These previous few turbulent months have seen a quiet change within the language of reportage of strategic conversations. Chokepoints, sea lanes, freedom of navigation, and different such phrases had been confined to skilled navy training and naval employees schools. They now seem in enterprise bulletins and prime-time panels.
The Strait of Hormuz, shuttered by Israeli and U.S. strikes in February, and the Houthi blockade towards Saudi Arabia declared on July 20 have completed what a long time of naval commentary couldn’t. They’ve made the ocean’s chokepoints a matter of arm-chair commentary and coffee-table chats.
There’s a quiet irony on this. The vocabulary the world is just now buying was written into Indian naval strategic lexicon some a long time in the past, within the plainest attainable phrases. In 2007, the Indian Navy printed an unclassified doc, titled “Freedom to make use of the seas: India’s maritime navy technique”. Its founding premise is “the liberty to make use of the seas for our nationwide functions, underneath all circumstances”. That was not a slogan reaching for impact. It was a doctrine, written practically twenty years earlier than Hormuz made the phrase in style.
As India enters its eightieth yr of Independence, that hole between what the Navy has lengthy understood and what the broader public is just now discovering is value a reflective pause. It factors to a fact that hardly ever will get advised in full: the liberty of this nation has at all times been, first and final, the liberty of its ocean. Not a metaphor stretched to suit the event, however the literal, load-bearing truth of how India has fed itself, traded, defended its shores, and projected its confidence into the world. A nation’s sovereignty and its command of the ocean lanes that maintain it will not be two tales working in parallel. They’re the identical story.
A maritime nation
August 15 is conventionally narrated as a land story of borders drawn, provinces divided, a line struck throughout Punjab and Bengal by a person who had by no means visited India earlier than. It’s a honest telling, however a partial one, and it has quietly crowded out a richer inheritance. It drowns out the truth that India’s oldest and most enduring declare to greatness has been maritime, not territorial. Okay.M. Panikkar made the sharper model of this argument in India and the Indian Ocean (1945): India’s subjugation was not basically a narrative of armies overrun on land, however of a civilisation that had, over centuries, ceded command of the ocean to whoever selected to contest it. The colonial interval didn’t start with a land invasion. It started with ships arriving at ports India may not management. The corollary is the one value dwelling on because the nation marked the Independence Day of 2026 when India has been most itself, most affluent, most assured, and most outward-facing than ever. It’s as a result of the nation held the ocean, not merely the land beneath its toes.
An influence value naming correctly
Earlier than it was misplaced, Indian maritime prowess was formidable, and that is value stating plainly fairly than in passing. The Satavahanas constructed sustained prosperity on Indo-Roman commerce working by Malabar’s ports. The Cholas, at their peak, fielded naval forces that reached into Southeast Asia, not for territorial conquest, in Rajendra Chola’s Eleventh-century expedition towards Srivijaya, however to maintain the ocean lanes freed from piracy and to venture the authority of an Indian energy throughout two oceans.
Chinese language chronicles of the Track dynasty report embassies from the Chola kings, a reminder that Indian sea energy as soon as commanded recognition so far as the courts of East Asia. By the twelfth century, 1 / 4 of the world’s financial output is estimated to have run by Indian shores. This was a maritime economic system, constructed and held by Indian fingers, centuries earlier than any European fleet entered these waters.
That command didn’t decay for need of ability or ambition. State patronage for shipbuilding receded, and non secular injunctions towards crossing the ocean took maintain in elements of the subcontinent, discouraging precisely the seafaring that had constructed Chola and Satavahana wealth. Into the vacuum stepped Arab and Chinese language merchants, and later European fleets carrying no such inhibitions. As a substitute of a pseudo eulogy on “Indian Information Programs”, the lesson value carrying into this anniversary just isn’t certainly one of loss dwelt upon, however of proof already furnished. India has held the ocean earlier than, decisively and by itself phrases, and is aware of exactly what it takes to take action once more.
Resistance with no ‘doctrine’
And when the ocean needed to be reclaimed, it was Indians who did the reclaiming, properly earlier than any trendy navy existed to do it for them. The Kunjali Marakkars held the Malabar coast towards Portuguese carracks for the higher a part of a century, utilizing shallow-draught vessels to use geography the heavier European ships couldn’t observe into. Kanhoji Angre, from his forts alongside the Konkan coast, turned Maratha sea energy right into a standing irritant that European buying and selling fleets couldn’t dislodge for many years. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, who held that mastery of the ocean was the mark of a very formidable energy, constructed the forts and the fleet that made Angre’s resistance attainable within the first place.
