After the 1962 coup, General Ne Win's Revolutionary Council pursued the Burmese Way to Socialism, nationalising banks, trade and industry under the Enterprise Nationalisation Law of 1963-64. The measures fell hardest on Burma's Indian community, long dominant in commerce, moneylending and the professions, and on Chinese business families; property was seized without effective compensation, licences withdrawn and residence permits refused. The Indian government organised ships and aircraft to evacuate people from Rangoon, and more than 300,000 left in two years, most with only what they could carry. Those who remained were largely excluded from citizenship, a position formalised by the 1982 citizenship law which recognised only 'national races' resident before 1823. Anti-Chinese riots in Rangoon in June 1967, encouraged by official propaganda during a dispute with Beijing, killed dozens and prompted further departures. The episode is little remembered outside the communities affected, and is a direct antecedent of Myanmar's later statelessness regimes.
Ne Win's military government nationalised private enterprise, expelled non-citizens and drove out most of Burma's Indian and much of its Chinese population
Burma's last ethnic census was the British count of 1931, which recorded 1,017,825 Indians, about 7 per cent of the population. By the early 1960s the Indian community is generally estimated at roughly 700,000 after wartime flight, and the Chinese community at 300,000-400,000, giving a combined baseline of about a million. No post-1931 enumeration exists to check this.
There was no mass killing associated with the expulsion itself; the harm was dispossession and forced departure. Dozens were killed in the anti-Chinese riots of June 1967 in Rangoon and other towns, according to contemporary reporting.
Indian government evacuation records, contemporary press reporting and later scholarship document the confiscation of property and the withdrawal of residence and citizenship rights.
Myanmar, India