Asia’s rising giants are eyeing each other with trepidation across the Indian Ocean. As China and India modernise their navies and extend their strategic reach from the Malacca Strait to the Gulf of Aden, there is growing concern of a maritime ‘great game’ unfolding on the world’s most international waters. Given the longstanding tensions over their disputed land border, mutual anxieties about being contained, and both states’ rapid expansion of ‘blue-water’ naval capabilities, conditions appear ripe for Sino-Indian competition at sea.
Recent events seem to support this assessment. When, in late August, two Chinese warships sailed into Thilawa, Burma, for the PLA Navy’s (PLAN’s) first ever port call on its strategically-located neighbour, suspicions in New Delhi were keenly aroused. Coming just months after Beijing sent high-level delegations to attend arms and infrastructure talks in Burma and Bangladesh – both ostensibly ‘strategic partners’ of India – many Indian analysts saw the PLAN visit as further evidence of China’s growing assertiveness in India’s backyard. Expressing concern over what he regarded as ‘[China’s] more than … normal interest in Indian Ocean affairs’, Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna responded by announcing that New Delhi would intensify efforts to monitor PLAN activities in the region.4 A few weeks later, as if on cue, Indian officials confirmed plans to purchase 12 P-8I Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft from the United States.5 Regardless of any direct connection, such developments suggest that strategic jostling and tit-for-tat policy choices are becoming increasingly frequent in Sino-Indian affairs. Read More
The map above is the old Silk Road, amazing despite of incredible technology advancement, today the sea trade route just about same as 600 or more years ago. So our life still revolved around, much depend on transportation whether that is sea or air and land or digital. As long as human life in the earth we need trade, possessor or possesses is name of game, that is not much difference from 600 years ago and today trade, for sure! YSK-W
