Guest contributor
James Shwe
Author’s note: This piece is an assessment of probabilities, not a forecast of certainties. The facts cited — territorial control, sanctions designations, statements, project costs, ore pricing — are documented and verifiable. The judgments about how each actor’s position will deteriorate are mine, based on the trajectory of the past five years and the structural incentives in play. Treat the factual claims as established and the strategic projections as a framework for analysis, not as predictions.
Min Aung Hlaing returned from his May 30–June 3 visit to India with what the junta media called the most significant diplomatic breakthrough of his presidency. Indian commentary called it a pragmatic counter to Chinese influence. Both readings assume the deliverables will hold.
They will not. In my last op-ed, I laid out the six deliverables Min Aung Hlaing extracted and the six advocacy moves available to the resistance. This piece extends the ledger.
The visit backfires on the two parties that chose it — India and the junta — and inflicts collateral damage on three others: it damages the United States and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), imposes costs on China, and weakens the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
How it backfires on India
Delhi bought infrastructure rights from a seller who does not own the land. The joint statement recommitted India to the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project and the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway. Kaladan transits via Chin State’s Paletwa, held by the Arakan Army (AA) since January 2024.
The Trilateral Highway transits Sagaing, where the People’s Defense Force (PDF) operates at battalion strength, and Karen State areas contested by the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA).
Indian security agencies have reportedly been coordinating with the AA on border security and with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) on rare-earth ore samples.
The June 1 optics make that dual-track posture untenable. Kaladan has absorbed two decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, with an Indian government revised cost estimate of approximately Rs 2,904 crore ($340 million USD).
Three outcomes are likely: the projects stall, the junta launches “clearance” operations that turn Indian contractors into targets, or Delhi continues quiet engagement with Ethnic Resistance Organizations (EROs) and the joint statement becomes a dead letter.
The rare earth’s thesis does not close. India needs dysprosium and terbium for its clean-energy, defense, and electronics sectors. China tightened export curbs on these elements in April 2025 and expanded the list in October 2025.
The accessible alternative deposits sit in Kachin State’s Pangwa and Chipwi belt, seized by the KIA in October 2024, not held by the junta. KIA ore flows to Yunnan processors under an arrangement finalized in April 2025 at 35,000 yuan ($4,830 USD) per ton, plus a twenty percent KIA levy introduced in December 2024. India cannot have both Naypyidaw’s political endorsement and Kachin’s ore.
The rupee–kyat channel is a secondary-sanctions case waiting to be filed. United States Treasury sanctions on the Myanma Foreign Trade Bank (MFTB) and Myanma Investment and Commercial Bank (MICB) were designed to choke dollar clearing.
A rupee–kyat correspondent channel routes around that chokepoint, and the Burma Unified through Rigorous Military Accountability Act (BURMA Act) secondary-sanctions architecture was built to achieve exactly this kind of workaround.
Indian banks acting as correspondents — State Bank of India (SBI), Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India Bank (ICICI), Housing Development Finance Corporation Bank (HDFC) — face real exposure.
The possibility of designation is sufficient to chill compliance departments. The mechanism is also a template: ruble–kyat, yuan–kyat, baht–kyat, and dirham–kyat follow if it is not addressed now.
Bangladesh and the northeast. Dhaka hosts roughly one million Rohingya refugees, has a deteriorating relationship with the junta over repatriation and the AA’s border takeover, and is recalibrating its India relationship under the post-Hasina government.
Manipur remains in unresolved ethnic conflict between Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities, with the Kuki-Zo’s kinship ties to Myanmar’s Chin resistance making any embrace of the junta politically combustible in the state. Mizoram openly hosts refugees from Chin State against Delhi’s preference. Nagaland’s cross-border kinship networks make Myanmar policy a center-state issue. A visible tilt toward the junta sharpens friction in three states Delhi can least afford.
The unpriced risk. The regime in Naypyidaw has lost territory steadily since Operation 1027 began in late 2023, no longer controls most border crossings, presides over a kyat that has lost much of its value, and has driven hundreds of thousands of young people out of the country through conscription.
If the regime collapses or enters a real political transition over three to five years — a scenario I consider increasingly plausible — India will have spent the period as Min Aung Hlaing’s most visible democratic patron. China survives that scenario; India’s soft-power claim does not.
How it backfires on the junta
The visit hardens the resistance.
The Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF) is an umbrella group including the National Unity Government (NUG), the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the Karen National Union (KNU), the Chin National Front (CNF), the Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP), and the People’s Defence Force (PDF).
