When the National Investigation Agency (NIA) recently apprehended seven foreign nationals – six Ukrainian and one American – who were returning to their countries on their way back from Myanmar, the Indian mainstream and social media went into a frenzied tailspin. 

Despite the lack of detailed information, beyond the agency’s sparse statement and selective leaks by Russian media outlets, news channels and X accounts began to push conspiratorial fables around a supposedly CIA-run anti-India terror module along the India-Myanmar borderland. Social media was flushed with hot takes dotted with terms like “terrorists”, “anti-India” and “subversive”, used liberally and callously alongside “Myanmar”. Some of it resembled excerpts from a lousy spy thriller fan fiction, laced with the unmistakable vapidity of AI-generated language. 

For someone who has closely studied Myanmar – its political struggles, pathologies, nuances and contradictions – for a decade now, all of this was both frustrating and depressing. This is particularly because by now, I know it far too well that the Indian media has little time for Myanmar. 

Even as a power-hungry and obstinate military junta forcibly snatched power from an elected civilian government in 2021 and proceeded to maim and kill its own people, the Indian media continued to largely ignore the suffering of the people in Myanmar. This neglect is particularly striking for a country that shares a 1643-km-long land border with India and was once part of a shared colonial geography. Furthermore, many ethnic communities in India’s own Northeast still cherish these borderlands as a transnational homeland.

Distortion through narcissism

It has also become clear to me – as would be to anyone in India who is even remotely interested in Myanmar – that mainstream Indian media only bothers to cover the country when something of its own concern happens there. Such events fall into one or more of three intersecting categories – insurgency, contrabands and China. 

It is no surprise, therefore, that coverage of Myanmar spiked when Indian special forces crossed the border to chase Naga insurgents in a ‘hot pursuit operation’ in 2015 following a deadly ambush of an Indian Army convoy near the border in Manipur’s Chandel district or when a joint unit of Myanmar-based Meitei and Naga militants ambushed an Assam Rifles convoy along the border in Manipur’s Churachandpur district in 2021. 

These high-profile events were interspersed with microbursts of misdirected attention. For example, when reports of an Indian Army operation against Naga militants along the Myanmar border began to emerge sometime in September 2017. News producers quickly revived the term “surgical strike”, nearly a year after the Narendra Modi government first introduced it during India’s cross-border assault against militants in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK). Back then, the term sold like hot cake in the flea market of sensationalist news. 

The coverage got so ridiculous that the Indian Army had to come out and clarify that it was not a ‘surgical strike’. Despite the clarification, some newsrooms refused to drop the phrase. 

Eventually, the news cycle moved to other issues, but the damage was done. For the average Indian news consumer, ‘Myanmar’ became somewhat of a ‘Wild Wild West to the east’ – a distant, lawless badland whose only exports to India through a chronically vulnerable border were drugs, guns and militants. 

Then, in March 2023, when the London-based think tank Chatham House released a report on a suspected under-construction Chinese spy base on Myanmar-controlled Coco Island in the northern Bay of Bengal, Indian media once again briefly turned its periscope towards Myanmar. There was great alarm that the Chinese were using the island to snoop on India. 

When I met one of the co-authors of the report in London a few months after its release, he was somewhat surprised by the high-voltage coverage of their findings in Indian media, which he knew was otherwise largely uninterested in Myanmar. 

To me, however, it wasn’t surprising. For the garden variety Indian geopolitical analyst and news producer, Myanmar was at best, a passive geopolitical soccer field where great powers played their dirty games against each other (and particularly against India) and at worst, a launching pad for anti-India terrorists. The people of Myanmar, in all their vibrancy and sophistication, were missing from this heavily distorted, solipsistic worldview.

The costs of this mental distancing were grave. We rarely ever bothered to cover in detail the complex and rather historic democratic transition that Myanmar went through over the last decade. Yes, there was some positive coverage – but most of it was wrapped in an uncritical recirculation of the Modi government’s push to use Myanmar as India’s land bridge to Southeast Asia under its ‘Act East Policy’. 

Myanmar, even in its most productive iteration, became only a means to an end – the end being India’s own regional consolidation. 

Worse, when the Myanmar military launched genocidal operations against the Rohingya Muslim population in northern Rakhine State, sections of the Indian media caught on to the thorniest end of the stick. It promptly painted the Rohingya as the aggressors, going as far as to link them with ‘jihadi forces’ and calling them ‘terrorists’ without a shred of evidence or analytical logic. 

Even as 800,000 Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, the Indian media continued to use the tragedy to fan communal flames at home and incite majoritarian passions against Rohingya refugees in India. One news report used an unrelated image to claim that the Rohingya were eating the meat of Hindus. Once again, Myanmar was presented as a sordid metaphor for all things ugly.

Looking away

Cut to 2026. Nothing much has changed. The military junta continues to bomb civilians from the air using fighter jets and paramotors, not far from the Indian border. But, the Indian media couldn’t care less. In fact, hundreds have died right across the border in Chin State, Rakhine State and Sagaing Region over the last three months in deadly junta airstrikes. 

