AS WE TRUNDLED DOWNHILL along the treacherous dirt track, made muddy by rain, I wondered how those routinely negotiating this path did not lose their mental bearings—or a few spinal discs. Our Mizo driver was nonchalant, piloting our pickup truck with ease. Peering through the foliage running along the trail, we saw neat rows of hutments, with green asbestos roofs, sprawled over a stretch of low hills. We could also see a river snaking through the valley.
The ten-kilometre trail originates in Farkawn, a village in Mizoram’s Champhai district, and snakes downhill to the Tiau River, which forms the border with Myanmar. It is frequented, among others, by Mizo sand miners and members of the Chin community—one of the eight national races recognised by the Burmese government. Under the free-movement regime devised by the governments of India and Myanmar, in 2018, people living within sixteen kilometres of the border can cross over without travel documents.
Forty-five minutes after leaving Farkawn, we finally reached the end of the trail. A swing bridge made of ropes and wood, swaying almost indistinguishably with the wind, connected the banks of the muddy river. I could see signs of human habitation on the other side, including a small check post and a few people ambling around in military fatigues. That, I recognised, was rebel territory.
On the morning of 10 January, four months after my visit, Burmese jets pounded this valley with bombs. Their target was Camp Victoria, the general headquarters of the Chin National Front and its armed wing, the Chin National Army. Ever since the coup d’état of February 2021, the CNF has been part of a nationwide coalition resisting the military regime in Myanmar. According to a statement issued by the National Unity Government, a parallel civilian administration, five people were killed in the airstrike. When the jets returned the following day, the NUG added, they destroyed the camp’s clinic.
Sources close to the CNF told me that the attack was not unexpected. In November 2022, the Chin Human Rights Organisation, that documents atrocities in Chin State, published secret intelligence about the military junta’s plans to bomb Camp Victoria, located along a horseshoe curve of the Tiau. The memos leaked by the CHRO included several targets, including the clinic and civilian quarters, that were bombed by the jets.
Farkawn residents told The Guardian that two bombs had landed on the Indian side of the border. The local chapter of the Young Mizo Association, the most influential civil-society organisation in the state, claimed that the jets had also breached Indian airspace. The YMA alleged that similar breaches had taken place several times over the past two months and circulated a photo showing personnel of the Assam Rifles—the paramilitary unit responsible for guarding the Myanmar border—inspecting a crater that had purportedly been formed by one of the bombs.
The remoteness of the valley, which even hinders the patrolling capability of the Assam Rifles, makes it difficult to ascertain what happened. One video, which the CHRO claims was “captured by a Mizo citizen journalist,” shows what appears to be a bomb landing somewhere close by, followed by smoke emanating from the valley below. Myanmar Witness, a group that collects, verifies and analyses open-source intelligence, announced that it had “assessed allegations of at least one strike impacting Indian sovereign territory and believes this likely did occur.”
The sole eyewitness who made a clear public statement was a Mizo trucker, who claimed to have been on the Indian side of the border during the bombings. A video, seemingly captured by him and shared by the CHRO, shows the shattered windshield of his truck. He told reporters that, as he stood by the river waiting to collect sand, a piece of shrapnel pierced the back of his truck, punctured the headrest of the driver’s seat and exited through the windshield.
A senior Assam Rifles officer and the district magistrate of Champhai dismissed these claims, conceding only that some shrapnel pieces had been recovered from the Tiau riverbed. On 19 January, Arindam Bagchi, a spokesperson for the ministry of external affairs, denied any breach of Indian airspace. “Such incidents are a matter of concern for us,” he said. “We have taken it up with the Myanmar side.” Neither government has made any further comment.
A day after Bagchi’s statement, the NGO Coordination Committee, a conglomeration of various Mizo civil-society organisations, submitted a memorandum to the union home minister, Amit Shah, expressing its “deep concern” over the bombings and “the distress and panic caused upon the local inhabitants.” The memorandum urged the government “to speak and act in defence of its citizens and ensure that the Indian territory of Mizoram, either on land or in air, is always vigilantly safeguarded from potential foreign military intrusions.” It added that since the Chins “are our blood related tribes from the Zo ethnic stock, we deeply empathize the inhumane suffering and human rights violations caused by the ongoing Myanmar political crisis. India, as the world’s largest democratic country, should not be a silent spectator to the ongoing human rights violations and inhumane treatment of innocent civilians in its immediate neighbour.”
Neither the home ministry nor the Mizo groups have released any further updates. The issue appears to have been managed, if not resolved, behind closed doors. Those living along the border, however, remain in fear as the war rages on. “What if the Myanmar army mistakes us as armed people and bombs our land?” a mechanic from Vaphai, a village fifteen kilometres north of Farkawn, told The Print. “We need some protection from the government and a show of India’s military strength.”
All of this brings into sharp relief not just the transborder nature of the war in Chin State but also the delicate triangular relationship between Mizoram, New Delhi and Myanmar, which has long been shaped by a complex, interlocking set of political and security orders managed by state and non-state actors on either side of the border. This fluid transborder space is welded together by a powerful ethnic fraternity that originated in mediaeval times but continues to mould, and even overwhelm, the geopolitics of modern nation states.
This fluid transborder space is welded together by a powerful ethnic fraternity that continues to mould, and even overwhelm, the geopolitics of modern nation states.
ON 1 FEBRUARY 2021, Myanmar’s worst fears came true. Armoured vehicles and tanks rolled through the capital, Nay Pyi Taw, and major cities, including Yangon and Mandalay. Nearly a decade after the country began its difficult transition from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy, the generals, some of whom had midwifed the transition, emerged from the barracks to seize power. Three months earlier, the National League for Democracy, led by the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, had won a general election in a landslide. The military alleged election fraud and arrested Suu
