How India’s MAHASAGAR seeks to counter China’s BRI in Indian Ocean Region

Two visits to two southern neighbourhood nations in just over a month, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has rewritten India’s script for the future in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). In Mauritius in mid-March, the Prime Minister upgraded his SAGAR initiative from an earlier innings into MAHASAGAR.

This he followed with the first-ever defence MoU in Sri Lanka in early April, that too with the long-time India-baiter, the centre-left JVP and its President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, in power, that too with full control of the 225-member Parliament.

For the uninitiated, SAGAR in many Indian languages means ‘sea’ and MAHASAGAR, ‘ocean’. Modi’s 2015 abbreviation SAGAR stood for ‘Security and Growth for All in the Region’, aiming South Asia. After this, MAHASAGAR, ten years later in 2025, expands to read thus: ‘Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions’. While the spirit of the two terminologies is more or less the same, the noticeable change or upgrading relates to the terms ‘Region’ in the first and ‘Regions’ in the second.

More from Opinion

‘Madman diplomacy’: Trump didn’t break the system, he exposed it Iran is not fighting for liberalism: How feminism is misreading the moment

Both implied that India was taking the initiative and responsibility for shared growth and security. But in the ten years that had passed by, the Indian side was signalling preparedness to take greater responsibility, from the immediate South Asian region to a larger geopolitical space, or ‘regions’.

Opportunities, challenges

The reasons for such preparedness are not far to seek. First and foremost, the ground realities over the past decade showed that India’s formalisation of what it had always been doing in the region through the SAGAR initiative served the purpose to a greater degree and faster than may have been expected. India did not seek out those opportunities, but when the Covid pandemic crisis and the consequent economic doom hit the world hard in the face, India was possibly the only one that was ready to help out not only neighbours but also distant friends, with medical kits first and vaccines next.

When better-placed and purportedly better-equipped nations saw challenges in opportunities – though not is not the right phrase – to help out brother nations when the human crisis blew out of proportions, India alone saw opportunities in the challenges that the pandemic posed. No, India was not playing geopolitical games with the pandemic, as many others were wont to do, if only they had risen to the occasion.

Quick Reads

View All

When power knows no bounds: How Trump’s imperial ambition is upending rule-based global order

India is a ‘dharma democracy’ but this doesn’t make it any less democratic or liberal: Salvatore Babones

Instead, for India, it was a translated action of the centuries-old national ethos of ‘Vasudeva Kudumbam’ in Sanskrit and ‘Yaadum Oore, Yavarum Kelir’ in Tamil. Both mean that the ‘world is only a large family’. It also implied that everyone has to help everyone else. And here was India living by the very national ethos, in the real world, in real time and really so.

It’s all in the Indian grain. Remember the ‘Asian tsunami’ of the end of 2004. First and foremost, India did not expect it, and two, it had no recorded history of a tsunami strike, unlike some of the South Asian nations and other countries elsewhere. Yet, when the natural calamity occurred, India voluntarily offered assistance and rushed it, too, to IOR neighbours Sri Lanka and Maldives – all within hours.

In fact, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the heads of the two nations and volunteered assistance if they were ready to accept it. They accepted it, and that’s how it happened. Of course, India had also extended aid and assistance to Nepal and Myanmar, the latter earlier this year, when massive earthquakes hit those nations. Keeping historic adversity aside, not very long ago, New Delhi offered similar assistance to Pakistan when hit by a huge earthquake, but Islamabad did not have the stomach to accept it.

Not a wordplay

Apart from further boosting bilateral relations, both in terms of developmental aid and strategic cooperation, Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Mauritius as the chief guest at the National Day celebrations on March 12 will ever be remembered for his larger declaration.

Much thought seems to have gone into the re-christening of India’s ‘holistic’ approach to bilateral and, now, multilateral cooperation, which includes development and security together. Rather, it’s India’s response to China’s BRI, so to say. At launch, the BRI was claimed to be representing China’s global developmental cooperation intent.

However, without identifying BRI, China’s chequebook diplomacy on white elephant projects, especially in Third World nations that are driven to debt and economic collapse, has involved strategic forays that the latter couldn’t resist. Worse still, owing to a patently flawed design, the BRI failed to destroy national economies. It created massive assets that did not serve any great purpose and involved a huge Chinese credit line, with a relatively higher interest rate and stiff repayment schedules.

