The Tiau River is narrow enough to cross on foot during the dry season. The Indian village of Zokhawthar sits on one bank, and the Myanmar village of Khawmawi on the other. A woman dying of breast cancer rests in a tin-roof shack on the Indian side, while her aunt, BM Thangi, crosses the river to fetch her belongings from the Myanmar side. BM Thangi’s husband, a Mizo farmer named Vanlalchaka, has made his home a haven for five refugees from the Myanmar junta’s seizure of power in 2021. Until 2024, these crossings did not require an Indian passport or permission from Delhi or Naypyidaw.
“The people of Zokhawthar and Khawmawi operate as a single village,” Vanlalchaka told a reporter in 2024. “When someone dies,” he added, “we join the funeral process; when someone falls ill, we cross the border to visit patients and stay overnight if needed.” The villagers belong to the Zo tribe, known as Mizo in Mizoram State on the Indian side and as Chin in Chin State on the Myanmar side. For centuries, people crossed the river to bury their loved ones, marry, and trade. These crossings predated the British administrators who drew the boundary line in 1834, and long before independent Myanmar or India existed.
In the late 1940s, the Myanmar and Indian governments began negotiations to formally ratify the border shown on colonial maps, which had never been fully surveyed. The two former colonies formally recognized the demarcation line imposed by the British, but, sharing the belief that colonial authorities had arbitrarily divided a single ethnic group, they rejected stringent border enforcement measures. For 74 years, the India-Myanmar border was considered the most open of any between two independent nations. The Free Movement Regime (FMR) dates to 1950, when India amended its passport rules to allow members of hill tribes living within 40 kilometers of the border, whether citizens of India or Myanmar, to cross freely without documentation. In 2004, citing security concerns, India reduced this zone to 16 kilometers and limited border crossings to three designated entry points. Reconfirmed in 2018, the FMR allowed eligible crossers to stay visa-free for up to 14 days. Only ten of the border’s 1,643 kilometers were fenced. Children from Khawmawi attended schools in Zokhawthar, while hospitals in Mizoram provided health care to people from Chin State. The FMR could be read as a tacit concession to the Zo tribe and an acknowledgment by Myanmar and India that the borderland was home to one people whom the British had divided into two. The openness of this policy did not spring from corridors of power but from the villages, river crossings, and familial relationships that predated either state.
Yet the FMR was not only about righting a historical wrong; it also served India’s regional strategy. In 2018, India formalized the FMR as part of its Act East Policy, balancing two goals at once. First, India sought to cultivate cordial relations with Myanmar, its land gateway to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and second, to counter China’s rising influence in Naypyidaw. However, the 2021 military coup in Myanmar disrupted that balance. The junta dropped aerial bombs on villages in Chin State. Families began crossing the Tiau River into Mizoram by the thousands. By 2025, approximately 35,000 Myanmar nationals sought refuge in Mizoram, the largest concentration of Myanmar refugees anywhere in India. The Mizoram State government, under the successive administrations of the Mizo National Front and the Zoram People’s Movement since 2021, echoed the logic behind the FMR in sheltering refugees. A Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament told the press that Myanmar’s refugees were like “family.” However, the central government in Delhi held a different view. According to the Indian Home Ministry, the porous border posed a serious threat to national security. In February 2024, Amit Shah, India’s Minister for Home Affairs, announced that FMR would be terminated and that the border would be fenced. By 2025, border arrivals from Chin State were required to have special permits and were scrutinized by the Assam Rifles, India’s oldest paramilitary force, which controlled the border on the Indian side. The government of Mizoram State, in which Zokhawthar lies, protested Delhi’s decision to abandon the FMR and fence the border. “The British geographically divided the Zo ethnic people who have inhabited [present-day] Mizoram and the Chin Hills of Myanmar for centuries together, once under their own administration. We have been dreaming of reunification and cannot accept the India-Myanmar border imposed upon us,” announced K. Sapdanga, the Home Minister of Mizoram. Thousands marched through Aizawl in protest, and the irredentist Zomi Reunification Organization threatened to take up arms if any further work on the fence continued.
The Ministry also claimed that rebel groups fighting in Manipur, where Meitei-Kuki ethnic clashes killed approximately 258 people and displaced around 60,000 residents between 2023 and 2025, were exploiting weak border controls to infiltrate India with militants and weapons. Shah justified the fence as a measure to protect India’s internal security and to maintain the “demographic structure” of its northeastern states bordering Myanmar. Thus, the bond forged over centuries of British colonialism, the 1962 coup, the 1988 uprising, fifty years of military rule, and the 2021 coup was being dismantled by India, the very nation that had long regarded the border as a colonial travesty.
To a national audience, the phrase “demographic structure” signaled that India’s about-face on migration was not about clandestine border crossings or smuggling, but about the perceived threat that ethnic Chins posed to the integrity of the Indian states. Two understandings of the cultural relationship came into conflict: one that viewed shared ethnicity as a basis for sanctuary, and another that saw it as a threat to be managed by a physical border.
The Myanmar-India story shows that bilateral relations extend beyond the power of nations. India and Myanmar created the FMR, thereby legitimizing regional cultural encounters that had flourished for generations. The Mizos and Chins acted on the basis of centuries-old ethnic and familial ties, independent of directives from Delhi or Naypyidaw. Cultural cooperation thrives in villages, families, and shared rituals. Yet in the 21st century, states view these organic bonds as threatening, because they cannot easily regulate these encounters from a capital thousands of kilometers away. The role of states is to decide whether to celebrate cooperation, restrict it, or pretend it is not happening. India chose to restrict cooperation, ending the freedom of movement that allowed the Zo people to live as one community across two countries.
When BM Thangi crosses the river, she is not making a statement about her citizenship. She is fulfilling her duty as an aunt. But the thousands who marched through Aizawl were making a statement. The conventional account holds that global citizenship replaces, or at least supersedes, national loyalties in favor of a cosmopolitan one. The Mizo protesters refused to choose between the two identities. Sapdanga rejected the border decision, not his nation. He asked the Mizos to remain Indians while refusing to enforce a colonial border that separates them from their kin. Being a global citizen does not require denying the importance of one’s nation. Global citizenship may instead mean strengthening the human ties that existed before nations.
For global citizenship, Myanmar-India border ties offer some hope, but the lesson about international cooperation is far bleaker. The FMR survived for 74 years because the arrangement suited Delhi, and when India’s priorities shifted to security, the open border was among the first casualties. The uncomfortable truth is that grassroots cooperation survives only as long as states find it useful. Grassroots, cross-border cooperation is rarely threatened by a falling-out between neighbors, but almost always by a government seeking power through nationalism, militarism, and a fence that purportedly advances state interests.
Currently, roughly 30 kilometers of border fencing are under construction. People continue to cross the river, but must apply for a border permit, pass a background check, and limit their stay to seven days. Many find the process too slow or costly and instead cross the unmonitored jungle.
Vanlalchaka continues to receive refugees. His niece still battles cancer. Some aspects of cultural cooperation may endure forever, quietly and steadily, through families and religious groups. Borders do not stop people from burying their dead. But the fence, when completed, will likely outlast the people who once knew the border’s permeability and witnessed the rapid decline of an era of relative openness in the 2020s.
Vanlalchaka still hopes his niece will survive. However, if she dies, the family intends to take the funeral procession across the river, following ancestral traditions. Whether they will be allowed to approach the opposite bank, for the first time in living memory, remains the question.
References
Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Indo-Burmese Border | Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made
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