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INDIA-US
SECURITY
All at sea in the Indian
Ocean
By Ramtanu Maitra
Given the crucial importance of the Bay of
Bengal for the security of almost half of Asia, and the
Arabian Sea for its importance of oil supplies to
enhance global prosperity, India's security concerns
will certainly remain pinned on the Indian Ocean as it
grows more powerful in the years ahead. - Excerpt
from part one of this two-part report: A partnership of unequals
The third largest ocean in the
world with an area of 73,500,000 square kilometers (or
28,350,500 square miles), the Indian Ocean's greatest
depth, in the Java Trench south of Java Island, is
25,344 feet. The Indian Ocean forms two large
indentations in the southern coast of Asia around the
Indian sub-continent - the Arabian Sea on India's west
and the Bay of Bengal on the east, both of critical
strategic and geopolitical importance. The Indian Ocean
supports the movement of jihadi terrorism from
Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Asia-Pacific region, and
it carries global oil supplies to the rest of Asia. In
fact, India sits astride two "choke points" for global
oil supplies - the Straits of Hormuz to its west, and
the Straits of Malacca to its east.
As former
Indian foreign secretary G Parthasarathy points out in a
recent article in the Indian Express, the Asia-Pacific
region in India's neighborhood is becoming a major
consumer of the world's oil resources, with China
becoming a growing importer of oil and natural gas. By
2020, oil consumption of this region will reach 38
million barrels per day, with 80 percent of that oil
coming from the Persian Gulf through the Indian Ocean.
While India now imports around 80 million tones of oil
annually, the annual demand for imported oil will grow
to an estimated 150 million tones in 2020. Today, some
50 oil tankers traverse Indian shores daily; by 2020,
the number is expected to be between 150 and 200.
It is also evident that India will have to share
the Indian Ocean with other Asian nations, China and
Japan in particular, to provide security to south, east
and Southeast Asia. Parthasarathy points out that
shortly after China became a net importer of oil in
1993, Zhao Nanqi, the director of the general staff
logistics department in the Chinese navy, proclaimed:
"We can no longer accept the Indian Ocean as an ocean
only of the Indians."
Chinese interest in naval
facilities in Myanmar is widely acknowledged. As India
and China, and perhaps Japan, develop a better
understanding of what is needed to provide security to
Asia, the Bay of Bengal will become a particular focus
of attention. The Bay of Bengal provides access to the
Indian sub-continent, Southeast Asia and the land-based
road through Myanmar to China. India has already
established and consolidated its naval bases in the
Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In fact, the Nicobar group
of islands is closer to Indonesia than to Indian shores.
India's maritime boundaries with Myanmar,
Thailand and Indonesia have already been demarcated east
of the Andaman and Nicobar chain. The additional
continental shelf area awaiting delimitation would be
shared between India and Sri Lanka. According to noted
Indian strategist B Verghese, the deadline for
submission of claims on the various mineral resources
that lie on the seabed has been extended to May 2009,
but India has an incentive to act by 2004 so that the
matter can be settled before India's term on the United
Nations Convention of Laws of the Sea Continental Shelf
committee ends in May 2007. An Indian submission before
the end of 2004, in consultation with Sri Lanka, could
result in an award by 2007. The delimitation principles
applied in the Bay of Bengal would also establish a
precedent for the Arabian Sea, where the hydrocarbon,
fishery and seabed mineral potential of the extended
zone calls for early exploration and exploitation.
Further, as Israel has expressed concerns in the
face of Pakistani-led nuclear proliferation into its
neighborhood and mooted a desire to hide its nuclear
arsenal from the prying eyes of the Americans, it is
only a question of time before that nation approaches
India with a proposal to deploy nuclear submarines in
the Indian Ocean. India has welcomed Russian interest in
projecting its naval power in the Indian Ocean and held
naval exercises with the Russians near Indian shores
recently. But as far as the Indian Ocean is concerned,
that relationship will not progress much further,
although Russia will otherwise remain a major provider
of hardware and training to the Indian military.
Intervention or long-term security?
These developments beg the question: How could the
Indians, pursuing a security doctrine based on securing
the Indian Ocean, accommodate the United States? Some
scholars, such as Yossef Bodansky, director of the US
Congressional task force on terrorism and unconventional
warfare, maintain that the US and India should work
together to keep the Straits of Malacca free for
maritime traffic. Bodansky's line of thinking, not fully
acceptable to New Delhi but seemingly logical to the
diehard anti-China, pro-American lobbies inside India,
spells out in no uncertain terms that the Chinese navy
should be kept bottled up east of Malacca. If the mighty
Chinese navy is allowed to come west of the Malacca
Straits, it could not only threaten the world's oil
supply, but India as well, argues Bodansky. But as
India's recent moves vis-a-vis China suggest, it is
unlikely that a security doctrine based on fear of the
Chinese navy will get many takers in New Delhi today.
