Rahul Gandhi vs Great Nicobar Project: India can’t afford this debate

Rahul Gandhi visited Great Nicobar Island recently, walked through its forests on camera, and declared the government’s Rs 81,000 crore development project “one of the biggest scams and gravest crimes against this country’s natural and tribal heritage in our lifetime”. He called it “destruction dressed in development’s language”. He said millions of trees were marked for the axe, and that he would try to stop it.

There is a word for this kind of politics. It is not environmentalism. It is not activism. It is strategic illiteracy, performed at a moment when India’s geographic assets have never mattered more, dressed in the language of conscience to obscure the fact that the people making this argument have no credible answer to the question it raises: if not Great Nicobar, then what exactly is India’s plan for the Strait of Malacca?

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That question deserves an answer. Let’s start with geography.

The Strait of Hormuz has dominated headlines since the United States and Israel struck Iran in late February. This led to Tehran closing off one of the world’s critical energy corridors and sending crude prices above $140 per barrel. But there is another strait, quieter in the current news cycle, that carries even more weight in the calculus of global power.

The Strait of Malacca, the narrow channel between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, is the busiest shipping lane on earth. Over 102,500 vessels transited it in 2025 alone, according to Malaysia’s Marine Department. It carries between 22 per cent and 30 per cent of all global maritime trade — roughly $3.5 trillion in annual cargo flows. In the first half of 2025, approximately 23.2 million barrels of oil moved through it every day, accounting for 29 per cent of all global maritime oil trade.

Now consider what that means for China. Roughly 80 per cent of China’s oil imports pass through the Strait of Malacca. Two-thirds of its total maritime trade transits this waterway. At its narrowest point — the Phillips Channel near Singapore — the strait is just 2.7 kilometres wide. This is China’s great strategic vulnerability, so well understood in Beijing that former President Hu Jintao formally named it the “Malacca Dilemma” in a Communist Party Central Committee address in 2003. In a conflict scenario, a naval blockade of the Malacca Strait would strangle the Chinese economy within weeks. China’s strategic petroleum reserve covers an estimated 40 to 50 days of imports. After that, the lights begin to go out.

Great Nicobar Island sits 40 nautical miles from the entrance to this waterway.

India has administered the Andaman and Nicobar Islands since 1947. For most of those years, it administered them as a remote administrative inconvenience rather than a forward strategic platform. The Andaman and Nicobar Command, established in 2001 as India’s only tri-services command, was chronically underfunded and under-resourced for over a decade after its formation. INS Baaz, India’s most southerly naval air station at Campbell Bay on Great Nicobar, remained limited in capability and reach. The island closest to the most strategically important chokepoint in Asia sat largely dormant, its potential untapped, its infrastructure minimal.

The Great Nicobar project is the decision to stop wasting that position.

What Is Actually Being Built and Why It Matters

The project has four components. The International Container Transshipment Terminal at Galathea Bay is planned to handle up to 16 million containers a year when fully completed, with the first phase aiming for 4 million containers by 2028. The port will have a natural harbour depth exceeding 20 metres, capable of accommodating the world’s largest container vessels without dredging. Then there is a planned greenfield international airport with a 3,300-metre runway capable of handling wide-body aircraft, apart from a 450 MW gas and solar power plant. This will all require a planned township for up to 65,000 residents.

The commercial logic is straightforward, but the scale of the problem it addresses is poorly understood. Currently, nearly 75 per cent of India’s transshipped cargo moves through foreign ports — Colombo, Singapore and Port Klang in Malaysia. Indian exporters pay terminal handling fees in foreign currency at these hubs, then wait for feeder connections to mainline vessels. This arrangement costs India hundreds of millions of dollars annually in foreign exchange, adds days to transit times, and leaves Indian logistics entirely at the mercy of foreign port authorities and their pricing decisions. A transshipment hub at Great Nicobar, positioned directly on the East-West shipping corridor, eliminates that dependency and brings the fees, the jobs and the trade intelligence home.