The famous example in the region is that of Sri Lanka’s Hambantota experience. The original deal obviously led to Sri Lanka surrendering a part of its territory for non-payment of the Chinese debt. The Hambantota lease purportedly runs (only) for 99 years, but it does not mean anything. What’s more, a decade and more of Chinese investments (?) created no jobs for the locals, no incomes for families and no revenues for the Sri Lankan state.

Familiarity, but more

But the outcome of such Chinese funding is first familiarity with the host nations and an understanding of their institutional weaknesses, the likes of which the Cold War-era adversaries had played upon. The intention seems to choke the host nations, likewise.

This has since been followed by more recent Indian Ocean forays of the so-called Chinese research vessels. Despite denials to the contrary, India, among the IOR nations in the immediate neighbourhood, sees the research ships serving twin purposes for China.

One, of course, is obvious. To help host nations to identify and locate deep-sea mineral beds and then use such information to exploit the host nations into signing a partnership agreement on joint exploitation of those minerals, supposedly for the common good. What has, however, turned out over the past years is China’s unjustifiable and insatiable appetite for such minerals and its intention to control the global market for them over the medium and long terms. It is the Chinese way of acquiring superpower status, not by sharing but by denying.

Nations like India see dual components, including a spy element. Needless to say, the BRI was at one time hailed as the largest global gathering of nations outside of the UN system – 149 members against the latter’s 193.

However, it is already floundering, as host governments are unable to stomach Beijing’s attempts to browbeat them into signing up or making space otherwise. In the immediate Indian Ocean Region, Maldives is another country where China’s aid-turned-strategic intent has caused avoidable disquiet internally.

Indo-Pacific, Quad

In a way, the same applies to the US-initiated ‘Indo-Pacific’ or the ‘Quad’. India is a founding member of both. Since then, the very term Indo-Pacific has taken multiple avatars at the hands of multiple nations. There is one by the European Union (EU); Germany was said to be having one of its own. Then there is the distant Canada, at least as far as the Indian Ocean part of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ goes. The nation too has joined the club of floating an idea of its own.

This one predates President Donald Trump declaring his intent to ‘merge’ Canada, Mexico, and Panama, apart from purchasing Greenland. Trump’s call or proposal might have got lost in his subsequent ‘tariff war’, but the nations named by him still are concerned. It cannot be otherwise.

The same applies to Quad, which thankfully does not see any competition, at least as of now. Yet, in the crucial area of military cooperation, India has already declared its intent not to participate for its own reasons and justification. India seems to have concluded, strategic cooperation, yes, but military cooperation, no. The US has since created AUKUS for this purpose.

Grow and share

Both the US as the sole superpower, whether failing or not, and China as the wannabe superpower have both since stirred the Indo-Pacific more than what the region and regional nations can take. This has conferred a greater responsibility on ‘middle powers’ like India to do what others should be doing but are not doing.

The ASEAN grouping in the extended neighbourhood is not up to it, nor is it cut out for the same. From elsewhere, the EU might or has the capacity to be there but lacks both focus and intention. Nothing explains the way the EU and member nations like Germany, France and earlier the UK were speaking about a multipolar world. At some point, nations like Australia that are sitting at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific Oceans also said such things, but their initiative and energy are tardy at best.

That way, only India, from the days of the unprecedented fiscal crisis of the early nineties, has risen from the dust to be where it is. When India talks, others have begun hearing/listening. Prime Minister Modi told Russian President Vladimir Putin that this is ‘not an era of war’ and has multiple messages. One, of course, is to Russia and also Ukraine, the other nation at war with the former – whoever commenced it, how and why, notwithstanding.

The other is about India’s peaceful intent to grow and share, rephrasing and reworking India’s historic intent at promoting non-alignment, and this time from a position of strength and not weakness. Though no specifics are available at present, indications are that India has given itself enough time. India has laid out its intent in clear terms – to share, grow and secure.

Of course, Indian strategic thinkers would have also known that historic adversaries like China and Pakistan are not going to jump at the idea, not certainly the former. Beijing’s intent and efforts since before the days of the BRI’s inception to box India in South Asia. Pakistan’s DNA is to oppose whatever India proposes, bilaterally, regionally or globally. Both nations are also working together against India and Indian initiatives in the region and outside – yet, they are not doing enough to win over the trust of host nations that they otherwise ‘pamper’ or what they believe to be pampered.

The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.