‘Everyone feels unsafe’: Border panic as Indian forces kill Myanmar rebels

In preparation for a rushed cremation in the Sagaing district of Myanmar’s Sagaing region, near India, flying over the blackened and swollen bodies of men and boys lying side by side on a piece of tarpaulin.

Quickly arranged wooden logs formed the base of the mass pyre, with several worn-out rubber tyres burning alongside to sustain the fire, the orange and green wreaths just out of reach of the flames.

The Indian Army killed three of the ten members of the larger People’s Defence Forces (PDF), three of whom were teenagers.

The National Unity Government (NUG), Myanmar’s government-in-exile, includes members of the National League for Democracy party, a Nobel Laureate, and lawmakers who were removed from the coup in 2021.

It mostly assists the PDF – a network of civilian militia groups against the military government – which serves, in effect, as the NUG’s army.

The Indian Army reported that on May 14, a battalion of the country’s Assam Rifles (AR) paramilitary force was “suspected to be involved in cross-border insurgent activities” while patrolling a border post in northeast India’s Manipur. According to the Indian Army, the battalion was “acting on particular intelligence.”

The Indian soldiers were stationed at the border in Chandel, a district contiguous with Tamu on the Myanmar side of the frontier. For the past two years, ethnic groups have been fighting in Manipur, and Indian authorities have frequently charged Myanmari migrants with stoking those tensions.

The exiled NUG claimed its cadres were not killed in an armed encounter within Indian territory, but they disagreed with the Indian version of the May 14 events. Instead, it said in a statement, they were “captured, tortured and summarily executed by” Indian Army personnel.

Political analysts and observers of conflict have reported that resistance groups operating in Myanmar, along its 1,600km (994 miles) border with India, have come to terms with an understanding that both sides have effectively minded their own business for almost five years.

The deaths in Tamu have since altered that, sending shockwaves through the exiled NUG, dozens of rebel-armed groups, and thousands of refugees who have fled the conflict in Myanmar to seek refuge in northeast Indian states. They now fear a spillover along the wider frontier.

According to Thida*, who works with the Tamu Pa Ah Pha, or the People’s Administration Team and organized the rebels’ funeral on May 16, “Fighters are in panic, but the refugees are more worried… they all feel unsafe now.” She requested a pseudonym to be used to identify herself.

Meanwhile, New Delhi has moved over the past year to fence the international border with Myanmar, dividing transnational ethnic communities who have enjoyed open-border movement for generations, before India and Myanmar gained freedom from British rule in the late 1940s.

With India in our neighborhood, “we felt safe,” said Thida. We are now very concerned about similar things happening to the Indian forces, the officer said.

“This never happened in four years]since the armed uprising against the coup], but now, it has happened”, she told Al Jazeera. Therefore, there may be a second or third time as well as a first time. That is my biggest concern.

Proactive or passive action: what?

After their previous positions were exposed to the Myanmar military, the PKP’s 10 cadres arrived at their newly established camp in Tamu on May 12. A senior NUG official and two locals based in Tamu independently told Al Jazeera that they had alerted the Indian Army of their presence in advance.

Thida remarked that “the AR personnel visited the new campsite] on May 12. They were kept informed of our every move.

What followed over the next four days could not be verified independently, with conflicting versions emerging from Indian officials and the NUG. The narratives released by Indian officials also contain contradictions.

In a gunfight in the New Samtal area of the Chandel district on May 14, the Indian Army’s eastern command claimed that its troops were acting on “intelligence” but that “they were fired upon by suspected cadres”.

Two days later, on May 16, a spokesperson for India’s Ministry of Defence said that “a patrol of Assam Rifles” was fired upon. They also recovered seven AK-47 rifles as well as a rocket-propelled grenade launcher as retaliation for “ten individuals, wearing camouflage fatigues.”