But the commercial case, solid as it is, is a footnote to the strategic one.

China has spent the better part of two decades trying to solve its “Malacca Dilemma”. Its “String of Pearls” strategy — a network of Chinese-funded and influenced ports across the Indian Ocean Region — is the clearest expression of that effort. Gwadar in Pakistan, developed under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor with $62 billion in Chinese investment since 2013. Hambantota in Sri Lanka, now on a 99-year lease to a Chinese state company after Colombo defaulted on loan payments. Kyaukphyu in Myanmar, connecting Yunnan province to the Bay of Bengal via oil and gas pipelines operational since 2013 and 2017 respectively. Djibouti, where China opened its first overseas military base in 2017. Port projects in Bangladesh, the Maldives, and across East Africa. China is methodically constructing a maritime architecture around India, and it has been doing so without pause or apology for two decades.

India’s response to this encirclement cannot be diplomatic protests and wishful thinking about multilateral frameworks. The only credible strategic counter is Indian physical presence at points of leverage in the Indian Ocean. Great Nicobar is the most important of those points. A fully developed dual-use military and commercial hub 40 nautical miles from the Strait of Malacca means that any Chinese naval calculation in the eastern Indian Ocean must now account for Indian surveillance, Indian response capacity, and Indian ability to monitor and, if necessary, interdict traffic through the world’s most critical shipping lane. This does not require a permanent blockade or aggressive posturing. Presence alone changes the equation. It is why China has built Gwadar. It is why China has built Djibouti. It is the oldest principle in maritime strategy: you do not need to use a chokepoint to benefit from being near one.

The Iran war has made this argument sharper, not weaker. The Hormuz closure demonstrated, in real time and at real cost, what happens when a state controls a maritime chokepoint and decides to use it. India was fortunate this time. Tehran named it a friendly nation. Indian vessels were granted passage. But that goodwill is situational. It depends on the political disposition of whoever runs Iran, on the state of India-Iran relations at any given moment, on calculations India cannot fully control. What India can control is its own position relative to the Malacca Strait. The project at Great Nicobar is a step towards structural advantage rather than situational luck.

The Opposition Argument, Examined Honestly

Now for the trees Rahul Gandhi is so worried about. It would be dishonest to dismiss the environmental concerns entirely. The project will require felling approximately 9.64 lakh trees, the government’s own figure, across roughly 160 square kilometres of forest — about 10 per cent of the island’s total area.

These concerns deserve honest engagement rather than outright dismissal.

But they should — at their core — be demands for better implementation, not for the project to be scrapped in toto. Forests, even primary rainforests, can be managed, offset and, over time, partially restored. Indigenous communities can and have been protected within development zones when the political will exists to enforce that protection. However, the strategic position India occupies at Great Nicobar cannot be recreated.

When Rahul Gandhi posts a video of himself walking through Great Nicobar’s forests and calls the project a scam, he is not making an environmental argument. He is making a political one. And the politics land in a very specific place: they provide exactly the narrative that China, and others with an interest in India remaining a passive presence in the Indian Ocean, would choose to amplify. That this narrative comes dressed in the language of tribal rights and ecological sensitivity does not change what it does. It gives opponents of Indian strategic ambition a domestic Indian voice to cite.

India’s choice at Great Nicobar is, at its core, a choice about what kind of power India intends to be in the decades ahead. A passive custodian of geography it declines to use, or a maritime power that understands the game being played in the Indian Ocean and decides to play it better. Dubai was desert when it built Jebel Ali. Singapore was a swamp when it built its port. Great Britain was a small island when it understood that naval power and chokepoint control were the keys to global influence. The lesson was never that geography guaranteed greatness. The lesson was that geography, activated by will and investment, created greatness.

The window to activate Great Nicobar will not remain open indefinitely. China is not waiting. The Indian Ocean is not waiting. And the Malacca Strait, through which 80 per cent of China’s oil passes every single day, does not care whether India has made up its mind.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)