland communities, a debate of people versus the state. Should rigid boundaries, fixed lines that mark the beginning and end of a territorial state, be privileged over the inclusive commons? There is no simple answer to the debate. However, such policy initiatives stem from a narrow and state-centric border concept wherein “border states and border regions as buffer zones safeguarding the more populous and developed interior areas”. 52
Thus, a new border thinking is required. A border thinking that is inclusive. One which is not limited by the binary state versus people. There is a clear need to reevaluate traditional understandings of borders and borderlands. A border policy that facilitates “the freer flow of people, goods, and ideas in a more integrated region and reduce the future propensity for tension and conflict”.
53 The ethnic bonds between communities are the oldest connections between India and Myanmar, and these ties should be viewed as vantage points for building stronger and more stable relations with neighbouring countries rather than being viewed as trouble spots. The trans-regional socio-economic exchange and cultural similarity can be pursued as “pathways and soft power bank resources to further relations”.54
The region is crucial to India’s policy re-orientation in the current geopolitical scenario both because of its strategic location and geographical proximity with the Southeast Asian market. The potent market catalyst in the
52 Saran, How India sees the World, 69.
53 Menon. “Fault Lines.”
54 Majumdar, “India–Myanmar border fencing,” 69.
form of “social diversities (cultural richness), physical (potential energy supply hubs), human (inexpensive, skilled labour) and natural (minerals, forests) capitals in the region” 55 should suffice the state to reevaluate its gaze on the region. The way forward as India’s former National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon puts it would be:
“to treat the borderlands as what they are and have been in history, as the commons in which people, goods, and ideas flow and intermingle, we would find a much better future for us all”. 56
This requires a major shift in mindsets to “seeing boundaries and borders as connectors rather than as walls behind which we cower in fear of the other.”57 Such an approach will restore the permeability without altering the existing borders. This will ensure the creation of “better and more productive alternatives” in the region and a return to “patterns that marked periods of prosperity in our history”.58
Taking into consideration the re-emergence of Northeast India as one of the most significant geopolitical regions in the light of the Act East Policy (AEP) and the larger Indo-Pacific region, an inclusive understanding of the region is imperative. A better understanding of the region will provide the much- needed direction for policymaking in India as well as the larger strategic shift in international politics. Bringing in India’s foreign policy imperative along with the local perspective will lead to a more balanced strategy, one in which the national security interest is ensured and at the same time bring the local communities along. An approach in which the local communities will not be used as a tool but will become an important component of the policy.
55 Basu and Bhowmick, “Re-envisioning Northeast.”
56 Menon. “Fault Lines.”
57 Shyam Saran, “India and Its Neighbours,” speech at the India International Centre,” February 14, 2005. Accessed on December 15, 2025, https://mea.gov.in/SpeechesStatements .htm?dtl/2483/ Foreign+Secretary.
58 Menon, “Fault Lines.”
Dr. Pfokrelo Kapesa is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Allahabad. She earned her Ph.D in Diplomacy and Disarmament from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests include Indigenous knowledge, epistemic justice, decoloniality and borderland perspectives. Dr Kapesa was a Young Connectors of the Future Fellow (2015) instituted by Swedish Institute, Government of Sweden. She was also a recipient of the Cariplo Foundation Scholarship through the Network for the Advancement of Social and Political Studies (NASPS), Italy 2018. Dr Kapesa received the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education fellowship for Transdisciplinarity for Early Career Researchers in Asia (TERRA), 2024. She has been invited to various international and domestic academic events.