New Delhi’s sea-blindness is hurting our navy

The Indian Navy briefly touches upon the national consciousness every year on December 4 when it celebrates Navy Day to commemorate its successful sea-borne bombing of the Karachi harbour in the 1971 war with Pakistan. Similarly, it now makes news whenever its warships successfully interdict Somali pirates and rescue merchant vessels off the Gulf of Aden or elsewhere.

Otherwise, sadly, the navy remains out of sight and mind, unlike the army and air force. Such situations arise because the army is actively involved in counter-insurgency operations in Jammu & Kashmir, while the air force makes news because its MiG-21 fighter aircraft keep crashing constantly.

Clearly the navy has till now figured lower than the army or the air force on the national security calculus because the political and military leaderships remain preoccupied with Pakistan and China on territorial problems since independence. As a result, the maritime dimension to national security confined itself to the background, while the continental and aerial aspects gained greater prominence. Besides, the army and the air force have traditionally obtained larger budgetary allocations and hardware acquisitions than the navy. In a sense, this reflects the New Delhi-centric political leadership’s lack of maritime security awareness.

However, the November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai launched by sea-borne terrorists focussed the political leadership’s attention on the maritime dimension to national security. Also emerging tensions in India-China relations over Indian naval presence in the South China Sea draws further attention to maritime security capabilities. For the navy, the South China Sea has emerged as an area of ‘significant concern’ and developments there will have global implications. Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Nirmal Verma recently said at a seminar on national security, ‘We are seeing edginess in relations between countries of this region. The potential for conflict in the South China Sea and instability in the Korean Peninsula have heightened awareness of analysts to the region’s shortcomings in terms on institutional arrangements to resolve potential crises. The South China Sea is an area of significant concern.’

As a result, the navy is now tasked with coastal defence at the lower end of the naval spectrum to strategic power projection at the regional/global level at the higher end. This implies that the navy has an expanded mandate and therefore requires more manpower and boats to successfully fulfil its role. For instance, the navy today suffers from a critical shortage of personnel and plans to expand its manpower by 15% over the next few years to meet the requirements arising out of rapid modernisation.

Presently, the navy comprises almost 58,000 personnel, including about 8,000 officers. But the Navy has only been increasing its manpower at the rate of 1% recently. To ensure adequate manpower a fair amount of financial planning, allocations and sanctions are required to take place.

Today a modern navy has three roles: war-fighting, constabulary and diplomatic to promote national security and foreign policy. The relevance of these roles is directly linked to the international and regional security environments. Apart from the war fighting role, the constabulary and diplomatic roles are predominantly practised in peace time. The constabulary role has to do with coastal security, while the diplomatic role entails goodwill visits by warships to foreign ports and ‘showing’ the national flag overseas. Considering the navy performs a passive role of surveillance during prolonged periods of peace most of the time to ensure maritime security it requires aerial and floating platforms proportionate to the nautical square kilometres it needs to cover. This numerical mismatch between the numbers of platforms, either warships or aircraft, is inadequate and worries the naval leadership. 

Though the Indian Navy leadership is keen to strengthen maritime combat and security capabilities through augmentation of warships, submarines, patrol boats, maritime surveillance aircraft and manpower, the financial sanctions lie with the defence ministry. However, the problem arises because the ministry’s decisionmakers — bureaucrats and politicians — are disinterested and ignorant about maritime security, naval affairs and warship building programmes. Over the years, New Delhi has developed a level of ‘sea-blindness’ towards the navy, its maritime combat and security capabilities.

This makes the naval decisionmakers helpless in the face of bureaucratic and political apathy. To what extent, therefore, would these two developments related to coastal security and power projection in the South China Sea compel the political leadership to pay serious attention to maritime security affairs remains to be seen?