Sea Change

The docking of the Chinese vessel Yuan Wang 5 at the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota from August 16 to August 22, after a five-day delay in its arrival, marked a delicate moment in India-Sri Lanka ties. Labelled as a “research vessel”, the ship has been suspected of tracking satellites and missiles. The likely subterfuge was hardly a surprise as China regularly uses fishing fleets as maritime militia to flex its muscles in territorial disputes with neighbours. Elsewhere, its spy ships roam far and wide as did a vessel reported by Australia in May near a base used for submarine activity. India expressed its unhappiness over Yuan Wang’s itinerary in public statements, but Colombo was in no position to resist China’s untimely insistence. China is yet to restructure the large debt owed by Sri Lanka and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that this could adversely impact efforts to bail out the island nation’s economy. Instead of being sensitive towards a friendly country’s interests, China unsubtly asserted its rights to a port it has taken over due to a loan default. Taking note of Colombo’s constraints, India let the moment pass, but not before it became apparent how a bankrupt and politically unstable neighbour could willy-nilly allow the use of China-developed infrastructure—ostensibly part of an economic partnership—for military purposes.

The incident brought to the fore the complexity of challenges India faces on its near and far seaboards, with conflict and competition never far from the surface even in times of peace. The un­resolved military standoff with China in Ladakh, now approaching its third winter, has sharpened awareness about an escalation that might not be limited to conventional land-based scenarios. The possibility of a naval dimension involving access to crucial sea lanes in the Indian Ocean provided a new, and more urgent, aspect to India’s military planning. It underlined the all-pervasive nature of the Chinese challenge across economic, political and military spheres. It was in the fitness of things that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s commissioning of India’s first indigenous aircraft carrier INS Vikrant on September 2 was seen as a significant milestone in India’s capacity-building to guard its turf in the Indian Ocean and project power far from the mainland. The new naval ensign, which pays homage to Maratha king Shivaji’s efforts to build a navy in the 17th century, recalls less-remembered seafaring traditions and illustrates India’s growing commercial, trade and defence interests in the Indo-Pacific.

While maritime defence has always been a concern given India’s vast coastline and threats ranging from conventional military rivalries to terrorism, events after the June 2020 Galwan clashes have led to a discussion on how national resources are to be committed. The commissioning of Vikrant serves to focus attention on a comprehensive ocean-based security policy that takes into account a vast spectrum of threats, feels Vice Admiral (retd) Shekhar Sinha, who points out that the Islamabad-Beijing alliance—often seen in context of India’s northern borders –has ramifications for the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) as well. “If India is to achieve its objective of becoming a leading economy, it must have a bold vision to protect its interests at sea and at distances far from the mainland,” Sinha tells Open.

The challenge remains just as relevant during peace time when the intrusion of hostile vessels needs to tracked while deal­ing with piracy, human trafficking and drugs, once described as non-conventional threats but which are now everyday security concerns. India’s naval programme has lagged in key areas, such as submarine-building, since the HDW defence scandal broke in the late 1980s. This has meant a serious gap in defence readi­ness with India’s current tender for construction of six advanced submarines receiving a tepid response so far. The government is pinning its hopes on the strong defence cooperation with France to resuscitate the submarine project. A similar situation prevailed with regard to field guns with procurement halted after the Bofors kickback scandal unseated the Rajiv Gandhi government around the same time as the HDW controversy. Sinha recalls that as Chief of Integrated Defence Staff, he had to overcome inertia and risk-averseness to get the defence establishment to develop a new sight for guns to replace the Bofors 155mm weapons system. The successful launch of Vikrant, with its strong validation of Indian expertise in critical areas like steel-making, control systems, flight and gun operations, provides an opportunity to draw a roadmap for India’s emergence as a blue water power.

“At Galwan, matters boiled down to wooden clubs wrapped with barbed wire. Yet, we also face a range of sophisticated threats that means that readiness in all domains is necessary,” Rear Ad­miral (retd) Sudarshan Shrikhande tells Open. In an essay outlin­ing the need for a national strategy keeping in mind that both India and China are active users of sea passages, he notes, “Vary­ing levels of sea control are necessary for protecting one’s own trade in international shipping lanes (ISLs), and for naval and joint operations involving power projection, strike warfare, and overall protection of the Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs).” Like some other naval experts, Shrikhande draws a distinction between “sea control” and “sea denial”, terms sometimes used in­terchangeably or in straitjacketed ways. Sea control is associated with area domination with a visible and strong presence while sea denial is seen as an adversary being prevented from the use of a space for strategic purposes. An example of sea denial is of the German submarine packs that attacked Allied shipping in the North Atlantic during World War II—the waters were of little use to the Germans in themselves but a military lifeline for their enemies. Sea denial can be seen as a subset of sea control and both constitute a form of deterrence. India needs to exercise control of the seas to different extents depending on circumstances and this makes the exercise a challenging and demanding one as it includes optimal use of forces like the coast guard, land-based weapons and strategic island bases. During World War II, the British developed a crucial naval and fighter base on Gan island in the Maldives that was a launchpad for surveillance and opera­tions against the Japanese in the Indian Ocean. The strategic value of the Lakshadweep and Minicoy as well as the Andaman and Nicobar islands remains unchanged with the People’s Libera­tion Army Navy (PLAN) regularly entering IOR waters. Indian forces need to be able to pose a threat, such as giving China food for thought whether it should escalate the Ladakh faceoff, and also boast real teeth in the case of a wider conflict. “PLA would not only use its deployed ships and submarines but its land-based aviation, missiles, intelligence/surveillance reconnaissance (ISR) capacity and even the islands it has created for itself in the SCS (South China Sea),” writes Shrikhande. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Oriana Mastro (a fellow at Stanford) and Derek Scissors (a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute) argue that despite headwinds, China’s economy is not likely to suffer a hard fall and by 2030 its military will have more naval ships than the US and an air force that can challenge American air superiority in Asia, besides a space arsenal. India must set its sights higher with an eye to the future in the IOR.

