India is typically in the news for its economy or complex democratic politics. But more recently, it has been in the limelight for its military’s potential, needs and challenges including maritime defense strategies. The Indian Navy is emerging as a first responder for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and a preferred security partner through counterterrorism and anti-piracy operations in the Indian Ocean.
On the subcontinent, four years after violent clashes between Indian and Chinese troops, the Indian army maintains a strong presence along the 3,500 kilometer-long, largely undemarcated Himalayan border. India’s participation in multinational military exercises and its peacetime naval deployments also continue.
The foreign policy of the world’s largest democracy has long been a balancing act between competing interests, and its security posture may not be new. Yet the attention of Western countries to India’s military capacity is a more recent phenomenon.
New Delhi is a close partner in the United States-led Indo-Pacific strategy to counter China’s expansionism and is a key member of alliances like the Quad (with the U.S., Japan and Australia). At the same time, India is a founding member of BRICS with China and Russia, among other regimes adversarial to the West, as well as being one of nine members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Despite Moscow’s war on Ukraine, New Delhi retains its long-standing defense ties with Russia, which continues to be a significant supplier of military equipment to India.
With so many moving parts, India’s strategies are of growing interest to the world at large.
India’s aim: Preferred security partner and first responder in the Indian Ocean
At a time when the Western world is preoccupied with the crisis in the Middle East and the ongoing war in Ukraine, India – a non-security partner of the West – is undertaking a critical role in keeping the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean open. Since December 2023, the Indian Navy has deployed, in rotation, 21 warships, drone units and maritime surveillance aircraft to police the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden in the Western Indian Ocean. These Indian efforts parallel those of Operation Prosperity Guardian, the U.S.-led naval task force in the Red Sea.
India’s actions reflect a maritime doctrine and military strategy that has steadily evolved over the last two decades. While in 2004 the Indian Ocean region was viewed primarily from the lens of maritime trade, the maritime military strategy of 2007 showed concern over China’s military, especially naval capabilities and ingress into India’s backyard. The region is increasingly viewed as critical to India’s security and energy needs, not just commercial interests. The 2015 maritime security strategy reflected this evolution by referring to India’s role as a net security provider and first responder for the entire region – from the Strait of Hormuz to the Straits of Malacca and Sunda.
Roughly 80 percent of India’s trade and 90 percent of its energy resources come through the Indian Ocean. About 9 million Indian citizens across the Gulf countries send half of the annual remittances that contribute around 3 percent of India’s gross domestic product (GDP). The Indian Navy’s actions, going back to 2008 when India undertook anti-piracy actions, are first and foremost meant to secure the country’s commercial and strategic interests. But they have also bolstered India’s credentials as a preferred security partner to others.
As a post-colonial country that is a strong practitioner of strategic autonomy, India remains averse to signing any security agreements. Yet, there has been steady growth in military exercises with friendly countries, especially the U.S. and its allies in Asia and around the Pacific. Historically averse to sending its troops abroad, over the last two decades, the Indian Navy has bolstered security ties with countries in the Indian and Pacific oceans, including maritime capacity building, upgrading infrastructure and peacetime deployments.
India also views itself as the first responder for humanitarian and disaster relief in its immediate region. The Quad grouping, comprising India, the U.S., Australia and Japan, originated as a mini-lateral in response to the Asian earthquake and tsunami of 2004, bringing together countries from the four corners of the Indo-Pacific. The tsunami marked the start of the Indian Navy as a first responder, a role that was strengthened during the Covid-19 pandemic and was most recently witnessed during the landslides in Papua New Guinea in May 2024.
India’s Mackinder-Mahan dilemma
Located at the confluence of South, Southeast, Central and West Asia while being a massive peninsula with exposed shorelines, India has a geostrategic location with a unique set of considerations. The country’s strategists have long viewed the Indian Ocean region, from the Gulf of Aden to the Strait of Malacca, as India’s neighborhood. As one of the most significant naval forces in the Indian Ocean, it was natural that the Indian Navy has sought to expand its presence in its historical backyard. The navy’s mandate has evolved from protecting freedom of navigation and undersea communication lines to securing India’s geostrategic interests.
Facts & figures
World’s 10 largest armed forces (January 2024)
Yet, any ambition India may have to project power in its historical maritime sphere of influence continues to face a continental impediment. For a country with a 7,517 kilometer-long maritime coastline, the Indian state has historically focused its attention northward toward the continental landmass. This is in large part due to the legacy of partition with Pakistan and tensions in Kashmir, due to which the Indian security establishment has concentrated predominantly on internal and border-area security challenges.
Since all wars that modern India has fought since 1947 have been on land borders with Pakistan and China, the state’s focus has been to counter aggression, provocation and expansionism of these two countries. That also explains India’s close relationship with Russia. India has long viewed Russia – since the early days of the Cold War when Beijing annexed Tibet in 1950 and established a direct Chinese-Indian border – as its continental balancer against China. India’s worst nightmare would be a Moscow-Beijing entente akin to Sino-Soviet relations before 1966, as that would deprive New Delhi of Moscow’s support in any future conflict with Beijing.
However, instead of building capabilities on both fronts, this historical continental orientation has come at the expense of India building maritime defense capacity in a timely fashion, resulting in insufficient attention to the naval rise of China in the Indian Ocean.
