Samudra Manthan

Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Indo-Pacific

C. Raja Mohan

• Publisher: Carnegie Endowment For International Peace
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780870033063
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Rising China and emerging India are becoming major maritime powers. As they build large navies to secure their growing interests, both nations are roiling the waters of the Indo-Pacific—the vast littoral stretching from Africa to Australasia.

Invoking a tale from Hindu mythology— Samudra Manthan or "to churn the ocean"—C. Raja Mohan tells the story of a Sino-Indian rivalry spilling over from the Great Himalayas into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. He examines the prospects of mitigating the tensions and constructing a stable Indo-Pacific order.

America, the dominant power in the area, is being drawn into the unfolding Sino-Indian competition. Despite the huge differences in the current naval capabilities of China, India, and the United States, Mohan argues that the three countries are locked in a triangular struggle destined to mold the future Indo-Pacific.

Chapter One

Introduction

The “churning of the oceans,” or Samudra Manthan, is one of the more enchanting episodes of Indian mythology. It traveled across maritime Asia, took root in Khmer cosmology, and was immortalized in the extravagant riches of Angkor Wat.1 What relevance does the image of angels and demons churning the oceans by putting a mountain on top of a tortoise and spinning it around with a gigantic reptile have for this study of Sino-Indian relations? Plenty. First and foremost is the fact that a rising China and an emerging India are turning to the sea in ways that they did not before. This fact alone has the potential to radically alter the world’s maritime environment. The early years of the twenty-first century have already generated an outpouring of popular and academic literature on the meaning of the rise of China and India. The metaphor of the dragon and the elephant turning the world inside out is now quite commonplace. Whether it is the mitigation of global warming, managing the world’s energy markets, refashioning the international economic order, sustaining food security, or the construction of a stable balance of power in Asia, China and India have become central to the debate.2 The dynamic interaction between the two and their impact on the international relations of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East have all begun to draw renewed attention from scholars and policymakers around the world. This volume focuses on the consequences of the rise of China and India for the world’s maritime spaces, especially the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Second, the unfolding maritime orientation of China and India is historic; it marks a fundamental shift in both countries away from the traditional obsession with controlling land frontiers. If Beijing built a great wall to stop the marauding tribes from the north and west, the empires in India, too, were focused on just one unending external threat—the invasion of the subcontinent through its northwestern frontier. To be sure, as two old civilizational states with long coastlines, China and India have always been interested in the waters around them. At different periods of time, the two civilizations did reach out to nearby lands through the seas. But navies and maritime power never acquired sustained attention and resources from either of the two old civilizations. In recent centuries, as China and India entered a prolonged period of rapid relative economic decline, the seas seemed to matter even less to statecraft in Beijing and New Delhi. Reemerging as modern states in the middle of the twentieth century, China and India began to appreciate the importance of sea power. National enthusiasts of sea power argued that both nations were defeated by invaders from the sea and not from the traditional land routes that the empires in both countries had done so much to guard themselves against. These exhortations, however, did not have an immediate impact, as China and India deliberately de-globalized and turned inward. In the mid-1950s, both nations unveiled disastrous experiments in finding a possible “third way” between the political and economic models of the East and the West. When they returned to reconnect with the world—China in 1978 and India in 1991—the maritime universe began to loom large in both Beijing and New Delhi. The new and enduring interest in the seas was an inevitable consequence of the enormously successful globalization of the Chinese and Indian economies in recent decades.

Third, as their economies boomed and commerce became the principal interface between the two Asian giants and the rest of the world, the trade volumes of China and India began to soar. China’s two-way trade stood at around $3.5 trillion (2011 estimate). The combined value of India’s merchandise exports and imports was around $750 billion in 2011. Most of this trade is seaborne. The protection of the sea lines of communication became an important commercial concern as well as the principal justification of naval bureaucracies in both China and India. That both countries chose to embark on ambitious and costly naval expansion programs marked a fundamental shift in the worldview of the political leadership in Beijing and New Delhi. Historically, the national security establishment in Beijing and New Delhi have tended to treat the navies as stepchildren. In the past two decades, Chinese and Indian political leaders have become strong supporters of maritime power and were ready to devote an ever-larger share of the defense budget to naval modernization. Outside observers have seen the influence of the great American naval thinker Alfred Thayer Mahan in the evolution of naval strategy in China and India.3 In India, Mahan inspired early navalists such as K. M. Panikkar, who contributed significantly to modern India’s strategic thinking.4 The quest for maritime power was no abstract ambition in young India. It was reflected in India’s decision in the mid-1950s to acquire an aircraft carrier.5 At the same time it was quite clear that the Indian state was in no position to consider an ambitious naval strategy. The same was true of China.6 By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Delhi and Beijing had unveiled plans for the construction of more than one aircraft carrier each and signaled their political commitment to build blue-water capabilities.7 If Mahan articulated the case for the United States turning to the seas at the end of the nineteenth century, his sensibility about the geopolitical relationship between rising powers and the maritime imperative offers an important insight into current naval thinking in China and India.

