The Indian quest for maintaining a regionally dominating status and its projection in the broader Asian power balance has led New Delhi towards the oceanic politics of the surrounding waters. The security architectures of Indian defense policy have started paying attention to the strengthening of India’s position in the maritime domain, which has made the naval power a gravitational point of the contemporary defense planning of New Delhi. Leading Indian policy circles widely believe that the naval empowerment in the defense sector will allow New Delhi meet its strategic aspirations for dominating the regional politics of the South Asian region. The pursuit of securing a dominating role in the domestic politics of South Asia has already resulted in the nuclearization of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). The strategic competition of the IOR cannot be separated from the politics of the nuclearized South Asian region, where India and Pakistan are the two main contestants. In other words, the increasing role of Indian naval forces, equipped with nuclear capabilities, is attached to the New Delhi-Islamabad strategic competition and its changing attributes under the nuclear shadows. In addition to introducing various modern warfare technologies in the land and aerial domains of warfare, India’s increasing focus on the maritime environment reflects its vision for keeping its defense forces active and efficient with the support of modern warfare technologies. Improving its conventional warfare capabilities, the Indian Navy (IN) asked Indian defense planners to uphold the idea of Indian naval development by signing various strategic collaborations with different states across the globe. In this way, this article aims to provide a glimpse of increasing Indian naval collaboration with different nations while focusing exclusively on the impacts of Indian naval modernization on the South Asian regional security environment. It is an attempt to academically analyze the contemporary emphasis of New Delhi on empowering the role of IN in the surrounding waters, which would allow Indian policymakers rationalize the vision of an influential Indian maritime position in the IOR.
The regionally dominating strategic goals of New Delhi propelled the Indian security establishment to align the IN with many States, mainly the United States, France, the United Kingdom, the Russian Federation, Japan, Singapore, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Oman, Australia, Qatar, Indonesia, Bangladesh, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Under different political administrations, the Indian government always kept its bilateral naval collaborations on a high strategic priority of the state. The signing of the strategic maritime partnerships with the above-mentioned states has provided IN with potential platforms for improving its warfighting capabilities, parallel to multiplying the existing designs of its naval collaborations with new initiatives. The genesis of rapidly emerging Indian interstate naval cooperation in recent history can be traced in the post-Cold War phase of international politics when New Delhi altered the traditional patterns of its foreign relations. While aligning the fundamental framework of its foreign policy with the United States in post-Cold War world politics, the maritime alliance between Washington and New Delhi started in 1992 when the formal navies of both states agreed to conduct a naval exercise along the Malabar Coast. It was the start of the US-Indian Malabar Naval Exercise, which later became an essential dimension of a wider strategic partnership between both states.
This bilateral naval collaboration became a trilateral platform with the inclusion of Japan, and its annual conduct at different locations allowed various states to participate in it. Analogous to the Indo-US naval collaboration, New Delhi conducted several bilateral and trilateral naval exercises such as IBSAMAR with the navies of Brazil and South Africa, SITMEX with the navies of Singapore and Thailand, Varuna with the French navy, Indra with the Russian navy, SIMBEX with the Singapore navy, Konkan with the Royal navy, SLINEX with the Sri Lankan navy, AUSINDEX with the Australian navy, and JIMEX with the Japanese navy. Additionally, the IN arranged naval exercises with Oman under NASEEM-AL-BAHR, Qatar under ZA’IR-AL-BAHR, Saudi Arabia under Al-Mohed Al-Hindi, Indonesia under SAMUDRA SHAKTI, the United Arab Emirates under Zayed Talwar, and Bangladesh under BONGOSAGAR. Apart from these naval exercises, New Delhi has conducted several bilateral maritime activities with the formal naval forces of Egypt, Algeria, Philippines, Morocco, Myanmar, Italy, and the European Union Naval Force (EUNAVFOR). Furthermore, New Delhi’s security architectures are still looking to secure the support of more states in the maritime domain with the belief that the influential position of IN in the evolving politics of IOR will serve the larger Indian maritime interests in world politics.
In this way, a brief overview of India’s increasing reliance on the improvement of its naval capabilities is intended to determine the future of the South Asian complex regional security environment in which the maritime-specific strategic competition between New Delhi and Islamabad will be an undeniable reality and an irrefutable future. The Chinese arrival in South Asian regional politics and the signing of a mega economic corridor agreement between Beijing and Islamabad have provided more reasons for the naval modernization of IN. The leading strategic circles of India have translated the China-Pakistan economic collaboration and Islamabad’s aim for introducing Gwadar port as a potential hub for international trading activities as a major security threat to Indian regional standing in the territorial and maritime affairs of South Asia which is attached to New Delhi’s quest for acquiring an influential position in its domestic region under the nuclear shadow. It is pertinent to mention here that India has already acquired the nuclear triad capability in 2009 and has pushed the whole regional political order of nuclearized subcontinent towards oceanic politics. Launching its nuclear-capable submarine INS Arihant compelled Pakistan to take appropriate countermeasures to maintain regional politics strategically stable. Pakistan’s decision for supporting the concept of strategic stability in the nuclearized subcontinent and its objective of making the Gawadar port an effective platform for future trading have disturbed the Indian maritime strategic calculations.
Now, the growing reliance of New Delhi on the formulation of a network of international maritime collaboration under the bilateral and multilateral frameworks has increased Islamabad’s anxieties about the South Asian regional security environment. New Delhi’s growing strategic engagement with advanced naval capabilities has started inflicting a sense of insecurity in Pakistan’s mindset, which has convinced Islamabad to explore the support of the international community in the maritime domain. Islamabad’s search for taking defensive measures for the security of its economic interests attached to the construction of the trading port is a response to New Delhi’s increasing strategic engagements with different states. This scenario is intended to alter the strategic outlook of the South Asian region, where the future competition between the two neighboring nuclear powers will be in the oceanic waters. Thus, oceanic politics will become an essential dimension of India-Pakistan strategic competition, and it will determine the future trends of the subcontinent’s nuclear order, in which the nuclear-capable naval forces of both states will try to keep the regional strategic balance in their favor. In this way, the states that are interested in creating different joint ventures with India in the maritime domain are required to keep in mind the regional security environment of South Asia.
