Myanmar Between Elections And Fragmentation: How Should India Play Its Cards?

Power in Myanmar has long been measured in bullets, not ballots. Yet this winter, the same generals who once dismissed democracy as a threat to order are preparing for elections, hoping to claim a veneer of legitimacy through the ritual of the vote. The coming polls, set to stretch from December into February, are being held in a country half-consumed by war. The Tatmadaw controls roughly half of Myanmar’s territory; ethnic armies dominate much of the rest.

Entire regions in Rakhine, Kachin, Chin, and northern Shan are effectively autonomous zones under the rebel command. What remains outside the majority Barman community-dominated lowlands in the south are contested grey areas where neither side holds sway for long and the reach of the state ends where its convoys stop.

Even the Junta’s own administrators concede that elections in many districts will be impossible. This will not be Myanmar’s first performance of electoral theatre. Since independence, its political story has swung between brief democratic openings and long military eclipses.

The National League for Democracy (NLD) won by a landslide in 1990, only to see the results annulled. It triumphed again in 2015 and 2020—until the army tore up the results, jailed its leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and resumed direct rule. The 2025 elections promise no deviation from this grim pattern. A quarter of the parliamentary seats remains constitutionally reserved for uniformed officers, and the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party faces no credible challenger. The outcome, like the past, is preordained.

A Fractured Nation: Myanmar today is less a unified state than an archipelago of armed sovereignties. In Rakhine, the Arakan Army controls major towns and trade routes but struggles to maintain governance amid fuel shortages and economic collapse. The Kachin Independence Army holds large parts of the jade-and-rare-earth-rich north; the Chin, Karen, and Mon each rule their own pockets of resistance. In the Far East, the United Wa State Army, one of the world’s most heavily armed non-state actors, operates almost as a Chinese protectorate.

For Myanmar’s weary citizens, the elections will offer no respite. The kyat has collapsed, fuel and rice prices have soared, and entire towns lie in ruins. The state has little money, even less legitimacy, and diminishing control. Fear, not consent, sustains authority. The conflict’s significance extends far beyond Myanmar’s borders. The country has become a critical arena in a broader superpower rivalry, with its geography and mineral wealth placing it at the crossroads of global competition.

Beneath its conflict-scarred soil lie some of the world’s richest deposits of rare earth elements, the metals essential for electric vehicles, advanced electronics, and precision-guided weapons. Whoever controls Myanmar’s mines controls a crucial link in the 21st century’s strategic supply chain. China has long understood this. The Americans have recently woken up to this and are trying to be players in the game.

However, through a dense web of infrastructure projects, arms deals, and political patronage, Beijing has entrenched itself as Myanmar’s indispensable ally. It supplies the Junta with weapons and surveillance systems, builds pipelines from the Bay of Bengal to Yunnan, and operates listening posts and runways on Coco Island, barely 55 km from India’s Andaman and Nicobar Command.

Reports of airbase expansions, submarine deals, and radar installations all point to one reality: Myanmar is becoming a Chinese outpost in the eastern Indian Ocean and an area India needs to be wary of. At the same time, China maintains parallel ties with ethnic militias, such as the Wa and Kokang forces, ensuring leverage over both sides of Myanmar’s civil war. This two-track influence, state and sub-state, gives Beijing an unmatched degree of control. It also enables Chinese companies to dominate the rare earth supply chains emerging from the country’s north, ensuring that even the chaos serves China’s strategic economy.

Western powers, locked in a shadow conflict with Beijing over these very minerals, are unlikely to recognise or legitimise the Junta’s elections. But their leverage remains limited. Sanctions have isolated the regime without toppling it, and the NLD’s leadership remains silenced. In this vacuum, the generals play one power against another—Russia for weapons, ASEAN for cover, China for patronage, and increasingly, India for access.

India Needs To Up Its Game: New Delhi’s interests in Myanmar are pragmatic, not ideological. It seeks calm along its 1,600-kilometre border, security for its infrastructure projects like the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Corridor, and a check on Chinese encroachment into the Bay of Bengal. India has, over the years, maintained workable relations with both the Junta and Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD, while quietly offering refuge to NLD escapees and ethnic minorities, such as the Chin and Arakanese.

Yet the equation is shifting. As China’s footprint deepens and Myanmar fractures into competing power centres, an accent on engagement with Naypyidaw no longer alone guarantees Indian interests. The reality on the ground demands a more layered approach. Indeed, there are indications that India has begun exploring limited ties with some of the ethnic armies, including discussions around the possible import of rare earths from zones outside the Junta control.

India’s Key Concern Lies Offshore: China’s expanding presence on Myanmar’s Coco Islands undermines India’s surveillance edge in the eastern Indian Ocean. Radar and signal posts there enable Beijing to track Indian naval and missile activities, turning Myanmar into a potential strategic outpost.

To counter this, India’s priorities should be threefold: Firstly, strengthen maritime domain awareness and littoral surveillance to blunt any expansion of external military reach into the Bay of Bengal; Secondly, pursue a dual-track engagement. Sustain official ties with the Junta for essential coordination, while building quiet, transactional relations with ethnic administrations that can secure local stability, humanitarian corridors, and mineral access by giving refuge. And providing medical and emergency assistance and even food and other civil supplies; Thirdly, diversify rare earth supply chains by investing in domestic processing, partnering with trusted Southeast Asian suppliers, and possibly rebuilding the old Stillwell Road built during World War 2 to supply Nationalist China in its war against Japan through North Myanmar.

When the ballots are counted, Myanmar will remain divided and weary—its generals ruling through ritual elections, not popular consent. Power still flows from the gun, not the people’s will. For India, the dilemma is not Junta versus democracy but passivity versus pragmatism. Navigating this fractured frontier demands realism and reach, for the true contest in Myanmar is not ideological; it is about influence and shaping the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific’s most volatile corner.

The writer is former head of PTI’s eastern region network.