Forcibly Displaced Chin from Myanmar in Mizoram: Local Solidarity versus National Security
In April 2026, a conscription bid by the Chin National Army, an armed group in Myanmar, forced an additional 34 Chin nationals to forcibly migrate to India’s Mizoram, which shares an international border with Myanmar. While Myanmarese nationals have been seeking refuge in India for many decades, the coup d'état in 2021 forced nearly 40,000 Chins into Mizoram. Since then, sporadic ethnic clashes in the Chin state of Myanmar have been pushing more and more people to Mizoram in India’s Northeast. As per recent UNHCR estimates, there are 86,200 Chin in India.
The conflict-induced forced migration of Chin from Myanmar has heightened the Indian state’s security anxieties. Consequently, in 2021, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) issued an advisory to the border states—Mizoram, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland—to deport Chin nationals seeking refuge in these states. The MHA cited India’s non-adherence to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees or its 1967 Protocol. The decision, however, was resisted by the local people of the region because they consider the Chin their brethren. Earlier, in 2024, the MHA had announced the suspension of the Free Movement Regime (FMR), a bilateral agreement on visa-free movement for 16kms on either side of the 1,643-km-long India-Myanmar borderlands. While Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, both Bharatiya Janata Party-led states, welcomed the decision, citing security concerns, Nagaland and Mizoram resisted it, citing ethnic ties.
In Mizoram, the Government of India’s decision to fence the India-Myanmar border was discussed in the State Assembly in February 2024, and a resolution was passed to oppose the decision. The resolution was also backed by the Zo Reunification Organization, which represents the Chin, Kuki, Mizo, and Zomi tribes across Myanmar, India, and Bangladesh, seeking to reunify them. These tribes were treated as fragmented by the colonizers, separated by arbitrary border-making during colonial rule and reinforced in post-colonial times. However, geographical borders could not deter the tribes on either side of the border from interacting with each other, even on an everyday basis. The Chin of Myanmar have been visiting the border towns of Mizoram, seeking education and healthcare services, engaging in trade, and intermarrying.
The strong resistance to the India-Myanmar border fencing, therefore, is rooted in shared ethnic and historical ties between the Chin of Myanmar and the Mizo people of Mizoram. While the India-Myanmar border is a pressing security concern for the Indian state due to ‘illegal immigration’ and drug trafficking across the border, for the people inhabiting the borderlands on either side, the fluid border is a meeting point of shared history, culture, and ethnicity. Therefore, the hospitality extended by Mizo society and the government of Mizoram to Chin forcibly displaced persons (FDPs), as opposed to the central government’s security apprehensions, is entrenched in history and ethnicity. Therefore, the point of contention between the Mizo people and the central government is ‘security vs. ethnicity.’
In July 2025, the Government of India initiated a biometric exercise to recognize and register the Chin FDPs from Myanmar and Kuki-Chin FDPs from Bangladesh. Critics, however, flagged possible risks of the biometric exercise. First, the biometrics can identify those Chin who opposed the junta and participated in the civil disobedience movement and sought refuge in Mizoram, leading to their deportation or their families in Myanmar being targeted by the junta. Second, the biometrics could add to the already mounting anti-refugee sentiments in Mizoram owing to resource scarcity and contrary to the initial phase of hospitality. Nevertheless, nearly 97 percent of the biometric process has been completed in Mizoram, aided by community leaders, although the state government had opposed the process previously. The urgency in implementing the biometric process indicates that while the Chin FDPs were separated by geographical borders earlier, in the host country, they are being quarantined by invisible and ‘everyday borders,’ which separate citizens from non-citizens
The Chin escaped the hostilities in Myanmar and migrated to Mizoram, India, in search of a haven. However, living without any legal rights, they are being subjected to structural violence in India. Research shows that the Chin FDPs in Mizoram lack access to sufficient aid, economic avenues, education, healthcare, psychological support, and legal protection. With limited aid flowing from the centre to Mizoram, the main support to the FDPs has come from the local Mizo community. In the absence of aid and limited economic avenues, the Chin FDPs have taken to work as daily labourers and domestic helpers or running small businesses.
Although India has had a history of accommodating different groups of FDPs, irrespective of their faith, on its soil, despite being a non-signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, a policy shift has occurred in recent years, as evident in the treatment of the Chin and Rohingya. The absence of a national legal framework for the protection of refugees makes the Indian state’s treatment of refugees ad hoc and inconsistent. In 2025, there was an alleged case of the government ‘secretly’ deporting Rohingya refugees and abandoning them at sea. The government, however, refuted the allegations, with the Supreme Court citing the lack of material evidence to prove the allegations. Critics, meanwhile, have expressed apprehensions over India’s Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, as being detrimental to certain groups of migrants, such as refugees, because the Act prioritizes national security over humanitarian assistance.
When viewed through a humanitarian lens, it can be argued that the regional policy of development and improved connectivity adopted by the Government of India towards the peripheral Northeastern region is paradoxical. On the one hand, through the Act East Policy, New Delhi attempts to hasten infrastructure projects connecting neighbouring countries to Northeast India, while on the other, it is building fences to curb population flows to the region and further to mainland India. Although the current crises in India’s neighbouring countries require it to build bridges, in reality, India is building formidable walls to stop the migration of people in peril. However, as the case of Mizoram shows, in India’s borderlands, the politics of border-making for national security reasons may not always align with and may not be able to limit the ethnic, cultural, and historical ties that people share.
About the Author: Dr Amrita Saikia is an Assistant Professor, School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, Woxsen University, Hyderabad