Head-on | Seychelles to Sumatra: India’s unfolding Indo-Pacific strategy

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visits to Seychelles, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand reveal India’s evolving strategy to build its own Indo-Pacific string of pearls. The enhanced partnership with Japan and the Great Nicobar Project in the Andaman Sea are integral to this strategy.

India’s Indo-Pacific terrain will cut an arc from Seychelles in the western Indian Ocean to Sumatra in Indonesia near the Malacca Strait, through to Japan, Australia and New Zealand, deep in the western and southern Pacific Ocean.

US President Donald Trump has tactically withdrawn from the Indo-Pacific. The shift isn’t only in narrative — renaming the US Indo-Pacific Command the US Pacific Command and downplaying the Quad. America under Trump wants to tactically withdraw from Europe as well, telling NATO to assume a greater share of Europe’s military challenges.

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Trump has decided to leave the Indo-Pacific to China. He knows that once Hong Kong reverts fully to China in 2047, as per the 50-year Sino-British agreement signed in 1997, and Taiwan eventually falls to China, by military force or diplomacy, Beijing will be an even more formidable economic and geopolitical power. Better, Trump believes, for the US to control North and South America in the western hemisphere and maintain a military presence in the Middle East while letting China and Europe take care of their areas of influence.

India does not figure in Trump’s calculations. He thinks it will be 20 years before India becomes a significant military and economic power. Even then, the Trump administration reckons, India should be left to police the Indian Ocean without bothering too much about what lies to its east and west.

That is a flawed thesis. India has already begun to act east and west. Consider the special partnership signed with Seychelles during Modi’s visit late last month. Seychelles is an archipelago of 115 islands in the western Indian Ocean, off East Africa. Seychelles lies close to the Gulf of Aden and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, a chokepoint between the Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa.

Nearly 80 per cent of seaborne oil trade goes through the Indian Ocean and past Arabian and African ports and straits. Following the raft of economic and security agreements signed with Seychelles President Patrick Herminie, India now has access to a crucial geopolitical asset in close proximity to both West Asia and East Africa.

India is meanwhile building new transhipment ports on its western and eastern coasts. Vizhinjam International Seaport in Kerala is already handling large ships that might earlier have used Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port which has a 99-year lease with a Chinese company. The Rs 76,000 crore Vadhavan Port under construction in Maharashtra will be one of Asia’s largest deep-water ports when it becomes operational later this decade, competing with mega ports in Dubai and Singapore.

The Great Nicobar Project in the Andaman Sea fits into India’s overall marine strategy. Located just 100 miles from the northern tip of Indonesia, the Great Nicobar transhipment port will overlook the Malacca Strait through which over 30 per cent of China’s seaborne trade passes.

During Modi’s visit to Indonesia earlier this month, it was decided that India and Indonesia will jointly develop Sabang Port located near northern Sumatra at the strategic entrance of the Malacca Strait. Thus India will have assets at both the entrance (Sabang) and exit (Nicobar) of the Malacca Strait, a prospect that is causing deep concern in Beijing.

But India’s Indo-Pacific arc extends even further. It curves north to Japan and south to Australia and New Zealand. The agreements signed with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi during her visit this month and with the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand give India access to China’s backyard in the western Pacific Ocean.

Weaponising the sea

For decades India was slow to use its long coastline to develop a port-led trading ecosystem. That has changed. The Indian Navy too has been modernised with two aircraft carriers and three nuclear-powered submarines (SSBNs) armed with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. These give India’s military a cutting-edge presence in the Indo-Pacific.

The sale of BrahMos and Astra missiles to countries in Southeast Asia has raised India's military profile in the region. Littoral nations have noted China’s aggressive militarisation of atolls in the South China Sea and increasingly look upon India as a counterweight to Beijing in a region largely abandoned by the Trump administration.

The view in Washington is dismissive. Deputy Secretary of state Christopher Landau let the cat out of the bag at a New Delhi security conference earlier this year when he said that the US would not make the same mistake with India as it did with China. What was that mistake? Allowing China to steal US technology secrets for 30 years, enabling Beijing to become a tech superpower.

But the analogy with India is wrong. The US has never helped India by giving it access to its proprietary technology. Instead it has undermined India by imposing sweeping sanctions on India after the 1974 and 1998 nuclear tests in Pokhran. This was the era — from the 1970s to the 1990s – when China had full access to US universities and research laboratories. US sanctions on China came only later — a case of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. For India, it was the reverse. The stable door was always shut.

Historical change though is afoot. According to the IMF, US share of global GDP was 30.5 per cent in 2000. In 2025, its share fell to 25 per cent. The fall was even steeper in GDP measured by purchasing power parity (PPP). In 2000, US share of global GDP (PPP) was 21 per cent. In 2025, its share plunged to 14 per cent.

America’s decline is matched by China and India’s ascent. In 2000, China’s share of global GDP (PPP) was 7 per cent. In 2025, it nearly trebled to 20 per cent. In 2000, India’s share of global GDP (PPP) was a mere 4 per cent. In 2025 it more than doubled to 9 per cent.

The next decade will see the greatest shift in global power from west to east. The Indo-Pacific — from Africa and the Middle East to Indonesia, Japan and Australia — will form India’s lengthening arc of global influence.

(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)