Securing Indias Maritime Neighbourhood: Challenges and Opportunities

This book is a compilation of papers presented at a day-long conference organised in Chennai, on March 28 2019 by the Chennai Centre for China Studies (C3S) in partnership with the National Maritime Foundation (NMF) and the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies, University of Madras, and supported by the Indian Navy and Indian Coast Guard on the theme, “Securing India's Maritime Neighbourhood: Challenges and Opportunities”. Contributors included a whole galaxy of luminaries from the serving and veteran echelons of the Indian Armed Forces, the diplomatic community, maritime industry, doyens of Indian academia, and distinguished personalities from the Fourth Estate. A number of facets of seminal importance to national security were addressed in the book. These included conceptual, geopolitical, economic, environmental and technological issues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: VIJ Books (India) Pty Ltd
• Release date: Aug 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9789389620641

Book preview

Keynote Address

VAdm Pradeep Chauhan, AVSM & Bar, VSM, IN (Retd.)

Over the next several decades, India will either succeed in positioning itself as a major global power or it will fail. Which one of these alternatives comes to pass is to very largely be a function of just how dextrously India is able to build and exercise its comprehensive maritime power, and, how astutely it is able to plan and execute its geopolitical game-moves within the maritime domain. Maritime power is the ability of a nation-state to use its maritime space (the seas) for its own purposes while dissuading or deterring or denying others the use of the seas in ways that are to its disadvantage. This ability manifests itself in three basic sets of cognitive and physical activities, namely, ‘political’, ‘economic’ and ‘military’ which, taken together, form the bulk of what is termed ‘geopolitics’.

While considering geopolitics, it is a major conceptual error to place geopolitics, geoeconomics and geostrategy and the same hierarchical level. The following schematic offers a cogent depiction of the correct typology of geopolitics.

Like other countries, India’s geopolitics, too, is a function of its pursuit of a set of ‘geoeconomic goals’ and a set of ‘non-geoeconomic goals’, all of which New Delhi seeks to attain. In both cases its efforts are either helped or hindered by the interpersonal relationships that exist between the Indian leadership and those of other nations with whom India interacts in competitive, collaborative or cooperative terms. It should be noted that the two instruments of foreign policy, namely, diplomacy and the military (as also logistic-support structures for the military such as overseas bases) are major components of the ‘assurance and insurance mechanisms’ depicted in the foregoing schematic.

It is very important to recognise that in geopolitics, the prefix ‘geo’ in ‘geo-politics’, ‘geo-economics’, ‘geo-strategy’, etc., refers to a country’s ‘strategic geography’, i.e., the core spatial assumptions underpinning its grand strategy. The question is raised, on what actually is this relatively-unfamiliar animal: ‘Strategic Geography’? How does it differ from ‘real Geography’? If one were to take a chart or map that depicts ‘real’ geography and then place upon it a set of coordinates defined by specific latitudes and longitudes, and, within the area that has been so bounded or enclosed, if one were to then give special focus — at the national-level — in terms of the planning and execution of one’s geopolitical strategies, this enclosed or bounded area would define one’s ‘strategic geography’. Obviously, the strategic geography of one country, say India for instance, can hardly be expected to be the same as that of, say, Maldives, or, for that matter, the USA. As such, every geopolitically defined ‘region’ is an artificial, manmade construct, whose defining-boundaries can be (and often are) different for different geopolitical players. This is as true of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ as it is of any other ‘region’. (For sheer convenience, if for no other reason, it is necessary to give a name to the one’s strategic geography — in the instant case, this is the ‘Indo-Pacific’). Thus, it is perfectly natural for different states to have different strategic boundaries and it is imprudent to unduly obsess over why the limits of one country’s conceptualisation of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ (its strategic geography) are not identical to that of another. Insofar as India is concerned, Prime Minister Modi has unequivocally described the Indo-Pacific as ranging from the shores of Africa to the shores of the Americas¹

In discussing maritime challenges in India’s ‘neighbourhood’, it is clearly necessary to provide some specificity to the term ‘maritime neighbourhood’ by identifying India’s ‘maritime neighbours’ which, taken collectively, would define India’s ‘maritime neighbourhood’ and whose ‘stability’ contributes to the maritime facets of India’s core national interest.

A common but grossly-erroneous approach is to attempt to transpose to the maritime realm, ‘continental’ thinking in terms of what constitutes ‘neighbours’. On the one hand, the provisions of the United Nation Law of the Seas, 1982, with the corresponding pieces of Indian domestic legislation ², make at least two types of Indian ‘maritime boundaries’ relevant to this discussion. These are the maritime boundaries between Indian and adjacent ‘Territorial Seas’, and, the maritime boundaries between Indian and adjacent ‘Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs)’.

In discussing boundaries, it is, of course, important to be clear about the terms ‘Delimitation’, ‘Demarcation’ and ‘Delineation’ that are associated with establishing and identifying boundaries — whether maritime ones or land-specific ones.³

India’s Immediate Maritime Neighbourhood

Thus, India’s Immediate Maritime Neighbourhood comprises countries with which India shares either a common Territorial Sea boundary or a common Exclusive Economic Zone boundary — whether or not the aforementioned steps of delimitation, demarcation and delineation have been completed in their entirety:

Countries (alphabetically arranged) with which India Shares a Common Territorial Sea Boundary

Countries (alphabetically arranged) with which India Shares a Common EEZ Boundary

India’s ‘Proximate Neighbourhood’

In addition to the foregoing there are a ‘proximate’ set of countries with whom India neither has a common ‘Territorial Sea’ border nor a common ‘Exclusive Economic Zone’ one, but whose politico-military stability nevertheless has an immediate and significant impact upon the preservation, pursuit, promotion, and protection of India’s core national interest. Within a maritime context, India’s ‘Proximate Neighbourhood’ would almost certainly include the following (alphabetically-arranged) listing:

India’s ‘Extended Maritime Neighbourhood’

India’s ‘Extended Maritime Neighbourhood’ would comprise those countries whose geographic position within the ‘Indo-Pacific’ oceanic expanse directly impacts Indian overseas trade and hence the country’s core national interest.

In addition to the three listings given above, this would include the countries of the Red Sea and East African littorals, as also the ten constituents of ASEAN, and the overall tabulation would now be as follows:

The criticality of Indonesia deserves special mention even though it needs little elaboration. This criticality stems from the geographic fact that Indonesia sits astride all the straits connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Moreover, if Indonesia (the home to the world’s largest Muslim population) and India (home to the third-largest Muslim population) can sing from the same sheet of music, any other state’s ability to play the Islamic card against India anywhere will be severely