‘Separated’: Why is India sealing its Myanmar border, dividing families?

Families, trade and life in this pocket of northeast India knew no national borders. Until now, with a pre-election decision threatening to rupture everything they’ve known.

Zokhawthar, Mizoram, India – For 61-year-old Vanlalchaka, the past few weeks have been filled with anxiety.

In the northeastern Indian border village of Zokhawthar, perched on a mountainside amid green hills, Vanlalchaka’s farm has been a safe haven for refugees fleeing the civil war in neighbouring Myanmar since 2021. Five refugees live there currently and Vanlalchaka has been leading efforts in the village, which sits on the banks of the Tiau River, to help others coming from across the border.

Like his ancestors, he said, he has never acknowledged the political borders that divide his ethnic tribe – known as the Chin in Myanmar, Mizo in India’s Mizoram state and Kuki in the Indian state of Manipur.

Vanlalchaka’s wife, BM Thangi, is from Myanmar’s Chin state. Vanlalchaka goes by a single name as is the custom in his community.

“The people of Zokhawthar and Khawmawi [the adjacent border village in Chin state] operate as a single village,” said Vanlalchaka, sitting with Thangi, 59. “When someone dies, we join the funeral process; when someone falls ill, we cross the border to visit patients and stay overnight if needed.”

That might not be possible any more.

As Mizoram prepares to vote on April 19 in the first of seven phases of India’s national election, its border communities are grappling with a deep rupture in their way of life.

For centuries, several Indigenous communities in India’s northeastern states of Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh have shared the same ethnicity and lived on both sides of the present 1,600km (1,000-mile)