The manufactured glorious maritime history does not strengthen India
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 government commenced a review of India’s maritime boundary. In the recent annual report (2023-2024), the ministry of home affairs (MHA) says that the ongoing review proposes the total length of India’s maritime boundary as 11,098.81 km. This review, once approved, would validate the navy’s position that India is a maritime nation. If statistics were to be the determinant of a nation’s characteristic, then here are two more. One, of the total landmass of India (about 32,87,000sqkm), the landlocked part comprises 18,75,824sqkm, which is about 57 per cent of the country’s area. But more important than that is the number of people living in this area: 65 per cent of the Indian population. Of this, at least 20 per cent are directly affected by the consequences of the disputed land borders.
Before getting into the fallacy of the claim that historically India has been a maritime nation, first the three reasons why the government is furthering this idea. One, the US’ discovery of the utility of the Indian Navy for its policing job, first in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), and now in what it has renamed as the Indo-Pacific. This has enhanced the stature of India’s smallest military service, enabling it to punch well above its actual weight. Regular exercises with the US Navy under the rubric of QUAD has fuelled the ambition to operate across the oceans; an ambition severely reined in by the limitations of funds. But this hasn’t deterred analysts from spouting that navy’s collaboration with QUAD can become the springboard for propelling India into the big league. Hence, manufacturing of a national maritime history as a continuum.
Two, the border disputes on the north and the west have indeed hemmed India in. They have not only impacted its bilateral and multilateral relations in the neighbourhood, they also challenge its self-projection as a rival power to China. The sea, by contrast, appears more accommodative of projectionism.
Three, harking back to the ancient or medieval maritime history fits in with the ministry of defence’s Project Udbhav, which seeks to trace India’s ‘military glory’ before the arrival of the outsiders (Afghans, Turks, Central Asians, basically all Muslims) who came via the land route and ruled over mostly the landlocked part of India. Their maritime interest was limited to pilgrimage and some trade, most of which was plied by the Europeans, 16th century onwards. For all the glorification of the naval power of the Marathas or the Zamorins of Kerala, the only empire that used its navy to expand its influence beyond its territory was the Chola dynasty with Tamil Nadu as its base. Between the 5th-11th centuries, Cholas had most of Sri Lanka under their influence and several parts of Southeast Asia, including present-day Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia. But Cholas were not a pan-India empire. The limit of their northward expansion was coastal Orissa.
This brings us to the fallacy of the maritime history argument. The first time there was a semblance of one nation, one polity and one economy was when the ‘outsiders’ who ruled from the landlocked part of India started to expand towards the Deccan plateau. The first king to do so was Alauddin Khalji. However, the maximalist notion of a united polity and hence a country was achieved, howsoever briefly, during the reign of Aurangzeb.
Yet, the idea of a country doesn’t emerge from mere technical or historical details. It emerges from the lived-in experiences of the people of that country. Most of the predominantly defining aspects of the Indian nation have emerged from the landlocked part of it—religion for example. Look no further than the recently concluded Kumbh mela.
Seventy-eight years after throwing off the yoke of ‘outsiders’, it is not only shortsighted but dangerous to divide the country as maritime and landlocked. Remember, the ocean is only as safe as the land borders. You cannot have a dispute on one and cooperation on another. After all, it’s one country, silly.