On July 20, 2023, INS Kolkata, the destroyer class-warship of the Indian Navy, along with an anti-submarine aircraft, P-8I, sailed off to Sydney, Australia, to participate in the Malabar Exercises, which will be conducted from August 11 to August 22, 2023.
With the Chinese Army (Peoples Liberation Army) showing no signs of de-escalation of troops from the Line of Actual Control (LAC), including those indicted into the Western theatre post-October 2022, the Indian military planners are now focusing on the Indo-Pacific Region to meet the challenge of the PLAN (Chinese Navy) also called Peoples Liberation Army Navy.
Keeping this in mind, the Indian Navy Chief, Admiral Hari Kumar, visited Vietnam and gifted the Corvette INS Kirpan to the Vietnamese Peoples’ Navy, which was the first active warship gifted by India to a foreign country.
The Malabar Exercises are a signal to the island nations of the far Pacific, who are being cavorted with the Xi Jinping Regime ostensibly to get funds from the Chinese BRI (Belt and Road Initiative)
The Indian Navy expects the Chinese Battle carriers ‘strike force’ to patrol on high seas in the Indo-Pacific by the year 2025, if not earlier. The Chinese posture in Eastern Ladakh under the Western Theater Command has not changed since the May 2020 PLA belligerence in Galwan and Pangong Tso regions. The threat from the PLA has increased in the eastern sector, with reserves being brought from the Central and Eastern Theatre Commands in the run-up to the National Party Congress.
These reserve troops, which are part of the light to medium infantry combat brigades, have not pulled back since then with increasing pressure on the Siliguri Corridor, Tawang and Kibithoo sectors in Arunachal Pradesh. There exists a fact that stalemate exists all along the LAC as PLA has not deescalated from friction points in Aksai Chin as well as Arunachal Pradesh, with its border villages being strengthened to tackle the worst-case scenario.
The Chinese activities have incidentally increased in India’s Northeast, with the Myanmar Government looking the other way. Despite the presence of Chinese nationals and infrastructure upgrades in the Coco Islands in the Bay of Bengal, the government in Myanmar denies any involvement with China.
Given the state of play, the Indian Navy is preparing plans beyond 2028 to counter the PLA Challenge in the Indian Ocean Region and the larger Indo-Pacific Realm, as all the PLA surveillance ships, ballistic missile tracking ships traversing the Indian Ocean are designed to survey the Indian Ocean bed for future operations, especially the PLA Submarine operations beyond the current conventional platform reach of the Indian Navy.
Over the years, the PLA Navy is planning to chart out a route for its nuclear submarines to enter the Indian Ocean via the Ombi Wetar straits in Indonesia and then head down to the Southern Indian Ocean through the 90 degrees ridge to the eastern seaboard to Africa. The Chinese have ambitious plans, and that is evident from the construction of a jetty in overseas naval bases in Djibouti, near the Horn of Africa, to dock an aircraft carrier.
The only answer to this challenge is that the Indian Navy acquires long legs and creates Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) with the help of the friendly QUAD and the French Navy, which has assets in the Indian Ocean Region and the far Pacific. The world is focused on China’s threat to Taiwan, but that perhaps is a ruse to hide the PLAN’s ambitions to rule the high seas in the Indo-Pacific.
The QUAD (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) is a maritime alliance comprising four major powers, namely the United States of America, India, Japan and Australia. The Malabar exercises are naval military drills conducted in the waters of the Indo-Pacific Region to tackle an aggressive, dominating and expansionist China and its ever-increasing ambitions.
