CHINA'S MARITIME CHALLENGE

The world’s largest navy is aggressively expanding its presence in the Indian Ocean region. Inside India’s plan to take on the Chinese PLAN

- SANDEEP UNNITHAN

It’s December 2025 and ‘Exercise Sea Dragon’ has begun. The world’s largest navy has bided its time for decades and is now ready to project power beyond its shores. Two PLAN (People’s Liberation Army-Navy) aircraft carrier battle groups, the Shandong and Fujian, with their entourage of nuclear-powered attack submarines, cruisers and destroyers, enter the Indian Ocean through the Malacca Straits, shadowed by Indian P-8I reconnaissance aircraft. ‘Sea Dragon’ is meant to test PLAN’s responsiveness to maritime operations against a distant adversary, the official release says. Four Shang class submarines circle the east and west coast of India—two on either coast conducting ‘barrier patrols’—leaving no doubt as to who this distant adversary is. In Delhi, the Maritime Domain Awareness panels in the navy’s maritime operations room paint a picture of the PLAN mission—an envelopment of the Indian subcontinent. No merchant ship or warship headed in or out, can sail without being targeted.

This hypothetical scenario could be straight out of an Indian Navy tactical exercise as the force contemplates the imminent entry of the world’s largest navy into its backyard, the Indian Ocean region (IOR).

Seafarers

Chinese President Xi Jinping gets a guard of honour before boarding the destroyer Xining in Qingdao pier; the USS Nimitz with Indian Navy ships INS Sahyadri and INS Shivalik during cooperative deployment in the Indian Ocean, July 20, 2020