How India’s navy changed tack

The Financial Times has published an article arguing that after decades of shunning alliances, New Delhi is rethinking how to project power on the high seas. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

India, a rising military power that proudly shuns alliances, last month deployed a frigate to the Arabian Sea and demonstrated just how much its view of the world is changing.

With little fanfare, and after decades of touting India’s “strategic autonomy”, New Delhi sent the INS Talwar on a mission to provide direct support to a US-led maritime coalition

The frigate’s main role was helping to intercept a drug-running dhow trafficking 940kg of methamphetamines, hashish and heroin in the Arabian Sea — working in a task force of the Bahrain-headquartered Combined Maritime Forces.

But far from being a routine drug bust, this marked a strategic sea change for a country that until now has only joined international military missions under the UN flag.

“India has quietly, formally, entered a coalition,” said one western official in New Delhi. “They haven’t been sounding the megaphone and we are not trying to overly publicise this and spook the herd, but it’s a significant moment.”

The operation came as India is aligning more closely with the US on military and economic matters, in large part because of shared concerns about China.

There are naturally still limits to co-operation. India declined to join Operation Prosperity Guardian, the US-led coalition formed last year to fend off attacks by Yemen-based Houthis in the Red Sea.

But since November it has been working with the 43-nation CMF, which polices the high seas along some of the world’s main shipping lanes in the western Indian Ocean and is under the command of the US Fifth Fleet.

India’s navy — acting independently — has also been increasing patrols in the high seas around the Red Sea in recent months, escorting ships at a time of war, and in a few cases rescuing crews from pirate attack. India has skin in this game: it supplies many of the sailors on the world’s merchant vessels, 17 of whom were temporarily taken captive last month near the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian troops.

“The fact that we are part of the CMF is not just a statement of India’s closeness to the US, but also a statement of our own interest,” said Indrani Bagchi of the Ananta Aspen Centre, a New Delhi think-tank. “Our interest is not only to put our flag out there, but to make our statement that we are a net security provider in this region.”

India’s diplomatic and military independence is a cornerstone of its foreign policy, but a tilt towards the west has been long in coming.

Jawaharlal Nehru was among the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. India’s scepticism of the west has a firm foundation from the cold war, when it was rankled by Washington’s arming of Pakistan — an ongoing irritant — and found the Soviet Union (more recently Russia) a more reliable friend.

But Indian officials and analysts say China is now India’s foremost strategic threat, not Pakistan. So while Modi government officials continue to disavow the word “alliance”, New Delhi does have burgeoning defence and technology partnerships with countries such as the US, France and Israel.

India has also been retooling its military and redeployed some of the troops it had along the Pakistan border to its long, disputed frontier with China after deadly clashes there in 2020.

While analysts say the northern border is the Indian military’s rightful focus, India is also taking steps to upgrade its navy and assert its presence at sea.

Its highest-profile effort in this area is membership in the so-called Quad, where security issues are co-ordinated with the US, Australia and Japan.

India and France have also carried out joint naval patrols from the French overseas territory Réunion. India and the Seychelles held joint military exercises in March.

 “Growing Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean is a canker for US presence and objectives, and a canker for everybody else, and a canker for India, given the lack of transparency in China’s motives and intentions,” said Sujan Chinoy of the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.

India is projecting soft power in the broader Indian Ocean basin, too — a task helped by the presence of diaspora populations across the region. IIT Madras, the southernmost of India’s network of elite technology universities, recently chose Zanzibar as the site of its first overseas campus.

But India’s overtures to its island neighbours have been snubbed in some cases. The Maldives, which alternates between pro-India and pro-China politicians in power, is in the process of replacing a small contingent of Indian troops there with civilian officials after Mohamed Muizzu won the presidency last year on an “India Out” platform. For India, this is likely to be a long game.