Expectations in the new US–India defence partnership are tempered. This might well come to be seen as the turning point when both countries settled for ‘a more productive, though modest, engagement.
The dream of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ idea has been peddled around New Delhi over the past few years by military enthusiasts from Canberra to Washington. But the concept of extended US naval and military power stretching across the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, with a land-stop in Australia, augmented by quadrilateral partners and allies in the region was never an easy sell.
The Indo-Pacific idea has also crept awkwardly into the lexicon of Australian political leaders on both the right and the left to the puzzlement of hard-heads in New Delhi and elsewhere in Asia. Southeast Asian diplomats have humoured their Australian counterparts but the Indians, though flattered, have generally given the notion short shrift. Mainland Asia, including China, where most of the economic and political action remains in Asia, is absent in this conception of the region.
The term Indo-Pacific is a descriptor of a grand naval security strategy, however unrealistic it may be. As a tag for our region, it’s an imperious insult — a conception that accords mainland Asia, upon whose shores neither ocean washes, no weight or respect.
Since Narendra Modi became prime minister there has, nonetheless, been a distinct shift in India’s maritime outlook. For years India’s maritime interests had been off the agenda. Modi’s leadership is now, says Darshana Baruah, ‘driving India’s maritime policy, re-igniting hopes that India is finally waking up to the changes in Asia’s maritime domain’.
The Indian navy released its new maritime strategy in October 2015. It emphasised international engagement and cooperation with regional partners. India also signed a Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean region with the United States, a Special Strategic and Global Partnership with Japan and a Framework for Security Cooperation with Australia.
These developments come amid practical steps such as India’s holding its first bilateral naval exercise with Australia in September 2015 and expanding its coordinated patrol with Indonesia to a bilateral naval exercise. New Delhi has also commissioned an Indian-built patrol ship for Mauritius and is boosting military and civilian assistance to its island neighbours. In Southeast Asia, India has provided a US$100 million line of credit to help strengthen Vietnam’s coastal defence, set up a satellite tracking and imaging centre in Vietnam and has strengthened maritime ties with Myanmar.
India has also spoken out on maritime disputes in the South China Sea, an issue that the previous government avoided. Modi talked of the destabilising potential of these disputes in joint statements with the United States and Vietnam at the East Asia Summit and the India–ASEAN summits both in 2014 and 2015. As Baruah notes, ‘India even referred to the South China Sea as the “West Philippine Sea”, the Philippines’ favoured term, in a joint statement with Manila’.
This is the context in which US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter paid his third visit to India last month — the seventh by a US Defence Secretary since 2008.
Carter and his counterpart, Manohar Parrikar inked a series of defence cooperation, technology sharing, and research and co-production related agreements. When finalised, these agreements will fundamentally, albeit incrementally, transform the nature of India–US maritime engagement in the Indian Ocean region.
They also entered an agreement to share logistics during peacetime that will enable the two navies to mitigate capability gaps in the Indian Ocean, which has seen a progressive expansion in operational commitments. This, Gupta says, will breathe life into the India–US Maritime Cooperation Framework agreement, which had envisaged ‘an appropriate agreement on logistics support’ 10 years after it was signed.
‘By the time the dust settles on this phase of cooperation’, Gupta explains, ‘it is likely that the Indian Navy and the US Pacific Fleet will individually operate a set of network-centric intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets that allow a common information picture about the Eastern Indian Ocean to be formed and exchanged. This could potentially provide a basis for cooperative responses to possible threats’.
Yet the burgeoning US–India defence partnership needs to be kept in perspective.
India remains not only averse to the idea of any formal alliance ties with the United States; it is also increasingly sensitive to its new maritime presence cutting across its traditional non-alignment posture. This is why India continues to separate the Indian Ocean and the Asia Pacific as discrete theatres in its joint strategic vision.
It’s also why the country hesitates to upgrade the Indo–US MALABAR naval exercises to a trilateral format, despite continued participation from Japan. And the same caution underlies India’s insistence that it will not patrol the South China Sea as part of increased cooperation with the United States.
‘US–India defence cooperation has for too long lagged behind its potential, owing in part to a tendency on both sides to view defence cooperation initiatives through a lens of entrapment’. Expectations in the new US–India defence partnership are tempered. This might well come to be seen as the turning point when both countries settled for ‘a more productive, though modest, engagement that [translates] their mutual strategic visions into practical cooperation in the Indian Ocean and the Asia-Pacific region’.
This article was republished from EastAsiaForum.
