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April 6, 2015

India's string of flowers

India obtains two strategically significant toeholds in the Indian Ocean

Sandeep Unnithan  March 27, 2015 | UPDATED 12:10 IST

Among the most significant aspects of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's five-day Indian Ocean tour between March 11 and 14 were MoUs to develop infrastructure on Agalega islands in Mauritius and Assumption Island of Seychelles.
The two island specks, easily missed on a map of the Indian Ocean, are now possibly India's most important strategic footholds in a region through which two-thirds of the world's energy supplies pass.
Both are outer island territories for their sheer distance from the capitals of the archipelago-Agalega is more than 1,000 km north of Mauritius and Assumption island, 600 nautical miles southwest of Seychelles' capital Mahe. India will build airfields and port facilities on both islands. A senior naval official terms the islands as two vital pieces in a jigsaw puzzle of India's reach-out to the countries of the southern Indian Ocean. They add to an Indian listening post on Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, commissioned in 2007 to monitor activities of foreign navies in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). Could this then mark the emergence of an Indian 'String of Flowers' to counter China's 'String of Pearls', a US scholar's coinage for a network of ports, infrastructure facilities and basing rights being built by China in countries along the IOR? Naval officials are quick to dismiss the thought of these islands being used as possible Indian bases like say, the strategic US-operated base Diego Garcia, just 600 nautical miles east of Assumption.
"The String of Pearls and the Maritime Silk Road have military connotations whereas India's approach is to enhance the capabilities of the IOR countries so that extra-regional powers are kept out of the region," says a senior naval officer. A case in point, naval officials say, is the menace of Somali piracy spiralling into an international economic problem and drawing in China's navy, chiefly because regional navies lacked the capability to patrol the region.
As part of counter-piracy efforts, India has gifted two patrol vessels to Seychelles-the Tarmugli in 2006 and the Tarasa in 2014. It now hopes to draw Mauritius and Seychelles into a trilateral regional security forum comprising Sri Lanka, India and the Maldives.
Prime Minister Modi announced the handover of a second Dornier maritime patrol aircraft to Seychelles, construction of a radar surveillance station in that country and the delivery of a 1,300-tonne patrol vessel Barracuda built by Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers, Kolkata. Measures the PM said would advance "our shared responsibility to advance maritime security in the region".
The Mauritian and Seychelles armed forces will be the primary users of the facilities India is creating on the islands. Left unsaid is the fact that they will also be used by Indian warships that are routinely deployed to patrol the 1.3-million-square km Exclusive Economic Zone of Seychelles and Indian naval hydrographic survey vessels that visit Mauritius.