New Delhi: Union home minister Amit Shah has said India is going to fence its border with Myanmar and discontinue the free movement agreement, adding that the border would be “protected like the Bangladesh frontier”.
“The India-Myanmar border will be protected like the Bangladesh frontier. The Centre will stop the free movement with Myanmar,” Shah told the passing-out parade of the first batch of five newly constituted Assam Police commando battalions in Tezpur, Assam, as per The Telegraph.
Free Movement Regime
Meanwhile, according to The Telegraph the free movement regime “allows people living on either side of the India-Myanmar border to venture 16km into each other’s territory without a visa and stay for up to two weeks, because many of them share cross-border familial and ethnic ties.”
It is said that 500 Myanmarese soldiers have crossed into India in the last three months to escape ethnic cleansing. Soldiers from Myanmar are said to have sought shelter in Mizoram after their camps were captured by militants from the Arakan Army— an armed ethnic group in the western Myanmar state of Rakhine.
The Hindu writes that 1,643 kilometres of borders are involved and the free movement regime, implemented in 2018 as part of India’s Act East Policy, allowed residents of both countries living along the border to travel up to 16 km into each other’s territory without a visa. Ending the agreement will restrict this movement.
Mizoram chief minister: “unacceptable”
This, despite the new chief minister of Mizoram, the only state in the north-east not with the BJP-led NDA, telling the foreign minister that any such plan would be “unacceptable.” As The Wire reported earlier this month, Lalduhoma’s statement came on January 3, two days after the Union government first said it had decided to do away with the 40-year-old Free Movement Regime along the Indo-Myanmar border in four northeastern states.
“The British had separated the Mizos by carving out Burma from India. They divided the Mizo ethnic people’s land from the ancient days into two parts. That is why we cannot accept the border, instead we always dream of becoming a nation under one administration,” Lalduhoma told Jaishankar in a meeting in New Delhi.
Already besieged in the subcontinent, this statement by India to try and fence a long border, after committing to keep it open, reflects Delhi’s growing concerns about the situation with yet another neighbour.
India’s increasing engagement with the Myanmar junta, was in evidence till as recently as July. The Wire revealed that the Myanmarese minister for immigration and population, U Myint Kyaing, sanctioned by the US, EU and other countries, paid a quiet visit to Delhi and Bengaluru to acquaint himself with the Aadhaar Unique Identity system.