The key competitor that China faces in the Indian Ocean Region is India. India has responded to China’s expanding naval activities by building up its own naval capabilities including naval infrastructure. This includes procurement of surveillance drones such as MQ-9B Sea Guardian to monitor Chinese maritime movements. The Government of India’s push for a major military and infrastructure upgrade of its Andaman and Nicobar Islands (especially given the proximity to the Malacca Strait) is a case in point. Runway expansion at the Indian Naval Station Kohassa in North Andamans to support P-8I maritime patrol aircraft is a key development, but the upgradation involves overall development of the island as a trading and maritime hub. Additional work being planned include development of an international container trans-shipment terminal, a dual-use civil and military airport, a power plant in the Great Nicobar Island.

India has also sought to improve relations with the littoral states. India’s initiatives such as SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) with the goal of enhancing cooperation with the maritime neighbours in the Indian Ocean are good steps, but scaling up cooperation in terms of capacity building for smaller neighbours in the region appears to be a challenge still. The SAGAR was given an additional boost with the Modi Government announcing a new and expanded maritime outreach initiative, titled MAHASAGAR, which stands for “Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions”. The new initiative, announced by Modi in a speech during his visit to Mauritius in March 2025, is meant to move away from a limited regional focus in the Indian Ocean to a broader proactive maritime engagement across the wider Indo-Pacific.

In addition, India has cooperated with strategic partners such as the US, Australia and Japan through the Quad in order to strengthen their capabilities in the region, both in providing economic and other assistance to the region but also countering China’s expanding naval capabilities. For example, India conducts the Malabar series of naval exercises which now include all the Quad partners. In fact, the primary focus of the Quad is on maritime security and specifically, on maritime and underwater domain awareness, which is another way of referring to monitoring Chinese naval activities in the region.

But this kind of cooperation among the Quad and such other partnerships have to shift from sporadic to one that is undertaken with a fair amount of frequency for meaningful effectiveness against sustained Chinese presence and expansion in the Indian Ocean. The Quad’s Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) can become a more sustained and institutional cooperation initiative in this regard. Considering the technological strengths of the four countries including in space, IPMDA is a key tool for the Quad to continually monitor maritime activities across the Indo-Pacific, an essential step for regional security and stability. But that the Quad countries have eschewed substantive defence cooperation is a limitation on the effectiveness in counter-balancing China and this needs to be addressed by the Quad partners.

Further, India has concluded reciprocal military logistics agreements with a number of maritime partners including the US, France, Australia and Japan as well as countries like Oman, which are helpful in keeping track of China’s presence in Djibouti and the broader Indian Ocean Region. Along with better coordination, such agreements could lead to some sort of division of labour and burden sharing among these countries considering that every country cannot be involved in every single theatre of action.

India also hosts the Information Fusion Centre – Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR), near Delhi, which is also designed to provide greater awareness of maritime activities around the Indian Ocean. However, it must also be noted that as China’s naval capabilities get enhanced, India is unlikely to be able to keep pace by itself. China already has three aircraft carriers with more on the way and all of them are larger than the two India currently has. While China’s current attention is focused on the Taiwan Strait, and the South and East China Seas, it should be expected that China will turn its attention to the Indian Ocean as its capabilities improve and whenever the Taiwan issue is resolved.