Fourth, the new emphasis on aircraft carriers in the naval headquarters in New Delhi and Beijing underlines an incipient interest in both capitals in power projection. Although China and India deny great-power ambitions or insist that their rise will be peaceful, there is no doubt that their strategic vision and geopolitical aspirations have begun to expand in the twenty-first century. Beijing and Delhi are beginning to appreciate that rapid economic growth and rising levels of prosperity in their large nations cannot be sustained without secure access to raw materials—minerals as well as energy resources such as hydrocarbons—in other countries. The Chinese and Indian maritime interests, then, are not limited to safe transportation of vital resources from far-flung territories but also include ensuring reliable access to them in, say, Africa and the Middle East, through special relationships and active local engagement. Both China and India insist in public that their commitment not to intervene in the affairs of other countries is indeed absolute. Yet, given the stakes involved—the prosperity of more than a billion people each in China and India—it would not be unreasonable to assume that Beijing and New Delhi would begin to consider the development of military capabilities necessary for protecting their economic interests far from their shores and a growing number of citizens working in distant lands. The first signs have emerged of a debate in both China and India on the conditions under which they might deploy military forces beyond their borders.8 As they begin to develop expeditionary capabilities, the navy will naturally be the principal instrument for delivering Chinese and Indian forces to distant lands. From the end of 2008, China and India deployed their navies to the Gulf of Aden to protect international shipping from Somali pirates.9 Both countries sent their warships to assist in the evacuation of their citizens from Libya during the popular rebellion and the crackdown by Muammar al-Qaddafi in early 2011.

Fifth, as the Chinese and Indian navies begin to operate far from their immediate waters, they are likely to step on each other’s toes and those of the Americans, the world’s dominant maritime power. As their maritime interests and strategic horizons widen, China and India are looking beyond their traditional ocean spaces. Until recently the principal concern for India has been the Indian Ocean. For decades, New Delhi had proclaimed that its strategic interests stretched from Aden to Malacca—the two choke points that guide the entrance into the Indian Ocean. Yet in recent years, India has begun to make regular naval forays into the Pacific Ocean. After an initial thrust into the South China Sea in 2000 for joint naval exercises, India sent its aircraft carrier into the region in 2005 and has conducted major naval expeditions up the Pacific since 2007. Since then India has participated in frequent naval exercises in the western Pacific with the United States, Japan, and the regional powers. Some analysts have seen these naval excursions as part of a larger strategy to expand India’s influence beyond the Indian Ocean into the western Pacific Ocean.10 China, meanwhile, has steadily raised its naval profile in the Indian Ocean. Initially, China’s strategic focus was aimed at Burma (Myanmar), where Beijing had sought a range of security cooperation. Since then, its interests in the South Asian waters came to light, as it moved into the development of maritime infrastructure in Gwadar (Pakistan) and Hambantota (Sri Lanka). China has begun to look beyond South Asia in recent years toward the key island states in the western Indian Ocean—Seychelles and Mauritius.11 As China and India reach out to waters beyond their traditional maritime domains, the notion of a rivalry between the two is beginning to gain ground. If China has aspired to dominance over the South China Sea, India has nursed similar ambitions in the Indian Ocean. While neither has a dominant role at the moment, each views with great suspicion the expanding naval profile of the other into waters close to its own territory. Before the rising naval powers crash into each other, they will run into the United States, which for now and the foreseeable future will remain the dominant force in both the Indian and Pacific Oceans. As Robert Kaplan argues, a triangular maritime dynamic now appears inevitable. “Precisely because India and China are emphasizing their sea power, the job of managing their peaceful rise will fall on the U.S. Navy to a significant extent. There will surely be tensions between the three navies, especially as the gaps in their relative strength begin to close.”12 The historic Western and the more recent American dominance of the Indian and Pacific Oceans is likely to be tested by the rise of Chinese and Indian maritime power in the coming decades. For the foreseeable future, the gap between the Indian and Chinese capabilities on the one hand and those of the United States on the other will be tilted in favor of the latter. Neither of these rising powers can hope to supplant the United States as the dominant naval power and principal security provider in the Indian and Pacific Oceans at this time.