Together with the Arakan Army (AA), the SCEF coordinates across the Kaladan corridor as it crosses through AA-controlled Rakhine and Chin’s Paletwa as well as Chin Brotherhood controlled southern Chin.
All share an operational interest: demonstrating that the territory through which India’s projects must transit is not the junta’s to deliver.
The demonstration requires only that existing ERO territorial control be publicized, mapped, and pushed into Indian, Japanese, Australian, European, and American policy discourse.
China will charge for the hedge. Beijing has historically responded to Myanmar hedging with operational leverage: border-gate closures, fuel and electricity supply tightening, selective enabling of EROs along the China-Myanmar frontier, and adjustments to rare-earth pricing.
The June 1 visit gives Beijing political justification to use those levers harder. The regime’s border trade with China, even degraded, is more economically significant than anything India can offer for at least five years.
Sanctions enforcement gets a new target. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) does not need to designate the State Bank of India (SBI) to make the rupee–kyat mechanism untenable. It needs only a public advisory that correspondent relationships supporting rupee–kyat settlement create secondary-sanctions exposure.
Indian bank compliance departments will read that advisory the way Singapore’s United Overseas Bank (UOB) read the 2023 Myanmar Foreign Trade Bank (MFTB) and Myanmar Investment and Commerce Bank (MICB) designations: as a signal to exit. UOB ended correspondent relationships with Myanmar banks in September 2023.
The election trap closes. The regime’s 2026 theory is that a staged election plus visible engagement with major democracies normalizes it. India was the keystone. If no second domino follows — and as of this writing, none is visible — the New Delhi optics become a record of how isolated the regime remains.
The European Union has denounced the “regime-sponsored elections.” Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand have withheld recognition. ASEAN remains split.
The optics become evidence. Junta state media has circulated photographs of Min Aung Hlaing beside Modi under the title “President.” The Gambia v. Myanmar case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is ongoing.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into Rohingya-related crimes is active. Universal jurisdiction cases in Argentina, Germany, and Turkey continue to advance. Every head-of-state photograph becomes part of the documentary record these proceedings rely on.
How it damages the United States and the Quad
The Quad foreign ministers met in New Delhi on May 26 and committed the four signatories to call for cessation of violence in Myanmar, release of those unjustly detained, humanitarian access, dialogue with all parties, and cooperation against Southeast Asian scam compounds.
Six days later, the host of that statement rolled out the red carpet for the person responsible for the opposite of all four.
The credibility cost falls hardest on Washington. The United States elevated the Quad from a security dialogue to a values-and-coordination forum. The BURMA Act, passed with bipartisan support in 2022, embedded Myanmar policy in U.S. law specifically to insulate it from administration drift. The June 1 visit demonstrates that one Quad member can render the bloc’s joint Myanmar position meaningless within a week, with no consultation and no consequence.
BURMA Act architecture gets stress-tested. The architecture rests on three assumptions: that major democracies will not actively undermine sanctions enforcement; that humanitarian access through Thailand, India, and Bangladesh into resistance-held areas will be maintained; and that diplomatic isolation will continue to erode the regime’s war-funding capacity.
The rupee–kyat mechanism undermines the first. Narendra Modi–Min Aung Hlaing reciprocal security-interest assurance threatens the second by constraining cross-border aid through Mizoram, Manipur, and Nagaland.
The head-of-state choreography attacks the third. Washington must either treat the rupee–kyat mechanism as a sanctions-evasion case and accept friction with Delhi, or signal that BURMA Act enforcement is selective. Either choice damages U.S. credibility.
Tokyo and Canberra absorb domestic costs. Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya’s March 21, 2025, Diet statement of “serious concern” about the junta’s election plans, reaffirmed in his August 1, 2025, statement following the lifting of the state of emergency, is now a parliamentary handle the Japanese opposition can use.
Australian Labor backbenchers and Greens senators have equivalent material. The February 2024 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) sanctions on Myanmar Foreign Trade Bank (MFTB), Myanmar Investment and Commercial Bank (MICB), and three jet-fuel entities sit awkwardly alongside India’s rupee–kyat workaround. Future Quad Myanmar language gets harder to draft, and that caution will extend beyond Myanmar.
The costs it imposes on China
Conventional wisdom holds that China wins any Min Aung Hlaing visit to a non-Beijing capital because hedging is structural and Beijing has the leverage to absorb it. That conventional wisdom is incomplete.
Beijing now has to spend more to hold its position. Before June 1, China’s Myanmar policy could rest on the assumption that no other major power was willing to invest the political capital required to compete for influence in Naypyidaw.
