How India ramps up Indian Ocean presence amid global power play

At a time when the Indian Ocean waters in the immediate neighbourhood are seemingly turning murkier, the Indian Navy has displayed new confidence in expanding outreach from the Mediterranean in the west to the South China Sea in the east. Coincidentally or otherwise, the timing too is interesting, as there is a lot of ‘external activity’ in India’s Indian Ocean Region neighbourhood.

Currently, India’s naval engagement has gone beyond periodic exercises with multiple nations, and more so, joint patrols with the Philippines in the South China Sea. In August, the two navies conducted the first joint patrol of the South China Sea.

Recently, India-developed INS Nistar participated in Singapore’s ‘Pacific Reach’ submarine escape-and-rescue exercise, along with 12 other countries. China and Japan were among the navies present, but non-regional players like the US were conspicuous by their absence. Newsweek claimed that ‘China’s rival flexes submarine capabilities in contested waters’, again referring to the South China Sea.

Even more recently, the Indian Navy’s indigenous stealth frigate INS Sahyadri made a port call at Kemaman in Malaysia as part of the Eastern Fleet Operational Deployment to the South China Sea and Indo-Pacific.

If it’s on the eastern flank, to the west, the Indian Navy conducted the first-ever joint exercise with Greece’s Hellenic Navy recently. It followed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Greek-controlled Cyprus, with their continuing politico-military adversity with Turkey, and days after Turkey’s involvement on the Pakistani side during Operation Sindoor.

As if coinciding with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s maiden India visit, the UK’s carrier strike group, led by HMS Prince of Wales , joined the Indian Navy’s ‘Konkan Exercise’ in the Western Indian Ocean. While it is a welcome development in the evolving geostrategic situation, the Indian strategic community should also be alive to the existence of the AUKUS tri-nation military alliance involving the US, the UK and Australia, as if an answer to India’s disinterest in militarising the four-nation Quad, which includes Japan but sans the UK.

Incidentally, Turkey has become a recent irritant in India’s neighbourhood, not only through President Erdogan’s constant references to Kashmir in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and elsewhere, too. Ankara has been supplying military drones to Pakistan (shot down during Operation Sindoor) and to the Maldives, along with a 42-year-old missile-capable warship , with an eye on a strategic role in the western Indian Ocean abutting India.

In the midst of all this has arrived updated news about the Indian Navy’s ‘Project 77’ for self-reliance in manufacturing nuclear-powered submarines. The Rs 40,000-crore project aimed at floating two such submarines by 2036-37. According to current information, each of these subs will be equipped with 40-50 numbers of 800 km long-range missiles . That’s saying a lot and is only a part of the Navy’s inventory that also at times includes another carrier group.

Fundamental Questions

If these constitute India’s ‘maritime signalling’ post-Sindoor, New Delhi has not been keeping quiet on the land front, either. On specifics, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has since sent out a stern warning to Pakistan over putting up military infrastructure on their side of Sir Creek. In larger terms, Indian Army chief, Gen Upendra Trivedi, has held out a threat to ‘erase Pakistan from the map’ without any restraint if Islamabad does not stop cross-border terrorism. Both speak of India’s defence preparedness, a possible reference to Rajnath Singh’s earlier declaration that Operation Sindoor had only been paused and was not over yet.

Be it as it may, there are multiple signals from the sea-front that New Delhi cannot ignore. Apart from China and now Turkey, which have been wooing Ocean neighbours like Sri Lanka and Maldives, an otherwise friendly US too seems to have injected a new-found urgency and impetus to do so.

Likewise, India, after having thwarted Pakistani attempts for a joint naval exercise with Sri Lanka off the sensitive Trincomalee port earlier this year, is now faced with a visiting Pakistani delegation stressing the need for playing a more active role with Colombo.

In the midst of all these, even as New Delhi has not stopped complaining about Chinese spy ships, passing for research vessels, finding a berth in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, a US Navy ship of the kind recently anchored near the Male port . Around the same time, the US also donated maritime security equipment to the Maldives.

This was reportedly preceded by Australia and Japan berthing naval research vessels in the Maldives. Australia’s Seismic Asia Pacific also recently presented a comprehensive hydrographic survey package to the Maldivian National Defence Force (MNDF).

On the one hand, Canberra, like the other two, is aware of India’s reservations about China (or any third country meddling in neighbourhood waters, whether in the name of seismic study or whatever). On the other hand, a US naval vessel anchored in Maldivian waters came not long after a French intelligence firm had reported a ‘concealed visit’ by a Chinese research vessel in the Bay of Bengal, after switching off the Automatic Identification System (AIS) most of the time.

Such overlapping incidents, if there are any, raise fundamental questions about India’s defence diplomacy. While New Delhi had loudly protested, alongside the US, when three Chinese spy ships visited these waters in as many years in a row, what’s India’s thinking when the visitor ship is non-Chinese and non-adversarial?

