After strike against northeast militants, NSA Doval will visit Myanmar to ramp up war on rebels

National Security Advisor Ajit Doval will visit Myanmar soon to discuss further "joint action" against insurgents, it was disclosed on Wednesday, a day after the Indian Army carried out a surgical strike in that country.

Updated on: Jun 11, 2015, 09:44:27 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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National security adviser Ajit Doval will travel to Yangon this week to offer intelligence and hardware cooperation to the Thein Sein government in its fight against insurgent groups operating in Myanmar.

Weapons-of-the-Indian-army-personnel-who-were-killed-by-militants-lie-at-the-scene-of-an-attack-on-a-military-convoy-in-Manipur-s-Chandel-district-AFP-PHOTO

Doval is going to Myanmar at the invitation of Major General (Retd) Aung Min, minister in President Thein Sein’s office, top government sources told Hindustan Times. The government’s move to send Doval comes a day after India conducted a surgical strike on two camps of Naga and Manipuri militants in Myanmar, inflicting “significant casualties”, an operation Yangon on Wednesday insisted as having been confined to the Indian side of the border.

Top government officials told HT that Aung Min recently wrote to Doval seeking cooperation in fighting insurgents operating against India as well as Myanmar.

“The dates of NSA Doval’s visit will be finalised shortly. The NSA will not only offer intelligence support to the Yangon government in fighting insurgents but also raise concerns over anti-India insurgent groups based in Myanmar. As Myanmar army has limited capability to take on these groups, the NSA will carry satellite imagery as well as communication intercepts of anti-India insurgent camps to help the Myanmar government take action against the militants,” said a senior official. Foreign secretary S Jaishankar also raised Indian concerns over insurgent groups during his visit to Yangon last month.

That Myanmar is concerned over increased activity of anti-India groups is evident from the fact that they informed New Delhi about the hospitalisation of Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khaplang) chief SS Khaplang in an army hospital in Yangon in April. In fact, on June 7 a senior minister of the Myanmar government went to meet Khaplang to ask him about the involvement of his group in the June 4 ambush in Manipur. Khaplang, a Hemi Naga, is a Myanmar national and is undergoing treatment for kidney-related ailments.

Khaplang abrogated a longstanding ceasefire with India on March 27. After the abrogation, Khaplang was appointed chairman of the United National Liberation Front of Western South East Asia — a conglomerate of NSCN(K), United Liberation Front of Assam (Paresh Barua), Kamtapur Liberation Organization (KLO) and National Democratic Front of Bodoland (Songbijit faction). Intelligence reports indicate that Barua and Songbijit have been seen near the Taga camps across Arunachal Pradesh in Myanmar.

While reports indicate that two camps of NSCN (K) and a camp with Meitei militants from the Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA), Kangleipak Communist Party (KCP) and Kanglei Yawol Kanba Lup (KYKL) cadre camp were annihilated in the Indian Army strike on Tuesday morning, intelligence has identified Starson from Chandel district as the NSCN (K) commander behind the Chandel ambush. The insurgent group has about 2,000 fighters led by a Naga commander identified as Nikki Soim. Before the Chandel ambush, NSCN (K) rebels had hit Indian security forces in Kohima and Mon districts of Nagaland, apart from three other foiled attempts.

National security officials are looking at the recent upswing in militancy in the northeast as part of a larger plan to open a third front against India with the tacit support of Pakistani and Chinese intelligence agencies. Even though China vehemently denies having anything to do with insurgent groups in the northeast, it is common knowledge that Paresh Barua frequents Ruili in Yunan province and has been sighted as far as Kunming. Indian insurgent groups based in Myanmar mostly use Chinese-manufactured small arms.

Read:

The anatomy of army's surgical strike on militants in Myanmar

Militants kill 18 armymen in Manipur, PM Modi terms attack 'mindless'

Families bid adieu to soldiers killed in Manipur ambush

After the ambush: What needs to be done for peace in Manipur

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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