For a country with limited means, committing the large resources needed for naval defence requires getting the trade-offs right. There is a heated debate on the utility of air­craft carriers and battle groups, with some experts arguing that large flotillas are vulnerable on open seas and lack the stealth that made them lethal force multipliers in the past. Vice Admiral Sinha, who served as a naval aviator on carriers, strongly dis­agrees. He points out that it is incorrect to view a carrier battle group (CBG) as oriented to protect the main ship and says that the distance between vessels can be as much as 100 nautical miles. A CBG has the ability to impose control over an area as large as 200 and more nautical miles and can move as much as 600 nauti­cal miles in a day, making satellite tracking difficult, if not impos­sible. India sees itself as a security provider in its neighbourhood and if it hopes to convince countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh that it has the muscle to do so, aircraft carriers are an essential part of the naval ar­senal. Responding to the discussion over a third aircraft carrier, Sinha says, “There should be more than that. India needs six carriers as in future we may see threats from the south seas as China is developing bases as far away as South Amer­ica. India needs to back its resolve with tangible assets.” Proponents of carrier-based strategies say the large funds required are not needed all at once and this need not be an either-or choice as regards submarines. Commentators like Shrikhande, who served as head of naval intel­ligence and held various joint staff positions, feel that increasingly carriers and even fighter jets will face more advanced threats from missiles and even unmanned weap­ons. “If China is building carriers we must invest in ways to sink them,” he says. He argues that Chinese as­sistance to Pakistan in acquiring Yuan Class submarines, which can be nuclear-armed, are a significant conventional threat. The govern­ment’s decision on the next aircraft carrier is awaited with the ability of a CBG to project force and deter op­ponents being carefully weighed. It is, however, clear that emerging military situations demand innovative and ambitious thinking.

Despite its impressive military build-up, China faces some disadvantages in its surrounding seas where chains of islands, almost like bars to a cage, prevent unhindered access to the wa­ters of the Pacific. China has made progress in overcoming these hurdles through island-building and land grabs at the cost of its neighbours in East Asia, but its lines to the IOR remain stretched. India’s position at the centre of the region, with its peninsula jutting into the ocean, allows it faster and clearer access to deep waters, an advantage sought to be strengthened through bi­lateral arrangements and important initiatives like the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) that seek to counter China by providing alternatives for both de­velopment and security. It is highly unlikely that any partner will put boots on the ground in case of India-China hostilities but the interoper­ability being promoted in areas like disaster management can easily be used for military surveillance and intelligence gathering which will be of compelling value in a clash of arms. Partnerships with Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Mauritius, Maldives, Australia, South Korea and Japan are critical in protecting transoceanic supply lines as also constraining an expansionist China even though most agreements are not explicitly security pacts.

As early as 1951, eminent scholar and administrator KM Panikkar had reminded the newly indepen­dent nation of its ancient sea-going traditions in ‘An Essay on the Influ­ence of Sea Power on Indian Histo­ry’ in which he noted that from the 5th to the 10th centuries, the com­mand of the Malacca Straits was in the hands of the “great Indian naval power based on Sumatra known to history as the Sri Vijaya Empire”. In­dian influence in the eastern seas, which went back to pre-Christian times, continued till the mid-13th century when it gave way to the Arabs who in turn lost ground to European powers. The failure to envision the seas as a frontier cost Indian kingdoms their indepen­dence, Panikkar argued, pointing out that it was too late to make up lost ground although Shivaji did build a navy at a time when the Mughals and the Deccan sultan­ates remained oblivious to such a need. After Shivaji, Maratha admiral Kanhoji Angre kept colonial powers at bay but the tide turned against the Indians after his death. It was this legacy, and its vision of self-reliance and national pride, that Modi invoked on the deck of INS Vikrant.

ChinageopoliticsIndian NavyINS VikrantNarendra ModiNaval defence