The myth of sudden importance of Andaman and Nicobar Islands 

Sudeep Chakravarti

There is no dispute about the strategic importance of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. For India the islands are a priceless asset. Only now they appear to have evolved from the material to the mythical—a dangerous presumption. The islands need to be addressed for their real measure.

Since March 2026, when the Strait of Hormuz was demonstrated yet again as a chokepoint, this buzzword has extended itself several thousand kilometres east to the Bay of Bengal. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are now being projected as India’s greatest chokepoint against China. Indeed, the world.

The islands sit atop the sea lanes that emerge from the Strait of Malacca—with Great Nicobar marking the northern tip and Indonesia’s Aceh the southern point about 150 kilometres away; hardly a gap for combat aircraft, shipborne or land-based missiles, or interdiction by naval vessels. This oceanic artery  carries nearly a quarter of the world’s trade—and nearly two-thirds of China’s; and about 80 per cent of its oil and gas imports. It is easy to see the significance from an Indian perspective when ‘chokepoint’ has become a 24/7 aspect of geostrategic grammar.

Several Indian analysts have begun insisting on India’s urgent need to ‘militarise’ the southernmost islands in the archipelago. Indeed, some of them have insisted—largely as a response to an opposition party leader championing the ecological treasures of these islands—that an ambitious port project centred on Galathea Bay on Great Nicobar must be constructed as a bulwark to India’s present and future enemies. One such prominent and inordinately loquacious analyst went as far as to suggest this May that India ought to stop looking west and look east instead.

Besides being a about three decades behind India’s foreign policy and strategic reorientation, and more than two decades behind actualisation of the Andaman and Nicobar process, as it were, the chatter is disingenuous and diminishes credit due to India’s strategic planners and executors. Such analyses also dismiss the ecological destruction and policy finessing in Andaman and Nicobar in the name of nationa