First Person | One Nation, Many Challenges

Ghazala Wahab

A year ago, while inaugurating an administrative block (named Chola after the medieval South Indian dynasty) at the Naval War College in Goa, defence minister Rajnath Singh said, “We were once known as a ‘landlocked coun­try with sea shores’, but now we can be seen as an ‘island country with land borders’.” This interesting turn of phrase fascinated him so much that he repeated the same line while addressing the Naval Commanders’ Conference in September last year.

More recently, some academic analysts with the job of expounding upon the government’s foreign policy, have also started explaining why India has historically been a ‘maritime nation’ and its only because of the land border disputes with Paki­stan and China that it acquired a land-oriented perspective, thereby ‘severely constraining’ its pol­icymaking, especially in the realm of diplomacy.

The Indian Navy has been asserting this for over two decades, primarily to get a relatively bigger share in the defence budget. Since India’s total land border is 15,106.7 km and the coastline half of it at 7,516.6 km, one of the arguments that the navy has made is that the naval equivalent of the land border should be the maritime border and not the coastline. To calculate the maritime bor­der, a cartographical line must be drawn outside the coastline, taking the outermost part (the one which juts out the most into the ocean) as the baseline. For instance, if one were to start drawing the border from northwest India, then Dwarka in Gujarat would form the baseline, from which the boundary would be 12 nautical miles into the sea, encompassing India’s territorial waters.

Finally heeding the navy’s argument, some time back the gover