By Sayantan Haldar
India’s maritime security agenda has evolved to include complex and multifaceted dimensions. As New Delhi assumes a central role in shaping the security dynamics across the wider Indo-Pacific, the Indian Navy, the country’s primary maritime security agent, has increasingly operated on various fronts. While it may be commonly assumed that the role of navies is limited to the military dimension, the Indian Navy has progressively expanded to include diplomatic and constabulary functions in the maritime domain. For India, this diversification of the navy’s role is particularly critical. Given India’s central location in the Indian Ocean and its emergence as a core pillar of the wider Indo-Pacific maritime security architecture, New Delhi’s naval preparedness extends beyond national interests to shaping regional maritime security. In this context, the navy’s role as a diplomatic and constabulary actor is significant.
India’s Expanding Maritime Security Agenda
As a diplomatic tool, the navy has enhanced cooperation with various like-minded countries by engaging in defence diplomacy, joint exercises, and improving interoperability to shape a favourable maritime security environment in the Indo-Pacific. This included expanding cooperation with countries that had thus far remained marginal in India’s diplomatic outreach. As a result, India’s foreign policy appears to have broadened its conception of the neighbourhood by incorporating littoral countries within the shared maritime space of the Indo-Pacific.
In addition, the Navy has directed a critical push towards its constabulary role. The maritime domain is an important theatre of governance and norm-making, where upholding a rules-based order in the oceans is integral to trade, connectivity, and the sustainable use of oceanic resources. This has paved the way for the security imperative to include a critical constabulary function of policing the oceans. For India, the constabulary function has emerged as a core dimension of its maritime security preparedness efforts. The evolution of this dimension can be traced through three distinct developments in the Indian Navy’s efforts to strengthen its maritime security strategy.
First, the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks resulted in the co-option of the Indian Coast Guard services into the Indian Navy. The route used by the perpetrators through the Arabian Sea displayed the remarkable intertwinement of maritime and territorial security. The co-option of the Indian Coast Guard, entrusted with the responsibility of the constabulary function, i demonstrated the institutional shift towards strengthening the policing role of the navy.
Second, the establishment of the Information Fusion Centre – Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR), run by the Indian Navy, has sought to enhance efforts to foster cooperation through maritime domain awareness. With the onset of new technologies, information gathering, exchange, and dissemination have emerged as central to shaping maritime security preparedness efforts. Through the IFC-IOR, India has sought to play a critical role in the constabulary dimension of maritime security preparedness initiatives in the wider Indo-Pacific.
Third, and more recently, the Navy has inducted key maritime assets to enhance its surveillance and interdiction capabilities at sea. The recent commissioning of three new assets—INS Mahe, INAS 335 (Ospreys), and ICGS Amulya— demonstrates this shift. Given the rapidly worsening security environment in the Indo-Pacific and India’s immediate neighbourhood, surveillance and monitoring of the maritime domain have become critical. China’s increasing presence in the Indian Ocean, including the deployment of research vessels with dual-use intelligence-gathering capabilities, poses a significant threat to India’s maritime security objectives. This, in turn, prompted the need for greater surveillance and monitoring in India’s maritime security strategy.
On 24 November, the navy commissioned the INS Mahe, the first of the new Mahe-class anti-submarine warfare shallow-water craft. This asset is tasked with strengthening the first line of coastal defence, surveilling and neutralising submarines in shallow coastal waters. This indigenously developed craft aims to enhance efforts in undersea surveillance, coastal patrols, and laying mines in coastal chokepoints.
On 17 December, the navy further inducted the INAS 335 (Ospreys), the second Indian Naval Air Squadron to operate MH-60R helicopters, providing a major fillip to its constabulary capabilities. Naval aviation remains a core pillar of the Navy’s constabulary function, given its versatile capabilities in both combat and surveillance efforts. The INAS 335 is well-equipped to carry out anti-submarine warfare missions, while also enhancing search and rescue operations.
On 19th December, the Indian Coast Guard commissioned the ICGS Amulya, the third vessel of the eight Adamya-class Fast Patrol Vessels, into its fleet. ICGS Amulya is designed to carry out a vast spectrum of operational activities, including surveillance and coastal patrol, search and rescue operations, interdiction, and anti-smuggling efforts. Given the centrality of the Coast Guard in the constabulary dimension of maritime security, the induction of this vessel underscores the urgency accorded to policing and maritime surveillance within India’s broader maritime security strategy.
The broader institutional reorientation of the Indian Ocean Guard, including its induction into the Indian Navy and the growing importance of the IFC-IOR, underscores the importance of domain surveillance in India’s maritime security preparedness. However, the recent commissioning of these three vessels further demonstrates the growing salience of the constabulary dimension of India’s maritime security preparedness. Viewed in the context of the increasingly complex and multifaceted role played by the navy in emerging as a key diplomatic actor and a military arm in the oceans, the constabulary function of the navy suggests that India’s approach to maritime security is evolving in tandem with the worsening security environment in the Indo-Pacific.
Sayantan Haldar is an Associate Fellow with the Strategic Studies Programme at the Observer Research Foundation.
