Delhi all ears in the Indian
Ocean By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - India is reportedly planning
to set up a high-tech monitoring station in
northern Madagascar to tackle piracy and
terrorism, while keeping an eye on China and the
sea lanes that are so critical to Delhi's economy
and security.
The station in Madagascar, a
large island in the southern Indian Ocean off the
east coast of Africa, will enable India to keep an
eye on growing terrorist activities in East Africa
and piracy in the waters off the East African
coast. It would be the first such facility
New
Delhi has opened in another country, though India
has a monitoring station in Antarctica that is
meant for scientific observation and
experimentation.
Al-Qaeda
activities in several East African countries have
been of concern for several years.
Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania and Comoros - all Indian
Ocean littorals - have either experienced terror
attacks by suspected al-Qaeda militants or are
believed to have activists on their soil. The
alleged threat posed by al-Qaeda in the region is
said to have prompted the US to set up an
anti-terror task force of almost 2,000 members in
Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to monitor the
region.
"India will pay US$2.5 million to
lease the station, because it apprehends threats
to its strategic naval assets and its political,
economic and military interests in Africa," the
online Public Affairs Magazine reported. "The
monitoring station will have high-tech digital
communication systems."
The monitoring
station is in tune with Indian maritime doctrine
that envisages an ambient forward naval presence
from the Strait of Hormuz to the Strait of
Malacca.
Madagascar
is in a rough neighborhood. To the north
is civil-war-racked Somalia, which hasn't had
a functioning central government for more than
a decade. The waters off Somalia's coast are
piracy-infested.
There have been 37 incidents of
piracy off Somalia's coast since last March,
according to the International Maritime Bureau, a
part of the International Chamber of Commerce that
fights crime related to maritime trade and
transport, particularly piracy and commercial
fraud, and protects the crews of ocean-going
vessels.
In fact, Somalia is being
described as "the most dangerous place these
days". Jayant Abayankar of the bureau said, "The
Malacca Strait used to be one of the worst, and
the waters off Nigeria and Iraq are currently bad.
But Somalia is the worst."
For instance,
an Indian ship with 35 crew members was hijacked
on Sunday by gunmen off the Somali coast. It is
incidents such as these that India's station at
Madagascar would hope to prevent through
monitoring and swift action.
But while
monitoring the region for piracy and terrorist
activity might be the ostensible reason for an
Indian monitoring station in Madagascar, there are
other considerations that seem to have prompted
the decision.
While the Indian presence at
Madagascar is "purportedly for anti-piracy and
maritime counter-terrorism monitoring purposes, it
is possible that a station is being set up here
for monitoring the sea lanes of communication
[SLOCs] in the Indian Ocean", suggests Lawrence
Prabhakar, visiting fellow at the Institute of
Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore and
associate professor of political science at the
Madras Christian College in India.
The
Indian Ocean is a critical waterway for global
trade and commerce. Half the world's containerized
freight, a third of its bulk cargo and two-thirds
of its oil shipments traverse this ocean. It
provides major sea routes connecting Africa, the
Middle East, South Asia and East Asia with Europe
and the Americas and is home to several critical
chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz and the
Strait of Malacca.
The significance of the
Indian Ocean to India's economic development and
security is immense. Most of India's trade is by
sea. Nearly 89% of India's oil imports arrive by
sea. The SLOCs are therefore lifelines for the
Indian economy and any disruption in these can
have disastrous consequences. Securing the SLOCs
is therefore a prime objective of India naval and
maritime strategy.
The proposed monitoring
station on Madagascar is part of a larger Indian
strategy to secure SLOCs in the Indian Ocean. It
is another step that India is taking to assert its
presence and secure SLOCs through policing waters
from Madagascar, Mozambique and the Gulf of Oman
in the west to the Malacca Strait and probably the
South China Sea in the east.
In fact,
several Indian analysts view India's security
perimeter - its "rightful domain" - as extending
from the Strait of Hormuz to the Strait of Malacca
from Africa's east coast to the western shores of
Australia.
To its east, India's
naval presence has witnessed a significant and
visible increase. The Indian navy has been exercising
with the Singaporean navy for more than a decade,
with the Indonesian navy since 2004 and with the
Thai navy since August. In 2002, Indian and US
ships engaged in joint escort duties in the
Malacca Strait. Likewise to its west, the Indian
navy has been holding joint exercises in the Gulf
of Oman, the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea with
the likes of Oman, Iran and France.
In
contrast to its exercises near the Malacca Strait
or in the Gulf of Oman, the Indian navy's foray
into the southern Indian Ocean is less talked
about. However, the proposed monitoring station on
Madagascar is not the first time that the Indian
navy will play a role in waters off the East
African coast. The Indian navy has patrolled the
waters around Mauritius at least twice and during
the African Union summit in Mozambique in 2002,
the Indian navy provided seaward security.
The expansion of the Indian naval presence
in the Indian Ocean is as much about keeping an
eye on the mounting Chinese presence in these
waters as securing the SLOCs. The Chinese presence
in the Bay of Bengal has increased much to India's
concern after its growing proximity with
Bangladesh and Myanmar.
And India is
anxious over China's involvement in Pakistan's
Gwadar port project. Gwadar is a fishing village
just 72 kilometers from the Iranian border on the
Arabian Sea coast in the Pakistani province of
Balochistan, which shares borders with Afghanistan
and Iran to the west.
Gwadar
is near the mouth of the strategic Persian
Gulf, about 400km from the Strait of Hormuz, a
major conduit for global oil supplies. Total cost
of the Gwadar project is estimated at US$1.16
billion, with China committed to about $198
million for the first phase.
"China has
access to Egypt's Port Said, Iran's Bandar Abbas
port and Pakistan's Gwadar port. Some years ago
China had a missile tracking facility in Zanzibar,
Tanzania," Prabhakar told Asia Times Online,
pointing out that an Indian naval presence on
Madagascar was therefore "not a bad idea".
India has naval bases in Cochin on the
southwest coast of the Indian peninsula, Karwar
near the confluence of the Kali River and the
Arabian Sea, and Mumbai, the largest port in
western India. When linked with Madagascar "the
quadrant would give India an idea of what
extra-regional navies are up to in the East
African and southern African coast", Prabhakar
said.
With a monitoring station on
Madagascar, the possibility of the Indian navy
venturing into joint patrols with other navies in
the region cannot be ruled out. "Cooperative
patrol is possible with [the] South African navy,
the only medium naval power in the entire African
continent. Besides, joint patrols with the US Navy
are possible," said Prabhakar, drawing attention
to "lower end maritime asymmetric threats in the
waters here".
Prabhakar points out that
with a monitoring station in Madagascar, "Some
limited offshore patrolling by Indian offshore
patrol vessels is quite possible. This could mean
deployment of a few rotary and fixed-wing maritime
patrol craft will follow."
India's move to
Madagascar will be welcomed by the Americans, with
whom New Delhi is growing closer. In Beijing,
however, where India's growing blue-water
ambitions have been viewed with some wariness, it
would raise eyebrows.
Sudha
Ramachandran is an independent
journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.
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