Myanmar General Min Aung Hlaing who staged the 2021 coup and is wanted by the ICC is now President of India's eastern neighbour

 Myanmar Junta Chief Min Aung Hlaing Elected President

Nirendra Dev  

The general who staged the 2021 coup and is wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity has formalised his hold on power through a sham election. New Delhi, which depends on Myanmar to deny shelter to Indian insurgents, is watching carefully — and quietly doing business. 

Min Aung Hlaing Becomes President, Posing Dilemma for India ?

The appointment follows elections held across three phases from December 2025 to January 2026 — elections widely condemned as neither free nor credible.

The general, 69, is wanted by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity committed against the Rohingya Muslim minority. He is now Myanmar’s head of state.

Min Aung Hlaing was born in Dawei, in south-eastern Myanmar, into a family with no particular military connection. 

He studied law in Yangon but aspired to a military career, gaining admission to the Defence Services Academy — the country’s elite officer training institution — only on his third attempt. 

For years, his presidential ambitions were blocked by one person: Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy commanded overwhelming popular support and won successive elections. 

When he overthrew her government in 2021, he simultaneously removed the only barrier to his political ascent. Suu Kyi, now 80, has been detained since the coup and no longer poses a political threat. Her party was banned from contesting the recent elections.

“He will not trust anybody enough to take orders from them — he would want to deliver the orders,” said Yanghee Lee, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur for Myanmar. 

Lee described Min Aung Hlaing as a paranoid and deeply suspicious figure — a characterisation that has shaped his style of governance and his approach to alliances.

A military that is a state within a state

Myanmar’s Tatmadaw — the military establishment — has long operated as a parallel state, with its own banks, companies, hospitals, and news outlets, insulated from civilian society and accountable to no external institution. It regards itself as the guardian of Myanmar as a Buddhist Bamar nation, with the Bamar referring to the country’s dominant ethnic group.  

That self-conception has driven decades of conflict with ethnic minority groups — including the Rohingya, the Arakan Army, and numerous others — and has made any meaningful power-sharing arrangement structurally improbable. With Min Aung Hlaing now formally president, that institutional logic has been extended and consolidated.  

For New Delhi, the appointment is neither a surprise nor a comfortable development — but it is, for now, an accepted one.

Security analysts in Aizawl, the capital of Mizoram, are direct about the dependency. “New Delhi depends a lot on Myanmar to deny Indian insurgents their key forest bases,” one analyst said. The northeast of India has historically contended with insurgent groups that use Myanmar’s dense border forests as sanctuary and resupply routes. 

Any government in Naypyidaw that cooperates on denying that sanctuary is, from New Delhi’s security perspective, a government worth maintaining a working relationship with.

The Modi government has moved toward a pragmatic transactional policy. The democratic concerns that shaped earlier Indian engagement with Myanmar have receded. 

India is now openly prepared to do business with whichever government holds power in Naypyidaw — a posture that mirrors its approach to Bangladesh, where New Delhi has made extraordinary outreach efforts across the political transition.

The calculus is complicated by geography and narcotics. 

Myanmar sits at the heart of the Golden Triangle — the nexus of Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar that produces a significant proportion of the world’s heroin and methamphetamine. 

Drug abuse and smuggling have been severe in Manipur for decades, and the routes run through Myanmar’s ungoverned border territories. 

A Myanmar government that is either unwilling or unable to police those corridors creates a direct security and public health problem for India’s northeast.

On the other side of the ledger: despite the junta’s proximity to China, the Tatmadaw has historically relied on Indian support in managing its conflict with the Arakan Army, and India has provided assistance including Covid vaccines. The relationship is transactional on both sides.

The border that holds everything together

The India-Myanmar border in Mizoram tells the human story that the strategic analysis does not.

Zokhawthar on the Indian side and Rihkhawdar on the Myanmar side — formalised as a border trade point in 1994 — remain a critical economic lifeline for both communities, even as the political situation on the Myanmar side has deteriorated. 

Agricultural goods dominate the exchange: beans, pulses, vegetables, fruits, spices, tobacco. Nearly six percent of Mizoram’s population has livelihoods tied directly or indirectly to this cross-border trade.

A large number of Myanmar citizens have been living in Mizoram since the 2021 coup. The Government of India has not officially designated them as refugees. Humanitarian assistance continues — shouldered primarily by the Mizoram state government, operating without a formal national framework to support it.

Jacob is a shy Class VI student from Myanmar, studying in Zokhawthar. Asked about home, his voice dropped. “My country is burning every day,” he said. 

“I am grateful to India and my Mizo brothers and sisters. A big kalawmein.” His dream, he added softly — “if God, Lal Pa, wills it” — is to become a pilot. 

Min Aung Hlaing is now president. Jacob is in Class VI in Mizoram. Both facts belong to the same story.

Courtesy - The Raisina Hills 

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