Finally, the rising profile of China and India and the unpredictability of their bilateral relations as well as the trilateral one with the United States will have the greatest impact on the region stretching between the eastern coast of Africa and the East Asian littoral. The reference to the “Indo-Pacific” in the subtitle of this volume is aimed at capturing the increasing integration of the regional theaters in the Eastern Hemisphere. Yet many in Asia and North America find it hard to accept “Indo-Pacific” as a new geopolitical frame of reference. They would prefer to treat the Pacific and Indian Oceans as two different realms. That the major powers of East Asia, especially Japan, China, and South Korea, are increasingly dependent on the energy and mineral resources of the Indian Ocean has been known for quite some time. In recent years, this dependence has begun to make an impact on the strategic thinking in East Asia.13 Securing the seaborne trade through the Indian Ocean and its entry into the western Pacific through narrow choke points in Southeast Asia has also become a major strategic concern for both Japan and China.14 It is not a surprise that the Sino-Indian maritime rivalry finds its sharpest expression in the Bay of Bengal, the South China Sea, and the Strait of Malacca that connect the two oceans. The term “Indo-Pacific” has wide acceptance among the oceanographers as representing a “bio-geographic” region comprising the warm tropical waters of the Indian Ocean and the western and central Pacific Ocean. As the strategic community worldwide begins to focus on China and India, the usage of the term “Indo-Pacific” and the conception of a single underlying geopolitical theater have gained some ground.15 Other scholars have been demanding an end to the traditional separation between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean and think in terms of a maritime Asia.16 Some political leaders in East Asia have articulated the significance of the “confluence of the two seas,” the Indian and Pacific Oceans, amid the rise of China and the emergence of India. In a speech to the Indian Parliament in August 2007, Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan at the time, argued that “the Pacific and the Indian Oceans are now bringing about a dynamic coupling as seas of freedom and of prosperity. A ‘broader Asia’ that broke away geographical boundaries is now beginning to take on a distinct form.”17 The phrase “Indo-Pacific” acquired some currency under the Obama administration as Washington proclaimed a “pivot” to Asia in 2011 after a prolonged preoccupation with the Middle East.18 That the Indian foreign policy establishment, traditionally conservative, has begun to adopt the phrase highlights India’s new interest in the Indo-Pacific geopolitical framework.19

The book uses a thematic framework to organize the discussion on the impact of a rising China and emerging India on the Indo-Pacific region. Chapter 2, which follows this introduction, focuses on the essential structure of Sino-Indian relations. Despite the significant improvement in Sino-Indian relations in recent years, the notion of rivalry between them has been an enduring one. This chapter reviews the competitive dynamic between the two Asian giants in a variety of spheres to set the stage for consideration of their relationship in the Indo-Pacific. Chapter 3 lays out the sources of the emerging maritime orientation of China and India. It offers an assessment of the extraordinary consequences of globalization for the national security thinking in Beijing and New Delhi, two great cities that were dominated by landlubbers for so many centuries. Looking at their growing dependence on imported natural resources and external markets for their manufactured goods, the chapter attempts to capture the meaning of more than two billion people turning to the seas. Chapter 4 examines the changing missions of the Chinese and Indian navies. It traces their evolution from coastal defense and sea denial toward blue-water missions and the ability to operate far from their home territories.

