With Myanmar’s military junta losing ground to rebel outfits in certain parts of bordering Bangladesh, India, and China in recent weeks, New Delhi is said to be thinking of revisiting its approach in dealing with the eastern neighbour largely because of serious security implications for its northeastern part.

Besides remaining engaged with the military rulers in Nay Pyi Daw, India is understood to be mulling various options including opening channels of communication with various ethnic groups that are inhabitants of Myanmar’s states bordering north-east India amid cross-border migration into Mizoram and Manipur.

The rethink on India’s strategy follows the military successes by the three key rebel groups fighting the junta of Myanmar in recent months.

The latest reported success for the rebels came when the Arakan army in the western Myanmar province of Rakhine claimed it had taken control of the town of Paletwa which shares its borders with India and Bangladesh, posing a major challenge to the junta which staged a coup against an elected government in February 2021.

Arakan Army spokesman Khine Thu Kha told the international media late on Sunday that it had captured Paletwa on the bank of the Kaladan river which is key to trade with neighbouring countries.

India has built an ambitious multimodal transport project on the Kaladan River in Myanmar that gives New Delhi a trade route opening to the Bay of Bengal.

The reported capture of Paletwa comes after another rebel group in the Three Brotherhood Alliance seized Laukkai town in the northern province of Shan bordering China. Last week, the junta had agreed on a truce with the rebel alliance in the region bordering China, according to multinational news wire services. But on Sunday, the alliance accused the junta of violating the ceasefire.

The northeastern Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram share borders with Myanmar’s provinces of China, Rakhine, Kachine and Sagain.

India has a lot of strategic economic interests at stake not only in the Kaladan river multimodal project but also in the under-construction trilateral highway connecting Manipur with Myanmar and Thailand as part of its much-talked-about Act East policy outreach to South East Asian countries.

A view is gaining ground in the Indian establishment that New Delhi should also interact with the Myanmar rebels bordering India because the writ of the Myanmar rulers does not run in these areas which are a hotbed of smuggling of drugs, gold and weapons.

For India, the security of the border areas with Myanmar takes precedence over anything else for peace and progress in the entire northeastern India which had in the past been hit by decades of armed insurgency.

The continued unrest in Chin province of Myanmar has seen the influx of thousands of common people and wounded Myanmar troops crossing over to Mizoram for safety and all of them are put in refugee camps in the northeastern Indian state for months. The people of Mizoram share an ethnic affinity with the residents of Chin and have welcomed the refugees from there.

Security consideration has prompted India not to join the US and West-imposed sanctions against the Myanmar junta and not wholeheartedly align with the struggle by pro-democracy groups in that country.