In this Security Sunday, your nerds bring on guest Aman Thakker, CSIS fellow and author of the Indialogue newsletter, to discuss the nitty gritty of the Indian Navy and its role in the complex power dynamics of the Indo Pacific. They discuss how India’s rivalry with China has impacted Indian maritime policy, the role of India’s alliance with the Quad (the US, Australia, Japan), as well as the future of naval competition in the Indian Ocean.
HUNTER:
Hello and welcome to Geopolitics Rundown, where we break down the biggest foreign policy headlines and give our listeners an inside look at the broader social, political and security implications of this week’s top stories. We are your hosts, Romney, Ryan and Hunter, foreign policy nerds from the Elliott School of International Affairs, Coming to you from the nation’s capital in Washington, D.C.. Let’s get started.
RYAN:
Welcome back to our show and today’s rendition of Security Sunday. We talked a bit on our episode, Chaos in Kashmir about naval competition between India and China and other both working to encircle the other in the Indian Ocean region or IOR. We wanted to go deeper into the security implications of that on this Security Sunday and to help guide us, we’ve got our guests Aman Thakker, a fellow at CSIS and the author of the popular Indialogue newsletter.
RAMYA:
The Indian Ocean makes up one half of the Indo-Pacific. We’ve spent the past few episodes discussing how vital it is to modern geopolitics. The region surrounding the Indian Ocean is teeming with different cultures, religions and peoples. The world’s most crucial trade routes, especially for oil coming out of the Middle East, flow through the Indian Ocean. The ocean’s breadth gives many countries important paths to maritime trade. Many countries have aspirations of ruling those waters, India most of all. But no one stands atop the IOR as of now.
RYAN:
We recently talked in our previous episodes about the South China Sea and Australia and we wanted to show how the IOR relates to both of those subjects. The same goods that flow through the Indian Ocean pass through the Malacca Straits and head into the South China Sea. So the two are linked militarily and economically. If the Indian Ocean is bottlenecked, then the South China Sea suffers as well and vice versa. So China’s efforts to control the South China Sea could have long lasting ramifications on the functioning of the Indian Ocean and the countries that depend on it. India is clearly one of those countries, but so is Australia. They both have witnessed China’s island building and have a vested interest in protecting the Indian Ocean from Chinese incursion. And that’s what leads us to today’s discussion about the Indian Navy.
HUNTER:
It’s my pleasure to introduce today’s guest, Aman Thakker. Not only is he an old friend of mine from college, Aman is the J.B. Maurice C. Shapiro scholar at St. Anthony’s College at Oxford and an adjunct fellow with the Wadhwani chair on U.S. India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS in Washington, DC. He also runs the Indialogue newsletter, which I consider essential reading on developments in Indian policy. Aman, thanks for coming on the show today.
AMAN:
Thanks Hunter. Great to be here.
HUNTER:
So, um, on how does India’s Navy fit into the broader context of maritime competition in the Indo-Pacific?
AMAN:
That’s a great question. I think it’s helpful to start here with with a brief, you know, sort of scene setter on what the Indo-Pacific has gone through over the last couple of decades, really. I mean, the Indo-Pacific has seen a massive transformation, the 21st century. I mean, led by the rise of India and China, economically, militarily, geopolitically, plus the great power interest of the United States. It’s become a really sort of focal point in international relations. There’s economic components here. You know, two thirds of container traffic goes through the Indo-Pacific. And so there’s, you know, a lot of interest by various different countries in the Indo-Pacific. Indian interest, obviously, is to preserve the stability and peace on the seas. It sort of sees the Indian Ocean region in particular as being a strategic backyard. And so it also wants to maintain a favorable Indian position on the seas. And that’s something that’s been inherited in the Indian Navy from the time that the British Raj used to, you know, have dominance on the seas and used that to establish its empire. The strategic sort of considerations have been given down to the Indian state as well. And how it sees the Indian Ocean region. With Chinese interests, on the other hand, is really about preventing what it sees as an alliance or greater alignment between the United States and India and the concern of what the joint union of those two countries would mean in a conflict situation or in a time when they feel they want to take action against Chinese interests. So that would be disruption for trade, which, you know, a significant portion of Chinese trade comes through the Indian Ocean or the Indo-Pacific at large. And so they’re trying to preserve, you know, or prevent something like that from happening, as well as maintain their own position as they become a greater power and go from being a regional power to a superpower, a great power. So that’s sort of the context in which this greater competition is taking place. And the Indian Navy is trying to figure out how it can preserve its interests in the region.
