By Ankit Panda
Operation Lal Dora, a 1983 Indian plan to invade Mauritius, sheds light on New Delhi’s thinking about the Indian Ocean.
Operation Lal Dora, a shelved 1983 plan by the Indian government to militarily intervene in the small Indian Ocean island state of Mauritius to prevent a coup, is a fascinating piece of Indian Ocean history and sheds light on how New Delhi thinks about the region. A 2013 paper authored by David Brewster and Ranjit Rai highlights a range of interesting developments in Indian military planning and strategic thinking around the operation, long seen as a perfunctory footnote in India’s Cold War history. Contrary to received wisdom about India’s inability to extricate itself from “non-aligned” thinking during the Cold War, Indira Gandhi’s government was quite ready to apply the levers of hard power against to protect Indian interests. Finally, the episode highlights the embarrassing degree to which the different branches of the Indian armed forces were stove-piped at the time; the Indian Army had no idea what the Navy was up in the planning phase of the operation and vice versa.
Mauritius, with a large Hindu community and geographic proximity to India, is a close partner for New Delhi. The country has long been seen from New Delhi as a “little India” in the Indian Ocean–when Narendra Modi, the current Indian prime minister, visited Port Louis in March as part of a broader Indian Ocean tour, he called it ”Chhota Bharat” (Little India), hearkening back to the term that was made popular by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the first Indian prime minister to officially visit Mauritius in 1970.
In the early 1980s, though, New Delhi sensed that its special relationship with Mauritius could be threatened by the emergence of a new government that could subvert the interests of the island’s Hindu population in favor of minorities. As Brewster and Rai note, there was concern that policies favored by Paul Berenger, a firebrand pro-Soviet leftist cabinet official in the government of Prime Minister Anerood Jugnauth could “favor the Creole and Muslim minorities and potential provoke a refugee exodus by Hindus.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat