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| Image: Flickr User - Official U.S. Navy Page |
By Pushan Das & Sylvia Mishra
India needs to shed its concerns about Chinese sensitivities and embrace its Indian Ocean partners.
The scope of the upcoming Indo-U.S. Malabar naval exercise has expanded to a trilateral that includes Japan. This will be the first multilateral Malabar exercise to be held in waters near India since 2007.
However, the exclusion of Australia from the Malabar exercise reflects New Delhi’s penchant for hedging against the prospect of Chinese opposition. New Delhi’s cautious approach to the exercise also reflects an institutional aversion to multilateral exercises geographically close to India. Given the rapidly expanding presence of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), can New Delhi afford to hold on to these hesitancies while simultaneously pursuing its quest to be the dominant security player in the region?
China’s growing naval profile in the Indian Ocean creates a new geopolitical reality that India needs to manage. To adjust its policies to the rapidly changing complexion of the Indian Ocean, New Delhi needs to proactively engage its maritime partners by holding trilateral and quadrilateral naval exercises in the Indian Ocean. Yet while India has not shied away from conducting bilateral exercises, it has a maintained a strong reluctance to hold multilateral exercises in the Indian Ocean owing to Chinese sensitivities. Given that China shows little apparent concern about India’s vulnerabilities in the Indian Ocean in light of the growing China-Pakistan nexus, India should shed its inhibitions and engage in institutionalized multilateral military exercises and engagements in the region.
Read the full story at The Diplomat