HUNTER:
So China’s obviously expanded its naval capacity and its reach, especially in the South China Sea. What is India doing to compensate?
AMAN:
Right. So, I mean, obviously, India’s got some interests in the South China Sea, but it’s very clear right now that India’s primary theater of focus is going to be the Indian Ocean region. And so while it has a lot of concerns about what China is doing in the South China Sea, it hasn’t been shy from talking about. You know, when asked what what it feels as China’s violations of international law or the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, it’s said that during the arbitration ruling in 2016, it’s recently said that when the United States changed its stance and rule China’s holdings beyond anything allowed under the U.N. convention to be illegal. India has said that it’s, you know, very concerned about Chinese developments in the South China Sea, but it’s primarily looking to maintain its primacy as well as its asymmetrical advantages compared to China and the Indian Ocean region. So as China is building up its blue water capacities, India has not only recognized that needs to speak out against what to developments in the South China Sea is, but really its primary consideration is needing to protect its own backyard.
RAMYA:
So we talked in our episode, Chaos in Kashmir about China’s string of pearls, and their bases in the Indian Ocean. Do you think you could tell us more about India’s forward deployments in the region and how they compare to China’s?
AMAN:
Absolutely. So, you know, India, again, in this context, if you know what’s happening in the South China Sea and then China’s interests in the Indian Ocean, it really is again about making sure that it continues to maintain some, you know, some of its interests or all of its interest in the Indian Ocean to India’s really primarily blessed by geography in this region. I mean, the peninsular jut that you sort of see of the Indian subcontinent are jutting out into the Indian Ocean has been described by many strategists as being sort of unsinkable aircraft carrier. India sort of has this wonderful geography. But the issue is that when you consider India’s interests and what China’s interests are, it has always been bedeviled or dragged down by those considerations of what it wants to do in the continental peninsula. So that’s sort of its borders with China and in Pakistan as well as its maritime considerations. So there’s three things that, you know, I think as it continues to balance those two interests it’s been doing in Indian Ocean regions. I’ll talk about in three parts. The first is sort of Indian assets in the region in particular. So this is, you know, what India itself has been doing. This is in 2001, setting up the Andaman and Nicobar commands in the Andaman and Nicobar islands right on the mouth of the Straits of Malacca. More recently, its acquisitions of really strategic technologies from the United States. This is the P.A. Poseidon platform as well. It’s this desire to obtain Sea Guardian, which is the unmanned naval drones. It also was also set up recently a Indian fusion center for the Indian Ocean region. This is sort of a place, a fusion center for where maritime domain awareness and white shipping data can be collected and shared with partners. The second part of this is a major sort of exercises. So India has been engaged in exercises with a whole range of partners. Obviously, Malabar is the big one, the trilateral exercise with the United States and Japan. India runs its own major exercise called Milan, which happens off the coast, happens through the Andaman and Nicobar Command, and invited close to 16 to 22 countries from the Indian Ocean region. It participates in RIMPAC, which is a US led a massive naval naval exercise that happens in the rim of the Pacific with Australia and Japan. They’ve got bilateral naval exercises. And finally, what you’ve seen this week, a passage exercise with the U.S. Navy in the Bay of Bengal. All of these things, again, are force projection, are sort of sending a statement to China and continue to deepen interoperability between India’s navy and the navies of its key partners in the Indian Ocean region. And finally, you know, you can look to India’s partnerships in the Indian Ocean region. So India’s, you know, mirror China’s strategy and received its own sort of port access to ports in key strategic areas. So one is the Duqm port in Oman and the other is the Sabang port in Indonesia.
