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India, China join hands at
sea
By Rahul Bedi
NEW DELHI
- India and China plan to follow up on recent top-level
diplomatic efforts aimed at ending decades of hostility
through their first-ever joint naval exercises later
this year.
The announcement regarding the
three-day search and rescue maneuvers, made last week by
India's vice chief of naval staff, Vice Admiral John
Desilva, came within a week of Prime Minister Atal
Bihari Vajpayee's return from his six-day trip to China,
the first by an Indian premier in a decade.
Desilva said that the venue and date of the
exercise involving frontline warships from both sides
had not been fixed. He said that the Indian navy had
given China a proposal to hold anti-piracy exercises in
the Malacca Straits, similar to those conducted with
Indonesian and US warships in the region earlier.
But Chinese officials then said that their coast
guard vessels were given the task of conducting
anti-piracy operations, after which the two sides opted
for search-and-rescue exercises instead, Desilva added.
Meanwhile, a 50-member Chinese air force
delegation arrived for a week-long visit to New Delhi on
June 29 to plan joint air maneuvers - also for the first
time. Official sources said that these would include
Russian-built Sukhoi 27 fighters and India's advanced Su
30 MkI multi-role aircraft.
The joint exercises
are a sure sign that the two countries are now prepared
to put behind them the bitterness arising from a brief
but bloody border war in 1962 and decades of mutual
suspicion broken only last month through joint
declarations pledging to increase trade ties and sort
out territorial issues.
Indian and Chinese
warships have already been making port calls in each
other's countries as part of growing confidence-building
measures between the two sides. The Indian navy has long
expressed apprehensions about the Chinese navy's
incursions into the Indian Ocean region and hopes to
"blunt" its thrust into this area through engagement.
The navy is also concerned about Beijing's
"pincer movement" of extending its military influence in
Myanmar and on Pakistan's western seaboard, where it is
developing Gwadar port that provides access to the
Persian Gulf. China is also helping Myanmar modernize
its naval bases at Hainggyi, the Coco islands, Akyab, Za
Det Kyi, Mergui and Khaukphyu by building radar, refit
and refuel facilities that could support Chinese
submarine operations in the region.
The Chinese
are also believed to be establishing a signals
intelligence facility on the Coco islands, 30 nautical
miles from the Andaman islands, to monitor Indian
missile tests off the Orissa coast, an activity that has
proliferated after India's 1998 nuclear tests.
Consequently, the Indian navy, too, is expanding its
role in the Indian Ocean region by providing security
cover to the African Union summit in Mozambique in July
and by assisting Mauritius in protecting its exclusive
economic zone (EEZ ).
This would be the first
time that India formally deploys its navy to secure
another country's EEZ following an agreement signed on
July 3 between India's External Affairs Minister
Yashwant Sinha and his Mauritian counterpart Anil Kumar
Singh Gayan.
During a visit in May, Mozambique
President Joaquim Chissano requested Indian navy
protection for the July summit, where African heads of
state will attempt to adopt a common defense and
strategic road map for the continent.
While the
Indian navy was earlier successfully involved in UN
peacekeeping operations in Somalia in the mid-1990s and
has had close cooperation with Indian Ocean states like
Sri Lanka and Mauritius, it has never ventured so far
afield on such a sensitive mission.
By 2010, the
Indian navy sees itself emerging as a strategic force
centered around at least three aircraft carrier battle
groups, nuclear-powered submarines and strategic
bomber/maritime strike aircraft, to play a dominant role
in the Indian Ocean region.
"India is the
largest state and the biggest economy in the Indian
Ocean with vast maritime interests and therefore its
navy must complement its status," Admiral Singh said in
a recent interview to Britain's Jane's Defence Weekly.
This endeavor, he declared, had been "greatly
reinforced" by the government "finally acknowledging"
the navy's overall strategic role and military
importance.
The navy's three-fold increased
outlay of US$3.5 billion last year, representing an 18
percent increase in the annual defense budget, indicates
that its expansion is imminent. The Navy recently took
delivery of two of the three Russian-built Talwar class
stealth frigates (Project 1135.6 ) ordered six years
ago, while the third vessel is expected to join service
in late 2003, over a year behind schedule.
These
4,000-tonne warships armed with sophisticated missile
systems would be the navy's "sharpest sword", Singh
said. They would also constitute the task force centered
around Admiral Gorshkov, the 44,500-tonne Kiev Class
Soviet aircraft carrier the Indian navy is likely to
soon acquire for the price of its refit.
In the
financial year 2003-04 ending next March, the navy is
expected to finalize the Gorshkov's procurement - under
negotiation for almost eight years - and the
"interconnected" lease-purchase of two Russian Akula
class Type 971 nuclear-powered submarines for around $1
billion and four Tu-22 M strategic bomber/maritime
strike aircraft.
The all-party parliamentary
defense committee has urged the government to finalize
the carrier's purchase "immediately", as it would take
52 months after the contract is concluded with the
Servmarsh dockyard at Sverdovesk, northern Russia, to
resurrect the vessel, crippled by fire and abandoned for
more than a decade.
In April, the committee
warned the ministry that further delay in clinching the
Gorshkov deal might lead to an operational gap as the
INS Virat, the navy's sole aging carrier, is due for
decommissioning by 2007-08. The 32,000 to 35,000-tonne
"air-defense ship" being built at Cochin Shipyard Ltd,
south India, would also not be ready until 2010-11, the
committee declared.
Singh does not envisage the
Indian navy's force levels increasing beyond the current
140-150 vessels, due primarily to the "lost decade"
between 1985-95, when no orders for surface combatants
or submarines were placed at home or abroad.
"But the accent would now shift to a healthier
ratio between large and small ships and more powerful
additions to the fleet by 2015, with greater stress on
indigenous shipbuilding capability," he said. "We cannot
keep buying a navy. We have to build one," Singh added.
(Inter Press Service)
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