India faces growing criticism over its decision to roll out the red carpet for the Myanmar junta’s leader, Min Aung Hlaing, becoming the first country to host the general since he declared himself president.
Min Aung Hlaing concludes a five-day state visit on Wednesday that began with a military guard of honour and included meetings with prime minister Narendra Modi and the president, Droupadi Murmu.
He has faced years of international sanctions and condemnation following his military overthrow in 2021 of Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government. He claims to have formed his own civilian administration after elections this year which were widely condemned as a sham exercise to maintain the military’s grip on power.
India defended the state visit as a necessary step to maintain dialogue with an important neighbour, but analysts and rights groups criticised the decision as short-sighted and serving the interests of neither the people of Myanmar nor India itself.
“Min Aung Hlaing is not Myanmar’s legitimate president,” said Mercy Chriesty Barends, chair for the Asean Parliamentarians for Human Rights organisation. “He is the architect of a brutal coup that overthrew a democratically elected government, and has since presided over a campaign of mass atrocities against his own people.”
The main event of the visit was a meeting between Min Aung Hlaing and Modi on Monday. Neither leader addressed the media afterwards. A statement said both men “underscored the importance of strengthening bilateral cooperation” and discussed trade, defence and security cooperation, border management and “bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest”.
Min Aung Hlaing was later received at the Indian presidential residence by Mr Murmu, who told him that India and Myanmar shared deep cultural, civilisational and spiritual ties that go back centuries.
On Tuesday, he visited India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, to meet business and industry leaders and to visit infrastructure projects before he was due to fly out on Wednesday.
New Delhi has long argued that geography leaves it little choice but to maintain relations with whichever government controls its eastern neighbour. The two countries share a 1,600km border, leading to common challenges involving security, migration and cross-border trade. But it is nonetheless significant that India has hosted Min Aung Hlaing at a time when Myanmar is still engulfed in a civil war triggered by his military’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters – a conflict that has killed thousands of people and displaced millions.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi remains in house arrest on charges widely condemned as politically motived, with no access to lawyers or visits from her family. She has spent much of the past five years in solitary confinement while resistance groups across the country continue to control large swathes of territory in their fight against the junta.
Min Aung Hlaing was a powerful figure in the military long before leading the 2021 coup and has been sanctioned for his role in the military’s attacks on ethnic Rohingya minorities, described by the United Nations human rights chief as a genocide.
Tun Khin, a prominent Rohingya activist who was born in Myanmar's Rakhine (Arakan) State and moved to the UK, said: “Instead of rolling out the red carpet [for Min Aung Hlaing], India should be slapping on the handcuffs. The Myanmar military has caused problems for India for decades, creating instability on India's borders, refugees, scam centres and damaging economic opportunities. India would be better off supporting a democratic Myanmar rather than legitimising a general responsible for genocide,” he told The Independent.
The US first sanctioned Min Aung Hlaing in 2019 over alleged human rights abuses against the Rohingya, including the military operations that drove hundreds of thousands of them into Bangladesh. Additional sanctions followed the 2021 military coup.
In July 2020, the UK also imposed sanctions on him, and the European Union has also maintained and extended its sanctions regime against Myanmar's military leadership.
Earlier this year, the UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), heard a genocide case filed against Myanmar’s military by the Gambia. The case centres on operations between 2016 and 2017 that forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee into Bangladesh. In 2025, an Argentinian court issued an arrest warrant against Min Aung Hlaing for alleged genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the Rohingya minority.
Mark Farmaner, the director of the Burma Campaign UK, told The Independent that Mr Modi’s current policy is driven by a desire to counter China’s influence, but that New Delhi would be better served in the long run by supporting a democratic Myanmar which might be less dependent on Beijing.
“Modi will be calculating that being the first to invite general Min Aung Hlaing since he appointed himself president will buy more goodwill and influence for India,” he said. “India’s current approach to Myanmar has doomed them to play second fiddle to China, as India can’t compete economically or politically with China and its UN Security Council seat and global clout.”
The group of Asean Parliamentarians for Human Rights, a regional body involving current and former elected representatives in southeast Asia, said India's “Neighbourhood First” and “Act East” foreign policies were built on stability, trust and a rules-based regional order – all values it argues have been undermined by Myanmar's military.
Ahead of the visit, an open letter signed by 122 civil society organisations, humanitarian networks and ethnic community groups urged India to rescind the invitation and avoid conferring legitimacy on a leader they described as the “architect of the Myanmar polycrisis”.
It said hosting Min Aung Hlaing “would inadvertently legitimise an illegal junta responsible for systematic violations of human rights and atrocity crimes against Myanmar’s peoples”.
At a briefing during the visit, Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri said engagement with the regime in Naypidaw did not mean endorsement of its political system. He said Mr Modi raised the issues of Ms Suu Kyi’s detention and the return of democracy in the country as part of a “free-wheeling” discussion.
“History has shown that disengagement doesn’t give us any results that are better than engagement, and it certainly doesn’t produce democratic change if that is what we are interested in,” he said. “On the other hand, disengagement only produces a vacuum that others go on to fill then to our detriment. And those others have no interest in democracy, I can assure you about that,” he said, an apparent reference to China.
Ophelia Yumlembam, an associate at the Organisation for Research on China and Asia (ORCA), told The Independent that developments in Myanmar’s border regions like Chin State were of critical importance to India.
“For New Delhi, the crisis in Myanmar is not a distant political issue but an immediate neighbourhood challenge with direct implications for border security, regional stability, connectivity projects, and refugee flows,” she said.
