Between Junta and Democracy: India’s Uneasy Position on the Myanmar Elections |
New Delhi: Mohammed Salim is watching a video of Myanmar’s Senior General Min Aung Hlaing shaking hands with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with a dozen cameras flashing at them, capturing their smiles. The video is from their bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in China in August 2025 — one of the few international fora where Myanmar’s isolated junta leader has appeared since the 2021 coup he led. Barred from ASEAN, unwelcome across much of the region and wanted by international courts for atrocity crimes against the Rohingya, Min Aung Hlaing’s limited travels only sharpen Salim’s discomfort.
Salim’s day begins at 7 am, picking up waste plastic from various colonies and dumpsters in Delhi. Though Salim graduated with a degree in political science from Myanmar, his life in India is largely governed by the status his existence has been reduced to – a Rohingya refugee. Salim fled Rakhine State in 2015, years before the military’s 2017 campaign that drove more than 700,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights later described those operations as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, a characterisation echoed by UN Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews in 2025. The Rohingya have been rendered stateless under Myanmar’s citizenship laws since the 1980s — a condition that shapes every part of their lives. Rohingya people like Salim have been stripped of their rights, including the right to vote.
Today, as he breathes amid garbage to make ends meet, even in his country of asylum the shadow of Min Aung Hlaing reminds him of the home, the family members and the identity of belonging to Myanmar which was robbed off of him.
Myanmar’s military regime has portrayed the December 28, 2025 general elections, the first in a three-stage process extending into January 2026, as a return to “disciplined democracy”. In reality, the vote is unfolding under the junta’s control: the National League for Democracy has been dissolved nationwide, its leaders imprisoned or in exile, electoral laws rewritten, political parties handpicked, and large parts of the population displaced. As of March, 2025, more than 3.6 million people are internally displaced within Myanmar.
The vote is staggered largely because the military does not control the entire country. Across vast stretches of Sagaing, Chin, Kayah and Rakhine, resistance authorities and ethnic armed organisations govern areas inaccessible to the regime. Even where polling stations exist, movement is restricted, surveillance is pervasive, and entire communities have been uprooted.
But these elections, though deeply skewered, have won the support of the Narendra Modi government. Prime Minister Modi has repeatedly said he “hopes” the polls will be fair, inclusive and involve all stakeholders, language that stops short of questioning the junta’s legitimacy but signals acceptance of its political roadmap. In his meetings with Min Aung Hlaing, Modi has stressed that there is “no military solution” to Myanmar’s conflict and has urged a “Myanmar-led, Myanmar-owned” transition through credible elections, a formulation echoed by the Ministry of External Affairs in official readouts. India has been in continuous talks with Myanmar on the elections. On December 15, India’s Ambassador to Myanmar, Abhay........