In the domestic political context of individual neighbours, it raises questions about their sovereign rights and strategic autonomy to make decisions independent of ‘selective, external interference’ (meaning India). It implies a lot when China, for instance, has been consistently and persistently vowing to safeguard Maldivian sovereignty (vis-à-vis India), and Maldives has not clarified its position even once.

New Chapter

In the midst of it all, India may have opened a new chapter in IOR relations when, during the recent visit of Mauritius Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam to India, the two sides signed MoUs on port development and hydrography and also the supply of helicopters for security and emergency use, among others. A section of the Indian strategic community was keen over the outcomes of the visit, especially after Mauritius’ recent deal with the one-time British coloniser, which signed a 99-year lease over the Diego Garcia Island for the trans-Atlantic US ally to continue with its military base for that many years.

It remains to be seen how Mauritius plans to utilise the substantially renegotiated lease amoun t of 101 million pound sterling, or $4.6 billion, a year, and what kind of supplies, if any, it might procure from the UK, whether in terms of commodities, defence equipment or services, including ocean hydrography and seabed mineral exploration and possible exploitation.

New Delhi will likewise be watching this week’s second, run-off round presidential poll in Seychelles, where Indian-origin incumbent Wavel Ramkalawan had reversed his predecessor-cum-contestant Patrick Hermine’s decision for joint development of Assumption Island as a strategic post for Seychelles in particular. In the first-round poll on 27 September, Hermine polled a marginally higher 48.8 per cent vote share against the incumbent’s 46.4.

It does not stop there for India. Madagascar, geographically located in Africa, became a strategic interest for New Delhi, especially after China developed a base in Djibouti, where the US and France, too, have such bases. Thus, along with Camaros, Mauritius, Seychelles and French Reunion, Madagascar also came under the care of the IOR Division after being created in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), with Sri Lanka and Maldives to begin with.

New Delhi cannot thus ignore the recent anti-government public protests (à la Bangladesh and Nepal?), following which President Andry Rajoelina dissolved the government and later named army chief Gen Ruphin Fortunat Zafisambo as prime minister. It is anybody’s guess if what otherwise amounts to military rule would be able to put down the mass protests, originally targeting water and power supply shortages, and spread to take up corruption and maladministration, as in the case of other ‘reformist protests’ elsewhere.

Strategic Ambitions

Independent of President Donald Trump’s over-assertive approach to trade and political relations with New Delhi in his second term, India has to be alive to American geo-strategic ambitions in and for the Indian Ocean, independent of India. In the post-Chagos, post-Diego Garcia deal era, the Indian strategic community will have to acknowledge the possibility of increased American involvement in the IOR neighbourhood that could end up side-lining India in the context of evolving US-Chinese contests for maritime and naval dominance across oceans. Over time, it could go beyond Taiwan and the South China Sea.

If it happened, even if over time, the US would have taken the evolving primary military adversity with China away from the Pacific—whose waters alone they two share in the conceptual Indo-Pacific construct—to the Indian Ocean, where neither of them belonged. This is how the US-created Nato kept the Cold War a main occupation of Europe, across the Atlantic.

Yes, now, if the US has Diego Garcia, China has Hambantota and Colombo Port City in Sri Lanka. In this background, New Delhi also needs to evaluate the outcomes of the recent Saudi-Pakistan defence pact for India and the anticipated return of Islamabad’s ‘Islamic bomb’ rhetoric after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s time. Likewise, Islamabad’s apportioning of Pakistani territory at Gwadar to China, an SEZ by Turkey in Karachi, and hurriedly shipping the first batch of rare earth elements under a $500-million fast-tracked deal with Trump’s US, post-Sindoor, all have strategic implications for India.

In context, Russia’s stout denial of supplying J-17 finger engines to Pakistan should come as a relief to New Delhi. Even here there are limitations that India needs to keep evaluating all the time. There are, for instance, still segments in Moscow that have not forgotten New Delhi signing the first-ever India-US defence deal of 2005, despite long-standing ties with Russia.

In the Indian Ocean context, any US approach wanting to calculatedly side-step India in IOR affairs, if only over time, became visible when Washington tried to sign the controversial Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Maldives in 2012-13, and a senior American official declared that they had taken India into confidence, when it had not been discussed at the appropriate level.

The recent Australia visit by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and New Delhi signing three defence cooperation agreements with Canberra, and the simultaneous India visit of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and the associated weapons deal, have to be considered in a larger context. Both nations form the AUKUS trio with the US, which is a military alliance, as different from the Quad, in which India too is a member but did not want it to be seen as a security alliance. Also of interest should be continuing rumours that the US wants a base on St Martin Island, Bangladesh, closer to India’s ‘traditional sphere of influence’ even after getting a longer lease over Diego Garcia, not very far away.

In comparison, the evolving India-US strategic partnership is all this and much more. But there are also visible irritants that keep showing up lately on the political and economic front. Wherever they are headed, any impending competition between the sole superpower in the US and the wannabe superpower in China can impact Indian interests, concerns and ambitions wantonly stuck in between.

India and Indians cannot rely on the US support and backing, as Washington’s conduct during and after Operation Sindoor has proved.

N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst & political commentator. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.