Since the turn of the century, China has deepened its diplomatic, economic and security ties with all of India’s South Asian and Indian Ocean neighbors. As part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China has built dual-use ports across the region, including in South Asia – for example, in Hambantota (Sri Lanka) and Gwadar (Pakistan). All of India’s South Asian neighbors are indebted to China under the BRI and over 60 percent of China’s arms exports go to Pakistan, Myanmar and Bangladesh.
New Delhi’s response to vulnerabilities in the Indian Ocean
In an effort to strengthen its position, India has become involved in maritime capacity building and upgrading infrastructure, not just of its own island chains but of friendly Indian Ocean island nations as well. In the Western Indian Ocean, India has added a security dimension to its long-standing developmental relationship with island states including Seychelles, the Maldives and Mauritius. India’s partnerships with strategically located countries along the eastern and southern coasts of Africa and the Gulf have a strong defense and security dimension. For example, India is helping with the construction of an airstrip and jetty for the Indian Navy on Agalega Island in Mauritius.
Similarly, since 2018, India has had access to the strategically located port of Duqm on Oman’s southern coast. In the Eastern Indian Ocean, India has deepened military ties with several Southeast Asian nations with whom it has decades-old economic relations. These include Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines, all members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Together with India, they hold military exercises, training programs and defense trade, such as India delivering BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles to the Philippines.
The Strait of Malacca is critical for India as well as for China, with almost 40 percent of India’s trade passing through this narrow waterway. India has access to and is helping upgrade the strategically located Indonesian island of Sabang, less than 300 miles from the Malacca Straits. This ties in with India’s upgrading infrastructure in the Andaman and Nicobar and Lakshadweep island chains. Nevertheless, India is still playing catch-up with China in its own backyard, in the very ocean that bears its name.
Indian military resources and equipment
At the core of India’s foreign and security policy lies a dichotomy. India’s leaders believe India is an up-and-coming global power, but they remain reluctant to allocate the resources necessary for building up military capabilities to project power globally. A military needs materiel. To have global clout India needs to invest robustly in its military.
Although India ranks as one of the top five highest spenders on military purchases, and the country’s military is acquiring new fighter jets, warships and surveillance aircraft, New Delhi is far from sufficiently equipping its armed forces for the rising security challenges it faces. Since the 1990s, defense spending has hovered around 2 percent of GDP. Yet the bulk of this goes toward salaries and pensions, leaving only a small percentage for procurement of state-of-the-art equipment.
When comparing India to its neighbor, China, its critical security threat, there was only a marginal difference between the two countries’ economic output in 1990. Yet by 2012, China’s GDP was seven times that of India’s (in 2024, China’s is six times larger). China’s military budget has also doubled over the last decade to $471 billion, more than six times what India spends ($74 billion). Over the last five years, even as the size of India’s economy has expanded, as a percentage of annual governmental expenditure, defense spending has fallen from 17 to 13 percent. Moreover, 62 percent of the Indian military’s equipment is of Russian origin, a legacy of Cold War-era alignments and not suited to contemporary requirements.
India prides itself on being one of the few post-colonial states that avoided a military coup. However, one long-lasting legacy of this is the notion that defense is simply one element of foreign policy. To achieve its ambitions of being a global and not just a regional power, New Delhi needs to accept the uniformed military as more than a tactical executor of policy. Military leadership needs to be included in defense strategy planning and decision-making, including in debates on the purchase and acquisition of arms.
This is one reason why, unlike the U.S. or China, the Indian state has paid insufficient attention to upgrading military infrastructure, modernizing military equipment, the need for constant training and retraining of defense personnel and utilizing newer technologies. To ensure both the modernization of its military and at a minimum its sustainability given current fighting levels, India needs to spend 2.5-3 percent of its GDP on defense. Should the country also seek to continue playing the broader role of a preferred security partner and first responder, it needs to increase its military and security outlays even more.
Another legacy of India as a post-colonial state is the strong emphasis on empowering domestic military-industrial entities to help grow the country’s economy and ensure its autonomy. While admirable in theory, this has resulted in a military dependent on equipment manufactured by an inefficient defense sector with outdated technologies. Additionally, India’s defense-acquisition process is cumbersome, and planning is ad hoc, lacking a strategic view. The focus has long been on saving money, not enhancing security.
Scenarios
More likely: More improvisation in military procurement
Because of India’s post-colonial, land-focused legacy, the likely scenario is that it will continue with its existing reactive – not proactive – ad hoc policy in military procurement. Its defense units will be expected to protect the land and sea borders without many additional resources. This means that any reactions to provocations, such as pushback on the land border or an operation at sea, will be short-term in nature and overly dependent on personnel mobilization.
If, however, there is a repeat of 2020-style incursions by China along India’s land border, this could result in an increase in India’s defense purchases. Barring that, procurement is likely to remain as-needed and limited in focus.
Less likely: Strategic planning in defense outlays
A less likely scenario, but the only one in which India moves from being a regional to a global player, is one characterized by increased Chinese incursions on land and sea and Sino-Russian deepening security cooperation, forcing New Delhi’s hand. That would result in the Indian state finally having to become strategic in its defense acquisitions and planning. In this scenario, India increases the proportion of its defense spending relative to GDP and makes critical investments in its navy, air force and army.