BANGALORE - India's new listening post in Madagascar has reportedly begun operations. Under construction for more than a year, the monitoring station will provide India with electronic eyes and ears in the southwestern Indian Ocean.
Located in northern Madagascar, the monitoring station "was quietly made operational" in early July, according to a report in The Indian Express. It will be linked with similar facilities in Kochi and Mumbai "to gather intelligence on foreign navies operating in the region", the report said. Mumbai and Kochi, which are on India's west coast, are headquarters of the Indian Navy's Western and Southern Commands, respectively.
Madagascar, a large island off Africa's east coast, is among a growing number of Africa's Indian Ocean shores with which India is building naval and other ties. The Indian Navy took charge of Mozambique's sea security during the African Union summit there in 2003 and during the World Economic Forum summit the following year.
To Madagascar's east lies Mauritius. In 1974, India laid the foundation of its naval security cooperation with Mauritius with the gift of the Indian Naval Ship (INS) Amar. India later provided Mauritius with an interceptor patrol boat, INS Observer, in 2001 and a Dornier Do 228 maritime surveillance aircraft in 2004. The Indian Navy has patrolled waters off Mauritius a few times.
Media reports last year spoke of a possible larger profile for India in Mauritius. According to reports, Mauritius offered its Agalega Islands to India on a long-term lease ostensibly for development as tourist destinations. The Agalega Islands are 1,100 kilometers from Mauritius, 3,000km from India and 1,800km from the US base at Diego Garcia.
Both India and Mauritius quickly denied the lease report - the leasing of a predominantly Creole island to India would be a touchy issue in a country with a delicate ethnic balance between the francophone Creoles and the Indo-Mauritians. However, according to the Indian Express report, "India is looking at developing another monitoring facility at an atoll it has leased from Mauritius [Agalega] in the near future." The report said that while the government is silent on the issue, "sources say some forward movement has recently been made on the project".
Across the channel to Madagascar's west lies Mozambique. Last year, India signed a memorandum of understanding with Mozambique that envisaged maritime patrolling of the waters off the latter's coast, supplying military equipment, training personnel, and transferring technical know-how in assembling and repairing military vehicles, aircraft and ships.
India's long-standing ties with Seychelles were further strengthened in 2005 when Delhi gave the latter's coast guard a fast-attack vessel, INS Tarmugli. India has given a few helicopters to Seychelles over the years and Indian naval ships routinely visit the archipelago.
India's naval foray into the southwestern Indian Ocean has gone by largely unnoticed. In contrast, its naval presence and activity near the Malacca Strait to its east and the Gulf of Oman to its west has been widely reported. The Indian Navy has been conducting exercises with the Republic of Singapore Navy for more than a decade, with the Indonesian Navy since 2004, and with the Royal Thai Navy since last August. Next month, the navies of five countries - India, Singapore, the United States, Japan and Australia - will participate in a huge naval exercise in the Bay of Bengal. To its west, India has been holding joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman, the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea with such countries as Oman, Iran and France.
India's naval profile in the southwestern Indian Ocean is smaller but growing quietly. Naval exercises with South Africa - the only medium naval power in Africa - and Brazil are expected to take place next year.
Indian Navy officers say that India's gifts of patrol boats and other equipment to countries in its immediate and distant neighborhood are to "help them identify and isolate more effectively fast-moving surface craft that may be carrying terrorists, gun-runners or smugglers. By providing these countries with better equipment, India is not only helping them secure themselves but also hoping that this will halt the flow of arms, ammunition and contraband into India."
There is the problem of piracy, too, in the waters off Africa that has affected India's trade. To the north of Madagascar lies Somalia, whose coastline has been identified by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) as the area with the highest piracy risk in the world. According to the latest IMB report, there were 15 reported attacks on vessels in or near Somalia's waters in the first seven months this year, compared with 10 incidents during all of last year. An Indian merchant ship was seized by Somali pirates this May and held for a month.
For India, monitoring the waters off Africa's east coast is an essential part of its effort to secure sea lanes of communication in the Indian Ocean. Most of India's trade is by sea - nearly 89% of India's oil imports arrive by sea. These sea lanes are thus lifelines for the Indian economy and any disruption can have disastrous consequences for its economic and energy security.
India has been acting to secure sea lanes in the Indian Ocean, and the monitoring station in Madagascar is part of this larger naval and maritime strategy.
India is reaching out far into the Indian Ocean, way beyond its shores, as it sees this ocean as its domain. In an article published last year in the Naval War College Review, Donald L Berlin, professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu and an expert on Indian Ocean strategic issues, wrote:
New Delhi regards the Indian Ocean as its back yard and deems it both natural and desirable that India function as, eventually, the leader and the predominant influence in this region - the world's only region and ocean named after a single state. This is what the United States set out to do in North America and the Western Hemisphere at an early stage in America's "rise to power". American foreign policy throughout the 19th century had one overarching goal: achieving hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
Similarly, in the expansive view of many Indians, India's security perimeter should extend from the Strait of Malacca to the Strait of Hormuz and from the coast of Africa to the western shores of Australia. For some Indians, the emphasis is on the northern Indian Ocean, but for others the realm includes even the "Indian Ocean" coast of Antarctica.
Of major concern to India is China's steady influence in the Indian Ocean through its naval and other ties with India's neighbors, including Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. China has a major role in the Gwadar port in Pakistan at the mouth of the strategic Persian Gulf, about 400km from the Strait of Hormuz, a major conduit for global oil supplies.
Concern mounted in India in January when Chinese President Hu Jintao rounded off his eight-nation trip to Africa with a stop at Seychelles. It was to preempt a Chinese offer of naval assistance to Seychelles that India quickly gave INS Tarmugli to the Seychelles Coast Guard. Hu's visit - the first by a Chinese president to an island state in the southwestern Indian Ocean - underscored the looming challenge that China poses to India's influence in this region.
Raja Mohan, an Indian strategic-affairs expert, pointed out: "No one doubts India's desire to retain its foothold in these geopolitically crucial island states. But question marks remain on whether India has a strategy to cope [with] China's dramatic entry into the western Indian Ocean."
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