As China and India exert gravitational pull on the ocean space around them, it is also important to look at the implications of their nuclear arsenals on their maritime strategies. Chapter 5 looks at the pressures on China and India to deploy their nuclear weapons at sea and what this might mean for the Indo-Pacific region as a whole. Examination of the nuclear doctrines of China and India will also take us into a survey of their linked policies on military uses of outer space and their emerging interest in missile defense. Chapter 6 looks at India’s new strategic thrust into the Pacific Ocean. For the past six decades, India’s maritime policies have been examined from the perspective of the Indian Ocean. After a brief review of the debate about India’s Indian Ocean strategy, the chapter turns to an analysis of India’s strategic aspirations in the Pacific Ocean. Chapter 7 in turn focuses on the importance of the Indian Ocean to China. Beijing’s maritime outlook was traditionally shaped by the cross-straits relations with Taiwan, its historic claims in the South China Sea, and more broadly the dominant American presence in the western Pacific. There is a growing recognition, however, of the long-term importance of the Indian Ocean in Beijing’s strategic calculus. The chapter analyzes the rising profile of the Chinese navy in the Indian Ocean and the factors driving it. Together chapters 6 and 7 provide the basis for thinking about the Indian and Pacific Oceans within the single frame of the Indo-Pacific.

Chapters 8 and 9 look at the deepening “security dilemma” between China and India in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Chapter 8 looks at the expression of the security dilemma in the small island states of the Indian Ocean. Control of the strategically located islands has always been central to the maritime strategies of the great powers. As China seeks to build long-term access arrangements with them, India has reacted by trying to limit Beijing’s influence in the Indian Ocean islands and stepping up its own efforts to consolidate long-standing economic and security cooperation with Mauritius, Seychelles, Maldives, and Sri Lanka. Chapter 9 extends the investigation of the Sino-Indian security dilemma to the littoral of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. While a competitive logic is driving China and India in the Indo-Pacific, its expression varies from one subregion to another. We look at the Sino-Indian rivalry in the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the South China Sea.

Chapter 10 focuses on three potential ways in which the Sino-Indian rivalry could be mitigated. It explores the record of Sino-Indian confidence building and the many problems with it. The chapter explores the prospects for a bilateral maritime security dialogue that allows an open discussion of each other’s apprehension and finds ways to harmonize or limit the conflict between their interests in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Chapter 11 focuses on the consequences of Sino-Indian rivalry for the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific and explores different possible outcomes in the Indo-Pacific regional order. The concluding chapter 12 offers an assessment of the emerging and consequential triangular dynamic between China and India, the rising powers in the Indo-Pacific, and the United States, which has been the dominant power in the two oceans for decades.

A word about sources and assumptions is appropriate at this stage. Not being proficient in Mandarin, the author relies largely on secondary sources and a few primary sources available in English to outline the logic and elements of China’s naval modernization. This volume does not seek to delve deeply into the domestic debates over maritime strategy in either China or India. The objective is to paint a picture, with the strokes of a broad brush, of the emerging naval capabilities and changing maritime orientation of China and India. A growing body of literature, including book-length volumes, examines in detail the history and the more recent evolution of the Chinese and Indian navies as well as the related political and policy debates in Beijing and New Delhi. The objective here is to assess the geopolitical consequences of China and India turning to the seas. The special emphasis of this volume is on the interactive dynamic between the emerging naval strategies of Beijing and New Delhi and their intersection with the maritime interests of Washington, which remains the preeminent power in the waters of both China and India.

Samudra Manthan recognizes that rivalry has been an enduring element of Sino-Indian relations since the middle of the twentieth century.20 As will be shown later in the volume, the repeated efforts of New Delhi and Beijing to build good neighborly ties did not mitigate the security dilemma that has gripped their bilateral relations. One of the central arguments of this book is that the growth of their naval capabilities and the broadening of maritime horizons in recent years will extend the security dilemma—which has expressed itself until now in the lands of inner Asia—to the waters of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• The Legend of Samudra Manthan
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Structure of the Rivalry
• Chapter 3: In Search of Sea Power
• Chapter 4: Tacking to the Blue Waters
• Chapter 5: Maritime Nuclear Power
• Chapter 6: India's Pacific Ambitions
• Chapter 7: China Eyes the Indian Ocean
• Chapter 8: Circling the Strategic Islands
• Chapter 9: Contesting the Littoral
• Chapter 10: Mitigating the Security Dilemma
• Chapter 11: Ordering the Indo-Pacific
• Chapter 12: Samudra Manthan
• Notes
• About the Author