Neither the Marakkars nor Sarkhel Angre had entry to the phrase “doctrine”. However what they practised as uneven resistance, calibrated to disclaim an adversary free use of the ocean, is recognisably the identical logic the Indian Navy would later decide to paper. It’s a lineage value being happy with by itself phrases a couple of centuries earlier than India had a navy within the trendy sense. It had Indians who refused to cede a imaginative and prescient and an operational maintain over the oceans.
Repeated argument
What’s much less typically advised is how a lot of a self-actuation it took to hold Panikkar’s 1945 warning to a Navy that writes its personal doctrine. Impartial India’s strategic tradition, for a lot of its first 4 a long time, remained stubbornly land-centric. One can perceive this, given wars fought in 1962 and 1971 have been alongside the northern and western borders. The ocean, even because it carried the majority of India’s commerce, struggled to carry the eye of a strategic institution consumed by the “two-front” framing of Pakistan and China. It took a sustained line of naval thinkers to maintain the maritime case alive towards that gravitational pull.
Rear Admiral Raja Menon’s writing by the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s pressed the argument for a codified Indian maritime technique together with sea denial, pressure construction, the self-discipline of eager about the ocean as a theatre in its personal proper at a time when the institutional intuition nonetheless deferred reflexively to the Military. Admiral Arun Prakash, each as Chief of the Naval Workers and within the years since, has been a persistent public voice for indigenous shipbuilding, naval modernisation, and the case that maritime energy just isn’t an adjunct to India’s strategic autonomy however a precondition for it.
Every era, in impact, needed to re-argue what Panikkar had already mentioned in 1945. And every spherical of arguing ultimately hardened into doctrine: the Indian Maritime Doctrine of 2004, Freedom to Use the Seas in 2007, Guaranteeing Safe Seas in 2015, and now the MAHASAGAR imaginative and prescient and the Indian Navy Maritime Safety Technique of 2026. This isn’t a narrative of sudden foresight. It’s a story of an argument that needed to be received repeatedly, inside India, earlier than it could possibly be written down.
Doctrine meets its second
The occasions of this yr haven’t required the Navy to revise its pondering a lot as affirm it. The Indian Ocean’s 9 chokepoints, by which greater than 60% of the world’s maritime commerce and a few 80% of its oil strikes, have behaved precisely because the doctrine anticipated they may, as factors of leverage, not mere geography. One can simply recall the dimensions of the Hormuz disruption earlier this yr and the delivery delays and value spikes that adopted even the specter of closure. What’s value noting on this explicit anniversary just isn’t the disaster itself, however the truth that India’s naval institution had already constructed its planning assumptions round precisely this sort of contingency.
Freedom as a verb, not a plaque
Independence Day tends to be marked as commemoration of one thing that occurred in 1947. The maritime report suggests a unique grammar. “Freedom to make use of the seas… underneath all circumstances” just isn’t a monument. It’s a standing verb, one thing that must be exercised constantly, contested afresh with each era, as Sardar Panikkar, Raja Menon, Arun Prakash and plenty of others understood in flip.
The Navy’s present management speaks in the identical register. Taking cost because the twenty seventh Chief of the Naval Workers this Might, Admiral Krishna Swaminathan famous that the Indian Navy “stands vigilant to guard nationwide pursuits wherever they’re and may be very actively deployed in a regional safety atmosphere that continues to stay difficult, advanced, unpredictable, and unsure”. Coming within the state of affairs of the Hormuz blockade and as we now see the Houthi motion, it reads much less like a routine assumption-of-command comment than a restatement of what the doctrine has mentioned since 2007. The Indian Navy chief has said what each strategist should be unequivocal about: freedom to make use of the seas, underneath all circumstances, just isn’t claimed simply as soon as. It’s exercised constantly, or it’s not actually held ever.
Eighty years in the past, the Indian Navy inherited a handful of former Royal Navy vessels and little else. Right now, it operates from a doctrine the remainder of the world is just starting to learn, commanded by officers who converse of vigilance as a everlasting situation fairly than a disaster response. That’s India’s maritime inheritance, correctly understood on its eightieth Independence Day. It isn’t merely a border patrol and never even a shoreline to be defended as an afterthought to the land. It calls to the very premise on which the nation’s freedom was constructed, misplaced twice over: in Kunjali Marakkar’s century and on this one, now duly reclaimed.
Commodore (Dr) Johnson Odakkal is a maritime scholar, strategic affairs analyst, and Indian Navy veteran. He serves as Adjunct School of Maritime and Strategic Research at Naval Battle School, Goa.
