Despite a long history of commercial maritime activity, India has never been a real maritime power. Early modern India did not actively shun the sea the way China did during the late-Ming and Qing dynasties, but neither did it depend on the sea for its existence. This was largely because, as in dynastic China, agricultural abundance left India's early kingdoms with little need to move beyond the subcontinent's geographic core in search of resources. Therefore, while maritime trade historically shaped coastal Indian life, it was neither economically nor politically essential. Land-based conflict shaped the broad contours of most of Indian political history.
Today, faced with rising energy needs and mounting competition from other regional powers — most notably China — India is working to secure its influence in and beyond the Indian Ocean.
The sea entered Indian history in a new way after the British Empire took formal control of most of the subcontinent in 1858. India then became the economic engine of Britain's global empire, a status it held for nearly a century.
The effect of British colonization on India was multiform. Being a colony pulled India into a global trade system that kept it economically dependent on London as a source of both capital and demand for raw materials. This hampered the development of homegrown industry in colonial India. It also gave rise to the political ideal of self-sufficiency, which shaped India's understanding of its place within the post-World War II global economic framework and of its relationship with the predominant maritime power, the United States.
India's Modern Maritime Environment
Post-independence India's geopolitical position evolved within the context of a much larger struggle for influence between the Eurasia-based Soviet Union and a maritime United States. A distinct fear of invasion by a foreign navy marked Indian foreign policy in the early years of independence. This in part explains India's initial choice to form an alliance with the Soviet Union rather than the United States, which India's leaders feared would simply replace Britain as a sea-borne empire. While India's immediate conflicts were primarily land-based, the underlying dynamics governing these conflicts had their roots in the global competition between the geopolitical models of the Soviet Union and the United States.
The collapse of the Soviet Union radically transformed India's maritime environment. Economic growth and the growing global competition for resources supplanted Cold War alliances as the driver of geopolitics. India initially floundered in this new environment while China, by contrast, excelled. In 1991, New Delhi, trying to keep pace with growing Chinese economic influence in Southeast Asia, enacted the Look East policy, which was designed to strengthen India's political and economic ties with countries in the South China Sea region and beyond.
China's Challenge
With Look East, India sought to duplicate China's moves, especially after 1992, to build a global resource network that would allow it to maintain high levels of economic growth. First and foremost, India worked to enhance its energy connections to and political influence in South and East Asia — a move welcomed by countries, such as Vietnam and the Philippines, that were looking to build multiple counterbalances to China's growing naval presence in the region.
At the same time, Look East was designed to shift the arena of potential competition between China and India away from India's presumed sphere of influence — the Indian Ocean — and back toward China's, the South China Sea. By poking around China's neighborhood, where India's interests are ancillary rather than fundamental, New Delhi hoped to distract Beijing and in turn stall or complicate Chinese moves into the Indian Ocean. Keeping China occupied within its own more limited maritime sphere benefits India's position in its immediate security environment. It also conveniently coincides with Washington's efforts to prevent China from expanding beyond the East and South China seas, the two environments where the United States is most equipped to counter the Chinese navy.
India wants to shift the arena of competition because Chinese expansion into the Indian Ocean presents a direct threat to India's ability to control the Indian Ocean maritime sphere. This is especially true of moves that might give Chinese security forces easy access to the Indian coastline; moves that directly infringe on Indian energy investments in the Andaman and Arabian seas; and any move that might aid Pakistan. India can and perhaps must accept a degree of Chinese presence in the region, but any alignment that puts India at a significant disadvantage in China's regard poses a potential long-term existential threat. The threat is amplified so long as India needs to maintain or even accelerate current rates of economic growth, since India, like China, is not able to meet its ballooning domestic energy demands. India will increasingly rely on the sea for imports of raw materials and commodities and for exports of manufactured goods. Any compromise of existing shipping lanes would cripple the already shaky Indian economy.
India's Approach
To meet the challenge China presents in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, India over the last decade has expanded its own naval capabilities and its ties with other countries in the region, most notably Japan and Vietnam. Enhanced naval capabilities are essential if New Delhi hopes to build on its predominance in the Indian Ocean or even to project more broadly. However it is these regional relationships — as well as developing ties with the U.S. Navy — that form the bedrock of Indian maritime strategy. It may never be in India's interest to actively counter China, either in home waters or abroad; but it is in New Delhi's interest to maintain overlapping maritime security ties — both with regional powers such as Japan and with the United States.
While the Chinese navy remains larger and more capable than the Indian navy, New Delhi has over the last decade embarked on a serious modernization program. The Indians already have an advantage over the Chinese in naval aviation. India first operated an aircraft carrier in 1961 and has developed decades of institutional knowledge in the operation of carrier task forces. The Indian navy currently operates an aircraft carrier and plans to add another in the next few years.
India also operates a sizable surface fleet comprising more than 45 destroyers, frigates and corvettes. The Indians also operate a dozen diesel-electric submarines, and the recent acquisition of the nuclear-powered INS Chakra from Russia will further allow the Indians to familiarize themselves with nuclear propulsion as they move to deploy domestically built nuclear attack and ballistic missile submarines. While these developments may ultimately be geared toward countering China, they also reinforce India's military supremacy over Pakistan (India's primary traditional land-based challenge).
The Indians bolstered their ability to replenish their vessels in distant waters by commissioning two Italian-built fleet replenishment tankers in 2011. In addition, a sizable and growing fleet of landing craft and amphibious vessels will allow the Indians to better utilize their Marine Commando Force to stage amphibious operations in the Indian Ocean.
The current Indian fleet and its planned modernization and expansion efforts will significantly enhance India's options in the Indian Ocean. While India cannot hope to match the power of the Chinese navy, New Delhi will maintain a distinct advantage in the Indian Ocean for some time to come, particularly in waters that are within range of Indian air force bases on the subcontinent. The Indians have also sought to maintain a friendly and cordial relationship with the United States and with other nations in the region, such as Vietnam. For instance, the Indian navy has reportedly received limited berthing rights from Vietnam and in 2007 deployed a listening post in Madagascar. The Indians have also participated in numerous naval exercises with countries across the Indo-Pacific, including Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, the United States and even China.
New Delhi's greatest challenge in developing a genuine blue water navy and taking full control of security in the Indian Ocean may derive from India's own domestic situation. The country is marked by regional, ethnic and political divisions, and is experiencing faltering economic growth due in large part to insufficient infrastructure and to policy indecisiveness. These dynamics will significantly curtail New Delhi's ability to project economic and maritime power beyond its immediate sphere. Nonetheless, a number of variables will push India to further establish its maritime presence. These factors include India's growing need to import materials and energy; regional competition for offshore energy resources in Myanmar and elsewhere; and China's aggressive efforts at expansion. It remains to be seen whether New Delhi can exert enough control over the land-based political dynamics that have long shaped its strategic environment to allow it to more boldly project outward.