AMAN:
So, again, India’s reaching out to sort of key partners and making sure that it has its own strategic locations in the Indian Ocean, in faraway areas from its own peninsular up its deepening partnerships with a lot of small states in the region so Seychelles and Mauritius are sort of big ones where, you know, India has been helping out with capacity building and engagement there. And then in the multilateral sort of area of the Indian Ocean Regional Association, Isaura has become a big sort of focus for the for the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. And from the Navy side, the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium is another area with which India looks to partner up with a lot of the regional players. So here you can sort of understand, you know, how India has been engaging in its strategy, you know, in response to sort of what China has been doing, which is building up. Aircraft carriers undertaking patrols in the Indian Ocean region, getting access to obviously Hambantota port, but also its port of Djibouti.
AMAN:
India is trying to make sure it maintains that asymmetrical advantage and really protected strategic backyard, because the last thing strategically that India wants to see is a twin threat, as you’ve seen recently in the Himalayas. China taking advantage of, you know, the undefined border to put stress on India in the north. And that as well in the south, looking at naval sort of pressure on India. That’s sort of what India wants to avoid as long as it maintains its asymmetrical advantage in the Navy area and continues to try and find a solution to the border conflict. That’s sort of what India’s strategy is in the medium term.
HUNTER:
So you mentioned the Malabar exercise and recently India finally invited Australia to partake in the Malabar exercise after I mean, years and years. What else is India doing to cooperate with its allies in the Quad Dialogue specifically, especially the US.
AMAN:
Yeah. So I think if I’m if I’m right, I think it’s sort of officially pending. But I think everyone is sort of gearing up for Australia to take part in the Malabar exercises that will take place. I think they were supposed to take place this summer, but it’s going to be delayed because of the COVID 19 pandemic will take place later this year. But, yeah, I know the US India relationship has sort of been very, very deeply growing in the strategic and security side of things. And you’ve seen that, you know, from both the Obama-Singh, the Obama-Modi and now the Modi-Trump relationships and even going back to even Bush and Singh as well. So you’ve seen a greater defense trade going from roughly zero dollar defense traits of 18 billion in the last 20 years. With the U.S. you’ve seen development of exercises, comfort and interoperability at the naval level in particular, but also across the services. They launched a tri service exercise a couple of years ago. I think they took part in the first one in 2019. And then with the Quad in general, I think there’s been a elevation even before the most recent developments with China. So you’ve seen an elevation of the dialogue from sort of the working level to the ministerial level. That was an area with which India wasn’t really comfortable for a long time. But it’s now taking place at the ministerial level and there’s, you know, now discomfort with Australia. The joint summit that took place between Prime Minister Modi and Prime Minister Morrison, again, you know, was sort of a development there that should have highlighted this greater comfort with Australia, which was sort of seen as the weakest leg of the quad, the India Australia diad. So I think, you know, this is all still going to happen under the surface as India sort of engages with the quad. It’s going to take its own pace, particularly because with four countries, each with its own different conceptions of the Indo-Pacific and its conceptions of interest, you know, there are sort of a sharing and sort of aligning of those interests and getting greater comfort with each other. But I think from India’s interest in particular, I mean, India’s been burnt by engagement before with the Quad, right. I mean, Australia pulled out of the quad dramatically in 2007. And there’s been a question of what Australia’s level of commitment is. I think since 2007, Australia’s strategic considerations have changed and India should recognize that and recognize that the Australia of Kevin Rudd is no longer the Australia of today, as well as, you know, Indian considerations about the level of commitment that each of the members of the Quad has to the Indo-Pacific. That they’re the big focus really is on the US level of commitment to the Indopacific. It said all of the right things, but the investments in the Indo-Pacific area of responsibility continues to be lower than that of the Central Command or the Middle Eastern investments that the United States continues to make. And so those interests will those questions will continue to drive some of India’s hesitation. But I think under the surface, the constant evolution of the Quad, Quadrilateral Dialogue, and the greater comfort of these four countries share with each other. Building on the backs of years of cooperation at the trilateral and the bilateral level, we’ll see this take its own course and evolution in the future. And I think India, with its new sort of considerations, views of China, is going to go to see its own calculations with the Quad change.
