India’s Unrealized Maritime Dreams

As the strategic construct of the Indo-Pacific takes form, the world looks to India – the fourth largest economy in the region and, notionally at least, one of its most formidable military powers – to help uphold order in the maritime theater that construct supports. In many ways, this is not an unreasonable expectation. India’s stakes in the region have never been higher, whether due to commerce or the direct intrusion of powers like China into its immediate strategic space. But more fundamentally, modern history is yet to show us an example of a great multidimensional power that was also not a significant maritime player. As India’s self-described quest to become a leading power continues, will it also eventually become a force to reckon with in the seas?

Writing in a 2013 essay, British military historian Hew Strachan noted: “Geography provides strategy with underlying continuity, a point that is generally true […], but is especially important for the sea.” Indeed, India’s vantage point, at the geographic center of the Indian Ocean, has long led many to believe that Indian dominance over that maritime space is but a matter of time, and that its claim over that space a foregone conclusion. In 1993 a Chinese military officer for the first time articulated his country’s apprehensions about the latter: “We can no longer accept the Indian Ocean as an ocean only of the Indians.”

But India’s geography also significantly constrains its ability to project power in the seas, hobbled as the country is with unsettled land borders with both China and Pakistan. India’s continental compulsions thus include paying sustained attention to land warfare, having fought five land wars in its 72-year history as an independent state. This in turn has dictated service allocations within India’s defense budgets. At the same time, contemporary India’s political aspirations – as well as the ideation of its policy elite – has implied that New Delhi is no longer content to remain a mere regional power whose maritime engagements are strictly pragmatic in nature. 

In Strachan’s telling, geography shapes strategy. But strategy is also, as he notes in the same essay, a matter of making choices in the face of constraints. The following is a story of how the Indian Navy continues to balance ambition in face of compulsions – and the extent to which it has been successful in doing so. 

How India Looks at the Seas

In 1909, 110 years ago, George Nathaniel Curzon, who had retired from the viceroyship of British India four years before, delivered a lecture in Edinburgh outlining the importance of India for the British imperium. In his address to the Philosophical Institute, Curzon emphasized India’s geostrategic importance, noting its central position between continental Africa to its west and Australia and “the China Seas” to its east, outlining a picture reminiscent of contemporary India’s thinking around the Indo-Pacific. It is no surprise that contemporary Indian nationalists – who have always envisaged a robust geostrategic role for their country while remaining disdainful of India’s former colonial masters – found inspiration in Curzon’s vision. When the currently ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) first came to power in the late 1990s, a former foreign minister’s very public appreciation of Curzon’s strategic vision for India led prominent Indian strategists such as C. Raja Mohan to advocate for the establishment of a British Raj-style “India Center.” In this strategic picture, India – by virtue of its geography – would emerge a “royal piece on the chessboard of international politics,” as Curzon put it in his 1909 lecture.

Yet, Curzon’s Edinburgh address also touched upon a central conundrum in India’s defense strategy arising from geography. That conundrum remains unresolved today. India’s vast continental frontiers – much greater during the Raj, which included what became Pakistan and Bangladesh – implied that maritime Britain’s emphasis on sea power would have to be tempered by the empire’s continental compulsions, which now included managing India’s land borders. Almost immediately after the country’s independence – and the creation of an independent Pakistan with it – the security environment deteriorated. The two countries have fought four wars to date. Meanwhile, China’s annexation of Tibet in 1950 removed a major buffer between the two Asian states, confounding India’s continental defense problem further. China – then, as now – continues to disregard the British Raj-era McMahon Line that separates the Tibetan Autonomous Region and India as the formal border between the two countries. In 1962, India fought China over this disputed border, a war which ended in a rout for India.

These experiences have translated into an overemphasis on the Indian Army in the country’s military doctrines and strategic orientation at a cost to the navy. By way of an example, when India released its first public armed forces joint doctrine in 2017, the near-total lack of discussion of force projection – and cursory attention to naval power – struck many analysts as reflecting India’s continued obsession with land warfare in general, and Pakistan in particular. The 93-page document failed to mention India’s only conventional triservice Andaman and Nicobar Command (in the eponymous islands). 

The irony was that the joint doctrine was signed off on by then-Indian Navy chief, Admiral Sunil Lanba, in his role as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee – a position that is automatically allocated to the chief with the longest-serving experience. In fact, Lanba himself admitted to India’s contested border with China being a factor in determining whether New Delhi will enter naval coalitions in the Indo-Pacific at a May 2018 think tank event. Responding to a question about the possible militarization of the U.S.-Australia-Japan-India “Quad” grouping, he bluntly noted: “India is the only country in the Quad with a land border with China. In case of conflict, nobody will hold our hand.”

It is not simply a matter of disputed borders (with China, but also crucially with Pakistan) that has shaped how India thinks about naval power. In his 2013 essay, Strachan noted that the end of the Cold War in 1991 – with the implication that the Soviet Union ceased to be an existential threat almost overnight – removed the overtly militaristic elements and reverted Western maritime strategy back to a “traditional form.” He noted that since then, “[n]avies are used to secure trade, to exercise political influence without necessarily resorting to war, and to apply sea power to sustain order at sea, particularly in the control of piracy and terrorism.” 

In the case of India, the end of the Cold War also saw its economy opening up with major reform efforts initiated the very year the Soviet Union was officially dissolved (triggered in part due to a balance-of-payment crisis following the U.S. invasion of Iraq that year). The Indian Navy’s role in the five wars the country has fought has been peripheral in all but one. In 1971, Indian naval pressure on Pakistan contributed to a decisive victory which led to the creation of an independent Bangladesh. Opening up and integrating its economy into world trade – as well as rising incidents of terrorism in India since the 1990s – have left a pronounced imprint on the country’s maritime strategy, emphasizing the very elements Strachan noted in the context of Western navies.

In its latest iteration in 2015, India’s maritime strategy document delineated the navy’s  primary and secondary areas of responsibility principally according to the country’s commercial and energy interests. The former includes the entirety of the western Indian Ocean, Indian sea lines of communication (SLOCs), as well as critical Indian Ocean chokepoints. (It is important here to note that about 60 percent of India’s petroleum imports are from the Persian Gulf area alone.) While the document does refer to the threat posed by China (albeit without naming the country directly) as a source of traditional security challenges, the overall tenor of the document is benign. Interesting enough, the 2015 maritime strategy considers the South and East China Seas as well as the western Pacific as secondary areas of interest for the Indian Navy. When the document was released, the Indian Navy was yet to adopt the Indo-Pacific as a unified strategic theater. Whether a revised edition of that document – if and when it comes out – reflects New Delhi’s political enthusiasm for that notion remains to be seen.

Aiming Without Arming

India’s continental military orientation has most clearly manifested in its defense budgets over the last 20 years, where the navy’s share of the pie has consistently remained the smallest. In 1999, the navy’s share stood at 12.6 percent of the defense budget; 20 years later, it is at 14.3 percent (Figure 1).