 "From east to west: India’s geostrategic outreach covers extended neighbourhood")
It is a coincidence, yes, but almost overnight, India’s defence and diplomatic outreach have separately taken wings, all at the same time, to cover the extended neighbourhood, where the nation’s presence has mostly been confined to bilateral trade, diplomacy, and even security cooperation outside of larger regional concerns and interests.
In a quick turn of events, New Delhi’s reach and outreach have spread militarily in the west and diplomatically in the east. One involves a non-state actor in the west, and the other relates to a dominant state player in the east.
What makes it even more interesting and even more important is that India did not initiate either. In terms of defence and security, the Indian Navy has been out at sea on the Indian Ocean, all the way closer to the mouth of the Red Sea, to put down the pro-Palestinian Houthi group that has been targeting merchant shipping since the outbreak of violence and war in Gaza. The action is to the west of the Indian mainland.
In the east, India is not directly involved, yes. However, External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar was visiting three ASEAN member nations, namely Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines. In all three capitals, he had discussions with his counterparts and other senior officials. Yet, it was in the Filipino capital of Manila that he spoke of regional and geopolitical politics, extending India’s support for the Philippines to protect the nation’s sovereignty.
Short or Selective
Jaishankar did not name it, but the reference was to China, which lately has been back to its old game of irritating Filipino merchant vessels in the South China Sea. China claims the whole territorial waters as its own. On this issue, many Southeast Asian nations have disputes with China. Among them, the Philippines even has an international arbitration award in its favour, but to no avail.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsIt is anybody’s guess what Jaishankar meant by India’s support for the Philippines to protect its sovereignty, but he definitely did discuss the expansion of political, defence, and security cooperation between the two. He did not name China either in his public statements in Manila, but Beijing was quick to grasp what it meant. In Beijing, a Chinese spokesman promptly said that ‘third nations’ had no role to play in the matter.
In Manila, Jaishankar did not name China, but Beijing, as the guilty customer, was pricked enough to comment on his support for the Philippines’ sovereignty. It does not stop there. China is also short on memory, it would seem. In March 2018, just out of the blue, China issued a statement that it would defend the sovereignty of the Maldives in India’s immediate neighbourhood if any nation intervened with its sovereignty, etc. The reference, of course, was to India, though it was not named.
Critical Chokepoint
As Navy Chief Adm R Hari Kumar said on the completion of the first 100 days of ‘Operation Sankalp’, meaning ‘determination’, against the Houthi/Somali piracy, Indian mariners had carried out over 1,000 boardings on suspected vessels. These included actual rescue missions in which naval personnel, including marine commandos, MARCOS, secured captured Indian and foreign vessels and their crew from the hijackers. India also became one of the few nations to take some hijackers as prisoners.
As Adm Hari Kumar pointed out, since mid-December, as part of Phase 2 of Operation Sankalp, the Indian Navy has seen the deployment of over 5,000 personnel at sea, over 450 ship-days (with over 21 ships deployed), and 900 hours of flying by the maritime surveillance aircraft to address threats in the maritime domain.
“As of yesterday (Friday, March 22), we had 11 submarines operating simultaneously in the sea, with more than 35 ships and over five aircraft deployed in different parts of the Indian Ocean Region,” Adm Kumar said. “So we are making sure that our assets are deployed in an optimal manner to ensure that they cover the area of interest and give us the best information so that maritime domain awareness and the requisite degree of transparency are achieved.”
As part of the process, the Navy conducted a naval exercise in the Arabian Sea, which extends up to the Somali base of the Houthi rebels and pirates, to demonstrate operational readiness. Together, eight submarines were deployed for the first time in three decades. Among them, one Scorpene submarine sailed to the Andaman Nicobar Islands, overlooking the Malacca Strait, a critical chokepoint for China.
Some experts have argued that China has four times the number of submarines compared to India, and New Delhi has to increase its fleet strength. Be it as it may, India does not have an expansionist or militarist agenda to provoke third nations. India’s military strength is to secure the nation’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Nor does it seek to set up military bases across the world, which China wants as a wannabe superpower seeking parity with the US.
Strategic Autonomy
If all of it is the demonstrated Indian strength, Jaishankar’s support for the Philippines is only an extension and expression of New Delhi’s new-found self-confidence that he, as the minister concerned, has been demonstrating during his interactions with foreign leaders and at foreign venues. It had begun in 2022 with his telling the Europeans in the early months of the Ukraine War that for them, their problem was the world’s problem, but the world’s problem was not theirs.
EAM Jaishankar has not stopped it as a one-off affair. By defying the US friend and its West European allies on ‘Russian sanctions’ and continuing to import oil from Moscow, India demonstrated where one’s nose ends and the other’s begins. With this one master stroke—unlike China, which also defied the sanctions regime—India is a democracy, and on that limited count at least, the West considers the nation as ‘one of us’.
The message was clear. There was no more room for unilateralism in matters in which India is interested and involved, whether on sanctions or larger policy matters. More importantly, there was no question of New Delhi compromising the nation’s ‘strategic autonomy’.
The Indian sense of self-confidence has since extended to cover bilateral equations with individual nations like the US and international collectives like the UNHRC. For years now, New Delhi has drawn the line on the UNHRC and/or the US State Department, among other fora, commenting on the human rights situation in the country.
More recently, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) joined the issue with the US State Department over its comments and observations on the domestic legal and judicial processes, involving the arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and also the freezing of the bank accounts of the Congress Party. The message was clear. India does not require any lessons in democratic behaviour from others and has strong institutions that are capable of addressing such issues. That is saying a lot!
The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. The views expressed in his column are personal, and do not reflect those of Firstpost.
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