RAMYA:
OK, so I if I’m not wrong, you did mention something about India taking taking it at its own pace, right. So and you wrote an article for CSI as titled A Rising India in the Indian Ocean needs a strong Navy. In it, you stated that India’s naval ambitions aren’t backed up by spending. So how is funding or lack thereof holding the Navy back?
AMAN:
Sure. So this has been something that, you know, has has been a factor for a long time, which is India’s interests in naval Interests in the Indian Ocean region continue to be very broad, but its investments continue to be small. I think I mentioned in the article that India’s investments in the Navy continue to be around 15 percent of the budget. So India has always had this sort of Cinderella relationship compared to the other two services. Whereas I think if you look at comparatively the other U.S., Australia and Japan in the Quad, just for an example, they spend close to 25 to 30 percent. And so fundamentally, you know, it is about India has got a lot of interests that it wants to pursue in this region. You know, if you look at what they’re trying to do, it ranges all the way from, you know, maintaining sort of peace on the sea to deterrence against other players, to territorial sovereignty, to, you know, safeguarding India’s national interests and mercantile trade and, you know, ensuring that if there is a ever a war like scenario that India would have a decisive victory in the region. All of those interests mean that India needs to put its resources to those interests. And if it can’t afford to put those resources there, then needs to have a reconsideration as to what its interests really are. And that was really the idea behind the pieces here. And there is a mismatch between resources and interest in either the resources need to be revised or the interests.
RYAN:
Understood. And I heard a lot of “woulds” and “shoulds” in there. So if you potentially had the power to do so, what policy recommendations or changes would you make for the Indian Navy?
AMAN:
Sure. I can talk about two things here. I mean, one goes to sort of the broader strategic or even grand strategic considerations that India should have between coordination among all of its branches of its militaries. And like I said, this resources versus interests example. So I’ll just give you an example here very quickly from what’s been happening over the last few months. India’s thinking about developing, well India has one aircraft carrier right now. A second one has been facing massive delays. And I think because I’ve covered 19 will now be hopefully launching in 2023. And then a third aircraft carrier was going to be developed. And India’s newly created chief of defense staff position, the news that was the first occupant of that was a former chief of Army staff, Gen. Bipin Rawat, just said in a interview in May, that, you know, this third aircraft carrier isn’t what’s needed. If you look at, you know, aircraft carriers, they’re too expensive. They’re not, you know, strategic in nature that in a war you need too many support vehicles and it’s, you know, easily sinkable. It’s vulnerable. What we actually need are subs. And you saw the Navy actually come out and say, no, no, no, this is not, you know, how we think about aircraft carriers and we actually really do need this third aircraft carrier. And here again, you’re seeing a lot of the considerations there about budgetary restrictions, how you’re going to divide up between your continental and your maritime issues, to really aligning these sort of greater coordination between these three branches of the military, between the political ambitions and the military needs. I think that’s something that India continues to do. And so, you know, the one thing that I would say is India needs to sort of find a way to align its or grand strategic ambitions as of right now. A lot of its strategies are living in silos. But if we can find a way to deepen coordination between the branches of the militaries and then the military’s interests, vis a vis other sort of political interest, that’s sort of the one major thing. The second recommendation I have is India’s development of the Andaman and Nicobar Command. This continues to be a sort of under leveraged or underdeveloped sort of area of India’s naval operations. Foreign port calls and visits aren’t allowed. It continues to be a very sort of logistical facility rather than its potential, which is to be a forward base. So if India can sort of work to make sure that this continues to be an area that, you know, it can lead India’s engagement with Southeast Asia, with Australia and the Cocos Islands, with France and the Reunion Island or with the U.S. and Diego Garcia. Andaman and Nicobar Islands has a really strong potential to become a key sort of anchor in India’s maritime strategy or a maritime doctrine. And so further, the development of that, I think is going to be another recommendation that I can put forward.
RYAN:
Gotcha. And India obviously has to contend with China’s growing submarine fleet that’s soon expected to be the largest submarine fleet in the world. Do they have any sort of specific remedies for dealing with that? Because from what I know, India isn’t really developing submarines at the same level that China is.