At least 170 were killed in air bombing campaigns just during the junta’s stage-managed ‘elections’ in the December 2025-January 2026 period. 18 were killed in one single strike on December 6 in Tabayin Township in Sagaing Region. In February, the junta dropped a 500-pound bomb on a village in Chin State’s Thantlang Township, killing six. On 8 March, the regime killed 116 prisoners of war in an airstrike on resistance-held territory in Rakhine State’s Ann Township. 

All of these regions either share borders with India or are proximate to Indian territory. One village located in Rakhine State’s Ponnagyun township that was struck by junta jets on February 24, killing 20 people, is just about 30 kms from the state capital of Sittwe, where India now owns and operates a high-stakes sea port. But the Indian media completely ignored these attacks, which amount to war crimes conducted by a regime with which New Delhi continues to do business on friendly terms. 

It also continues to ignore the sophisticated political experiments in state-building and constitutional reform that Myanmar’s resistance forces have been engaging in amid extraordinary circumstances – including, for instance, the Chin forces' creation of a whole new judicial system in the liberated areas.

Instead, in recent times, the public discourse on Myanmar in India has become even more disfigured and distracted. Thanks to generative AI chatbots and a new X algorithm that reportedly privileges misinformation over genuine news, it is now easier to churn out and amplify sophisticated, compelling disinformation packages about Myanmar, many of which then stealthily find their way into mainstream newsrooms that have no time to cross-check.

In the recent case of the arrests of the seven foreigners, the Indian arms of the Russian state-funded media, like RT and Sputnik, alongside pro-Russian commentators, provided additional firepower through the selective leak of agency information and amplification of propagandist narratives that flattened the complex reality of the India-Myanmar borderlands. 

These narratives moved rapidly through the Indian social media sphere and were promptly picked up and repurposed for a wider audience by the mainstream news media. This was just another instance showing how social media has become a glacial source of information and analysis for the legacy broadcast media, despite its acute lack of editorial checks and third-party verification. 

A disinformation black hole

This is also precisely how disinformation takes on a life of its own. An inorganic, coordinated ecosystem incubates an uncoordinated, organic one, each continuously reinforcing the other. Ultimately, uncorroborated claims from one event are extrapolated to analyse and contextualise other, entirely unrelated events.

For example, the theory that the seven foreigners were in the region at the American deep state’s behest to train and supply drones to ‘anti-India insurgents’ spilt over beyond the specific remit of their arrests. 

At least two accounts on X linked them to a separate attack on an Assam Police camp in Tinsukia by the United Liberation Front of Asom-Independent (ULFA-I) on 22 March. This is even though the attack involved the use of grenades, not drones, or that ULFA-I’s likely basing area in Myanmar’s Sagaing Region is some 500 kms (as the crow flies) northeast of Chin State, where the seven foreigners reportedly travelled to through Mizoram.

The American deep state theory is also being deployed at scale now to malign the Kuki-Zo communities in Manipur. One popular X account with more than 122,500 followers linked a recent incident where members of the community burnt down an armoured vehicle of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) following a minor road accident in Churachandpur with a so-called conspiracy to create a Christian nation in the region, which the arrested foreign “mercenaries” allegedly attempted to do. 

Without context, an uninitiated reader could read this and be convinced that the Kuki-Zo were taking revenge for the arrests of the foreigners, which is, of course, a ridiculous proposition. Old videos of an American evangelist grifter, called Daniel Stephen Courney, handing over drones to Kuki-Zo communities are also being recirculated to fit the current news cycle. At least one right-wing account pulled up an older video of western combat volunteers meeting resistance forces along the Thai-Myanmar border as evidence of “US mercenaries training Rebel groups [sic] of Myanmar near India's Northeast border.”

As fresh reports of an attack against Assam Rifles personnel by the Myanmar-based Yung Aung faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) along the India-Myanmar border in Arunachal Pradesh’s Changlang district emerge, one can expect the usual suspects to weave similar conspiracies around it. The likely reasons and broader context behind the attack, which I have explained here, have little to do with Western ‘mercenaries’ seeking to deliver drones to Chin resistance forces further down south. 

But that would likely not stop the conspiracy hawkers. They have mastered the not-so-fine art of crunching time and space into one massive disinformation black hole.

As X influencers hungry for blue tick payouts and mainstream news producers chasing TRP ratings do their thing, the unsuspecting audience sleepwalks deeper into a collective fever dream about a great nation fighting back against a Biblical, Western-backed plot to split up India. Consequently, not only does the complex and rather tragic truth about Myanmar get pushed under the rug, but our own siege mentality gets from bad to worse. Instead of an informed public discourse, we end up with a mass psychosis. 

Angshuman Choudhury is a joint PhD candidate in Comparative Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and King's College London. He also authors Barbed Wires, a Substack focused on politics, identity, conflict, and human rights in South Asia and Southeast Asia.

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