The Defense Ministry identified the dead as PKP cadres five days later, on May 21. The ministry spokesperson further noted that “a patrol out to sanitise the area, where fence construction is under way along the]border], came under intense automatic fire”, with the intent “to cause severe harm to construction workers or troops of Assam Rifles to deter the fencing work”.

A retired Indian government official who has been providing advice to New Delhi on its Myanmar policy for ten years pointed out the contradictions in the Indian translations: Did Indian soldiers actively respond to intelligence alerts or were they responding to an attack by Myanmar-based rebels?

Making sense of these killings is challenging. This is something that has happened against the run of play”, the retired official, who requested anonymity to speak, said. He claimed that “a mistake occurred, perhaps in the fog of war,” given the contradictions.

It can’t be both a reactive operation and retaliation.

Al Jazeera requested comments from the Indian Army on questions around the operation, first on May 26, and then again on May 30, but has yet to receive a response.

The [PKP cadres] are not combat trained, or even armed enough to imagine facing a professional army, according to Thura, an officer with the PDF in Sagaing, northwest of Myanmar.

‘ Taking advantage of our war ‘

Local Tamu authorities rushed to the Indian Army when they learned of the deaths on May 16.

A Tamu official, who was coordinating the bodies’ handover, claimed that “Assam Rifles had already prepared a docket of documents.” He requested anonymity. “We were forced to sign the false documents, or they threatened not to give the corpses of martyrs”.

The PDF cadres were killed in a gunfight in Indian territory, according to three documents from the docket, which imply consent to the border fencing.

The Tamu People’s Administration Team and NUG officials have repeatedly asked Indian officials to reconsider the border fencing, according to Thida from the organization.

“For the last month, we have been requesting the Indian Army to speak with our ministry]referring to the exiled NUG] and have a meeting. Stop the border fencing process until then, she urged.

While our nation is in a crisis, Thida said it is simple to take advantage of the killings. And, to be honest, we cannot do anything about it. How can we engage in combat with the large Indian Army because we are the rebels in our own country?

Thida expressed her heartbreak before going on to say it. “The state of corpses was horrific. She recalled that inside the body, insects were growing. Indian forces should respect our dead without sacrificing anything.

Border fence worries

Angshuman Choudhury, a researcher focused on Myanmar and northeast India, said that conflict observers “are befuddled by these killings in Tamu”.

He claimed that it was “counterintuitive” and that nothing should have happened.

The border fencing, according to Choudhary, is a perennial issue. “It has always caused friction along the border. And he referred to it as “violent fiction” because there are significant territorial misunderstandings between opposing groups.

Indigenous communities in northeastern India’s Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh were shocked when New Delhi first took the initiative to end the free movement system, which allows residents to travel across borders. Members of these communities live on both sides of the border with Myanmar – and have for centuries.

Due to the freedom to travel back and forth, the border communities on either side agreed to the idea of India and Myanmar. According to Choudhary, erecting physical infrastructure creates a kind of anxiety in these transnational communities that demarcation on maps does not.

“By fencing, India is creating a completely new form of anxieties that did not even exist in the 1940s, the immediate post-colonial period”, Choudhary said. It will “create completely unnecessary forms of instability, uglyness, and widen the existing fault lines.”

Amit Shah, the Indian home minister, stated last year that border fencing would help “maintain the demographic structure” of the areas bordering Myanmar and ensure India’s “internal security.” This was widely accepted as a response to the conflict in Manipur.

Since May 2023, ongoing ethnic violence between the Meitei majority and the Kuki and Naga minority communities has killed more than 250 people and displaced thousands. The government has refuted allegations that the state administration is promoting furthering the unrest in order to gain support for the Meitei population.

Both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the state-run government in Manipur have accused undocumented migrants from Myanmar of contributing to the increase in ethnic tensions.

Now, with the killings in Tamu, Choudhary said that Indian security forces had a new frontier of discontent, along a border where numerous armed groups opposed to Myanmar’s ruling military have operated — until now, in relative peace with Indian troops.

Source: Aljazeera