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The Indian Navy
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Soviet built ships and deal with the Soviets themselves. While the
Russians were friendly on a personal level … India was given little or
no access to operational doctrine. 19
Strategically, the result of the IN’s second phase of intellectual development was a
reprioritisation that, by the end of the 1970s, had cemented the Navy’s priorities as
coastal defence, the defeat of the Pakistan Navy in the event of war, the defence of
India’s offshore territories, the ability to conduct sea denial operations within India’s
exclusive economic zone (EEZ), and the protection of India’s maritime trade routes. 20
Throughout this phase the Indian Government’s role in the non-aligned movement
and its declaration of an Indian Ocean ‘zone of peace’ served to isolate the Navy
internationally. 21 Although this stance resulted in an ongoing lack of access to foreign
operational doctrine, it also served to encourage the ongoing development of indigenous
naval thinking. Finally, the clarity and focus of IN intellectual development also
advanced significantly as a result of the Navy’s role in India’s 1971 war with Pakistan. 22
The international strategic upheaval of the early 1990s catapulted the IN into its third
phase of intellectual development. As with the transition from the first to second phases,
the transition to the third phase was also a result of the convergence of a plethora of
internal and external factors.
Although the IOR began to play a prominent role on the world stage after the Soviet
Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, this prominence greatly increased following the
end of the Cold War. Beginning with the 1990-91 Gulf War, the subsequent enforcement
of sanctions against Iraq and more recently the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
have given cause for an ongoing and substantial US Navy presence in the IOR. 23 Unlike
during the Cold War, when the relationship between India and the US was frustrated
by India’s non-aligned stance and acquisitions of Soviet equipment, the global security
environment since 1991 has brought about renewed cooperation between India and
the US. 24 This has been especially prominent in the realm of naval activities. Indeed,
by 2002, naval cooperation between India and the US had grown to the extent that the
IN assisted in providing security for US shipping in the Malacca Strait. In 2005 this
cooperation was further expanded when the US and Indian navies conducted their
first combined exercise. 25
Enabling this growth in cooperation has been a major change in Indian Government
policy since the conclusion of the Cold War. This change has involved the abandonment
of India’s long-standing position of non-alignment and its substitution with a more
pragmatic approach to alliance (and security) relationships. This change was succinctly
summarised by C Raja Mohan, who stated that, ‘India has moved from its past emphasis
on the power of argument to a new stress on the argument of power’. 26 Underlying this
change appears to be two factors, the first being the Indian Government’s realisation
that no matter how much it might want too, it is not going to be able to keep other