AMAN:
Yeah, I mean, I think the national maritime strategy that India put out in 2015, which is one of the more strategic documents put out by the services, I think speaks a lot to that about India’s need to develop antisubmarine warfare capabilities and some of the exercises that it wants to do and the technologies that it wants to acquire in order to be able to do that, as well as, you know, India’s desire to have greater maritime domain awareness, understanding when these subs and how these subs are patrolling in the Indian Ocean, having that data and making sure that, you know, it understands that sort of awareness of its maritime domain area and the Indian Ocean. That’s something that India is looking to invest a lot. But again, like I said, you know, the maritime strategy is written in a silo. The Navy writes it by itself without much coordination with the other services. And if I can be so bold, the national maritime strategy is really sort of an aspirational document than, you know, a really doctrinal document in the sense that, again, it sort of talks about what the Navy would like to do and sort of what its interests are. But sometimes the resources just don’t get there and allow the Navy to do what it wants to do. And so we need to be cognizant of the fact that one of these strategy documents that when they talk about what they want to do specifically with antisubmarine warfare or even other interests, there is that mismatch and that continues to affect India’s ability to achieve its interests in the region.
HUNTER:
Now, before we wrap things up, I wanted to transition to some of the other stories that you’ve been covering. Your newsletter, IndiaLogue, which I quite liked, by the way, has been talking about recent developments in the India China border skirmish. We covered this when the story broke in June. But what’s the latest in a nutshell?
AMAN:
So the latest is that the process looks like it is starting to stall. Both India and China are continuing to meet. So they had a meeting of the foreign ministry earlier this week. And another meeting of them at the military level at the corps commander level is likely to take place next week. But it still looks like the disengagement process is stalling. There was disengagement on some of the areas of friction, particularly the Galwan Valley and Hot Springs. But two areas, I think continue to be of key focus. The Pangong Lake, which China made incursions. If you look at sort of some of the Indian reporting, it’s been up to eight kilometers into Indian territory. And then in Depsang, in Depsang Plains, which has been sort of the newest front of tensions that has emerged between India and China. And that’s very, very close to strategic positions along the LAC, sort of the un-demarcated border between India and China. So the Daulat Beg Oldi airfield is very, very close, as well as the road that India’s developed, the DBO Road, or DSDBO Road. China’s incursions in Depsang come very, very close to India’s strategic positions there. India’s interests continue to be the same. It wants to restore the status quo before the standoff began to around April 2020. But, you know, India’s options are quickly sort of becoming, you know, if this disengagement process runs out, whether it’s going to have to be able to push Chinese troops off by force or do a quid pro quo or accept the change in the status quo. The options don’t look very good if this process continues to stall and does not work.
RAMYA:
So in our podcast, we like to do a takeaway section at the end of each episode. So what would you say everyone should remember if they can’t remember anything else?
AMAN:
Well, I think, you know, there I would say two things. The first is always sort of keep in mind your are your resource constraints and your interests here. As a country, you’re going to have unlimited sort of interests in the world and especially, you know, when you come down to naval or army or Air Force or military sort of levels, there are unlimited interests that you want to sort of have and you have limited resources. And so how and where you prioritize what those considerations are and whether you can do that well, especially when times of crisis hit, that’s something that, you know, as a student of international relations and a student of seeing how countries engage and develop, that’s something that I look to in particular. And the second thing that I always tell people is always go to the primary source. I hope that you sort of seeing me mention the direct strategy documents or, you know, sort of direct primary source mentions by people within government or government publications. It always helps, I think, to go to the source. I went to the reportage and so engagement with primary source documents. If you’re so lucky and you’re in graduate school or an AP HD going to the archives, all of that, I think gives you a much richer perspective into what a state does, than looking at some of the reportage or some of someone else’s analysis of what’s happening. So I think those would be my two takeaways for for everyone listening.
HUNTER:
That’s it for our episode today. Special thanks to a man for coming on the show. If you liked to this episode, don’t forget to rate and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify or however you’re listening. For transcripts of our episodes and to contact our team, visit our website http://www.geopoliticsrundown.com. Stay tuned for our next episode on Japan in the Indo-Pacific. As always, thank you for listening. This has been Geopolitics Rundown.