That assumption is now wrong. Beijing will have to spend more — in subsidies, in Kyaukphyu acceleration, in border-gate flexibility, and in ERO management — to hold the position it previously held for free.
Every additional yuan defending the Myanmar position is a yuan not spent on Belt and Road expansion, the South China Sea, or Taiwan-related contingencies.
The KIA arrangement becomes harder to maintain. The April 2025 deal with the KIA was politically expensive for Beijing, justified internally by the absence of any credible competing buyer.
India is now a credible competing buyer. KIA’s leverage in any renegotiation has increased. Better terms for the KIA mean more friction with Naypyidaw, which will read any Chinese accommodation of the KIA as betrayal.
The China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) faces a competing template. Kaladan and the Trilateral Highway were dormant enough that Beijing could ignore them. The June 1 recommitment changes the political signaling around both.
Even if neither project advances physically, both now exist as templates that Tokyo, Seoul, Washington, and the European Investment Bank (EIB) can reference when discussing alternatives to CMEC. The template effect matters more than the physical infrastructure.
How it weakens ASEAN
Malaysia’s 2025 ASEAN chairmanship under Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, with Othman Hashim as Special Envoy on Myanmar, represented the most serious attempt in five years to recover the Five-Point Consensus.
Hashim’s mid-February 2025 Naypyidaw visit, his subsequent engagement with the NUG in Bangkok, and Anwar’s April meetings with both Min Aung Hlaing and NUG Prime Minister Mahn Win Khaing Than constituted the most ambitious ASEAN Myanmar diplomacy since the coup.
Malaysia’s mediation track is undercut. Anwar’s argument to the junta was that ASEAN, properly engaged, offered a more credible pathway to international rehabilitation than bilateral deals with individual neighbors. India’s choreography demonstrates the opposite. The junta does not need ASEAN; it needs only enough bilateral deals to assemble the appearance of normalization.
The dissenters lose leverage and the accommodationists gain ground. ASEAN is split between dissenters — Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines — and accommodationists — Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. The June 1 visit is the most visible vindication of the accommodationist position in five years.
Thailand will use it to justify deeper economic engagement, including baht–kyat parallels to the rupee–kyat model. Cambodia and Laos will use it to deflect criticism. Vietnam will use it to harden its non-interference posture.
Jakarta and Manila have unused equities. Indonesia cannot afford to watch a non-ASEAN power demonstrate that bilateral end-runs around the FPC produce results faster than the consensus process Indonesia helped design.
The Philippines has equities related to Southeast Asian migration, transnational crime, and the scam-compound networks the junta’s Border Guard Force (BGF) protects. Both have reasons to be vocally uncomfortable.
The resistance should ensure they have the analytical and documentary material to do so publicly.
What this means for the resistance
The June 3 framework remains the operational priority: the Quad text-versus-conduct contradiction, the Kaladan logistical reality, a coordinated NUG-SCEF-ERO territorial-control statement, the rupee–kyat sanctions-evasion case, the ASEAN dissenters, and the sustained proof-of-life demand for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
Damage in five directions means advocacy in five directions. The case against India travels through Indian-domestic political space, the Northeast, Bangladesh, and the international financial compliance community.
The case against the junta travels through territorial-control mapping, Chinese leverage dynamics, sanctions enforcement, and international legal accountability.
The case to the Quad democracies travels through Congress, the Diet, and the Australian Parliament. The case with China is harder to make publicly but easier to make analytically: every additional cost Beijing pays to hold its Myanmar position is a cost worth documenting.
The case to ASEAN travels through Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and Manila. Each advocacy success on one front strengthens the case on the others.
Delhi bet on a regime that has spent five years losing; that bet backfires. Naypyidaw bet that international engagement would substitute for domestic legitimacy; that bet backfires.
Washington and the Quad bet that coordinated democratic messaging would constrain the regime’s diplomatic recovery; that bet has been undermined by a partner.
Beijing bet that no other major power would compete for influence in Naypyidaw; that assumption has been overtaken by events. ASEAN bet that consensus diplomacy could deliver the Five-Point Consensus; that bet has been weakened by a bilateral end-run.
All five positions fail on the same evidence: the territory the junta does not control, the economy it cannot stabilize, the prisoners it will not release, and the people it cannot defeat.
The case closes itself if we keep the record.
James Shwe is a Myanmar democracy advocate and writer based in California. His previous DVB analysis of Min Aung Hlaing’s visit to India appeared on June 3.
DVB publishes a diversity of opinions that do not reflect DVB’s editorial policy. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our stories: [email protected]