More broadly, what is then the US perception of
providing security in the region? In the MacDonald
report, one American colonel is quoted: "The US navy
wants a relatively neutral territory on the opposite
side of the world that can provide ports and support for
operations in the Middle East. India not only has a good
infrastructure, the Indian navy has proved that it can
fix and fuel US ships. Over time, port visits must
become a natural event. India is a viable player in
supporting all naval missions, including escorting and
responding to regional crises. In the same vein, the US
air force would like the Indians to be able to grant
them access to bases and landing rights during
operations, such as counter-terrorism and heavy airlift
support."
This arrangement, as far as it goes,
would be acceptable to New Delhi. But the fact is that,
contrary to what the colonel says, the US doctrine of
providing security has always been directly tied to
setting up bases, and there is every reason to believe
that the Pentagon still thinks that way today. According
to Jane's Defense Review strategist Rahul Bedi, the US
wants India's help in expanding its vital naval
influence in South Asia and containing China's
proliferating sway in the Indian Ocean region. To
achieve these twin aims, Bedi says, the US's covetous
eyes are on eastern Sri Lanka's Trincomalee port as a
staging point for its naval assets stationed in and
around its Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean.
Washington's sudden interest in the Colombo-Tamil Tigers
talks in the aftermath of September 11 have not gone
unnoticed.
It was known that the US navy had
long been looking for access to a strategically located
South Asian port for its Fifth Fleet, established in
1996 for permanent deployment in the Indian Ocean to
bolster the US Middle East Force. US missile strikes
during the war in Afghanistan were executed by Fifth
Fleet warships, among others, demonstrating America's
ability to exercise military power against littoral
states deep inland. While the massive Fifth Fleet, which
in size and capability is equivalent to the Sixth and
Seventh Fleet together, watches over the oil fields of
Arabia, the US base in Diego Garcia could soon become a
concern for Asia as a whole. Diego Garcia, 37 miles long
and one of 52 islands in the Chagos Archipelago, is
strategically located in the central Indian Ocean.
Diego Garcia
Although historically
and legally a part of Mauritius, Diego Garcia was
formally constituted as part of the British Indian Ocean
Territory (BIOT) in 1965 and came under the
administrative control of the British government of the
Seychelles. With the independence of Seychelles in 1976,
the BIOT became a self-administering territory under the
East African Desk of the British Foreign Office. In
December 1966, Britain signed a bilateral agreement with
the US making the islands of the BIOT available for
defense purposes to both governments for a period of 50
years, until the year 2017. Approximately 900 American
naval personnel are presently based on the island.
According to a scholar previously associated
with the New Delhi-based Indian Defense Studies and
Analyses, the long-range nuclear weapon-capable and
missile-armed B-52 bombers operating from Diego Garcia
are formally part of the US Air Combat Command's 96th
Bomber Squadron, based at Barksdale Air Force Base in
Louisiana. In addition, nuclear-armed and
nuclear-powered attack submarines are capable of
berthing at Diego Garcia. These warships remain the most
potent in terms of nuclear-weapons capability. Since
1991, the US navy has withdrawn and stored ashore all
its sea-based tactical nuclear weapons; these do not,
however, include the nuclear-armed Tomahawk land attack
missiles deployed aboard submarines or surface ships.
The US propensity to acquire bases to operate in
any region is based on its doctrine of intervention, not
a doctrine of providing long-term, on-going security to
the region. The latter is what India has no option but
to adopt for its own, and the region's security.
In addition, US adherence to the concept of
preventive warfare, which led to the unilateral
declaration of war against both Iraq and Afghanistan,
makes the presence of these bases in the region highly
dangerous. These bases, like the one in Diego Garcia,
afford the US the capability to strike quickly and
decisively on a nation it considers an enemy - whether
or not India agrees. This kind of disagreement has shown
up between India and the US in evaluating the case of
the Islamic Republic of Iran, for instance.
Nonetheless, the idea of working together in the
Indian Ocean will persist. The idea was articulated by
US Secretary of State Colin Powell. In his senate
confirmation hearings in 2001, Powell talked about
India's potential for maintaining peace and stability in
the Indian Ocean and its vast periphery, and the
importance of the US supporting such a role.
But
as pointed out by Indian strategic analyst C Raja Mohan
in 2001, it is one thing to demand that outsiders get
out of the Indian Ocean, and it is another to create a
security structure that addresses the concerns of the
weaker states vis-a-vis their stronger and aggressive
neighbors. In other words, the region consists of many
small nations whose interests do not figure prominently
in the India-US military relationship. But for India it
would be vital to make sure that the security structure
it develops embraces the security of the smaller and
weaker nations of the region as well.
(Copyright
2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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