MAKING IT official, Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Saturday announced that the Centre has decided to fence the entire length of the currently porous India-Myanmar border to stop free movement of people. Addressing the passing out parade of newly appointed commandos of the Assam Police in Guwahati, Shah said: “Our border with Myanmar is an open border. The Narendra Modi government has taken a decision that the India-Myanmar border will be secure and the whole border will be fenced like the Bangladesh border. The government is reconsidering our Free Movement Regime (FMR) agreement with Myanmar, and is going to end this ease of coming and going.” While there have been reports that the Centre is planning such a move, Shah's public announcement confirms the decision. India and Myanmar share a 1,643-km border along the Northeastern states of Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, a porous border of which only 10 km is fenced in Manipur. The FMR with Myanmar, formalised in 2018 following the agreement between India and Myanmar on land border crossing, allows tribes living along the border on either side to travel up to 16 km inside the other country without a visa and stay up to two weeks. With the end of the FMR and the fencing of the border, it will be mandatory for anyone coming into India from across the border to get a visa. When the FMR was put in place in 2018, the Centre had referred to it as an “enabling arrangement for movement of people” which would “facilitate regulation and harmonisation” of the already existing free movement rights of people living along this border. Acknowledging the customary fluidity of life along this border, the government had said that besides boosting economic and social interaction between the two countries, it would “safeguard the traditional rights of the largely tribal communities residing along the border which are accustomed to free movement across the land border.” While the Chin people living in Chin state of Myanmar, contiguous with Mizoram, are of the same ethnicity as the Mizos and the Kuki-Zomis of Manipur, there is also a sizeable Naga population in Myanmar, largely in the Naga Self-Administered Zone in Myanmar’s Sagaing region. The Mizo-Chins and Nagas on both sides of the border share close social, economic and day-to-day ties. However, recent developments have prompted security concerns to take precedence over this. Sources told The Indian Express that the rationale for this move is to check the influx of illegal immigrants, drugs and gold smuggling, as well as to “stop the misuse of FMR” by insurgent groups to carry out attacks on the Indian side and escape into Myanmar. The India-Myanmar border and its fluidity had grabbed attention last year with the outbreak of the ongoing conflict in Manipur in May, when both the state government and Meitei civil society referred to “uncontrolled illegal immigration” of Chin people from Myanmar as the root cause of instability in the region. Responding to these concerns during his visit to Manipur in May-end, Shah had said the Centre had undertaken the tendering process for fencing another 80 km of the border and begun surveys along the rest of the border. Shah had also referred to immigration as the root of the conflict while speaking in Lok Sabha in August. He had said that “fears of a demographic change” had been triggered by the settling of “Kuki brothers” in the forests of Manipur, following the military crackdown against the Chin resistance movement in Myanmar. In the light of the ongoing conflict, Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh had said last September that he had asked the Centre to scrap the FMR, citing the influx of illegal immigrants and cross-border trafficking. While the Manipur government has been actively advocating the sealing of the India-Myanmar border, governments and civil society in Mizoram and Nagaland have expressed their opposition. Soon after reports emerged that the move was being planned, Mizoram Chief Minister Lalduhoma had met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar in Delhi, after which he told the media that the Mizos consider the India-Myanmar border “an imposed boundary” and that fencing it is “unacceptable”. The government of Nagaland has refrained from commenting on the matter so far but Deputy Chief Minister Y Patton met Lalduhoma in Aizawl on January 8, following which the Mizoram government said that Patton had communicated that fencing the border would be “unacceptable for Nagas” given the significant Naga population in Myanmar.
