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How the Indian Navy counters modern maritime threats—Hard seas and steady hands

India's oceans have been getting nastier for some time, but our public discourse has struggled to move beyond familiar reference points.

In the early hours of 4 March 2026, the United States Navy sank the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in international waters off the southern coast of Sri Lanka — in the heart of the Indian Ocean, the very waters India claims to steward — as part of what it designated as Operation Epic Fury, a named, publicly owned kinetic action. The operation triggered an unusually wide public discussion in India about naval warfare, maritime law and the risks inherent in operating at sea. Questions surfaced across television studios, social media and policy forums: Was the ship a lawful target? What rules govern attacks on warships? What happens if such an incident occurs near our own waters? The questions that episode forced into the open are what further motivate this essay. Much of the professional nuance that naval officers, maritime lawyers and practitioners grapple with routinely rarely finds its way into mainstream narratives about India’s maritime rise. Yet if India is serious about thinking and acting as a maritime power, those nuances must not just enter our public discourse — they must inform capability choices, legal frameworks and operational doctrine in deeper and more demanding terms. The essay that follows tries to ask them honestly.

India’s oceans have been getting nastier for some time, but our public discourse has struggled to move beyond familiar reference points — India’s anti-piracy operations, Chinese actions in the South China Sea, or the US Navy’s so-called Freedom of Navigation exercises through the Lakshadweep Islands. Russian operations in and around Ukrainian waters, persistent grey-zone coercion in the Western Pacific, and unmanned and missile campaigns against shipping in the Red Sea have driven home a core argument made by Geoffrey Till (the author of “Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century” ): that navies today operate along a spectrum. At one end lie blue-economy governance and constabulary policing; at the other, outright naval war. Between them stretches a wide zone of competition — grey-zone probes, coercive signalling, enforcement actions — through which maritime order is continuously contested.

Good order at sea, in other words, is not a static condition. It is a political project that sometimes demands the credible use of force.

Amidst all this, India has over the past two decades evolved to talk like a maritime power. We now possess a vocabulary — SAGAR, MAHASAGAR, Indo-Pacific, the aspiration to be a “net security provider” — and an ecosystem of institutions and forums that constantly affirm the centrality of the sea to our future. Official language has already edged away from the older “net security provider” formulation towards India as the Indian Ocean’s “preferred security partner” and “first responder” — a semantic shift that softens hierarchy but further emphasises benign, demand-driven roles over the harder business of coercion and enforcement at sea.

The Indian Navy’s public outreach, the work of the National Maritime Foundation (NMF), multilateral groupings such as the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS), and spectacles such as the International Fleet Review (IFR) all reinforce the same message: India has rediscovered the maritime dimension of its strategic identity. Popular histories such as Sanjeev Sanyal’s The Ocean of Churn have carried that rediscovery into wider culture, reclaiming the Indian Ocean as a civilisational space central to India’s past and future. That is not a small thing. The old complaint that New Delhi “thinks only in continental terms” therefore no longer captures reality. Yet recognising the importance of the sea is only the first step.

The deeper question is what kind of maritime power a state ultimately chooses to become — and whether its political leadership is prepared to use that power as a deliberate instrument of statecraft, accepting the risks and the moral weight that serious seapower has always carried.

My contention is that India’s official and semi-official maritime narratives have converged around a benign conception of seapower — one that emphasises stewardship, cooperation and the provision of maritime public goods — while systematically underplaying the coercive, high-risk and legally contentious practices that serious seapowers must also be prepared to undertake. The challenge lies not only in residual continental instincts in Delhi, but in the way India’s maritime community itself has chosen to imagine the sea.

That IRIS Dena episode made the gap this essay addresses uncomfortably visible — not in the questions it raised, which are the routine currency of naval professionals worldwide, but in the silence around them. There was no institutional voice, no prepared public framework, no settled vocabulary with which India’s maritime community could meet the moment. The sea had forced its way into the conversation as a theatre of conflict governed by its own technical rules and strategic logic. The conversation was not ready for it. This essay tries to understand why — and whether it can be made ready.

India’s benign maritime self-image

India’s declaratory maritime frameworks are now well known. SAGAR—Security and Growth for All in the Region—casts India as the steward of shared commons and the provider of regional public goods. Later formulations, including MAHASAGAR and broader Indo-Pacific visions, extend this language to include blue-economy cooperation, environmental protection and regional governance.

Within this framework, India’s maritime role is increasingly described in terms of being the Indian Ocean’s “preferred security partner” and “first responder.” These formulations emphasise responsiveness to regional needs and the provision of maritime public goods rather than hierarchy or dominance. In practice, they are used to describe a wide spectrum of activities: anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden, Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief across the Indian Ocean, evacuation missions from conflict zones, and capacity-building programmes for smaller littoral states.

Institutions reinforce this narrative. Think-tanks such as the NMF emphasise “holistic maritime security”, integrating economic development, governance and environmental stewardship. Multilateral naval engagements showcase India as a convenor rather than a........

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