Andaman & Nicobar Islands: Neglected bastions

From high above, Teressa Island resembles a giant green boomerang, frozen mid-throw over an azure sea. Last December, this island in the Nicobar chain was a military objective for over 100 soldiers from an elite army unit. Leaping out of the back of a C-130J transport, paratroopers from the Agra-based Shatrujeet Brigade practised parachuting onto the island and securing a drop zone, simulating how India would react to an invasion of the islands. In a real-world scenario, it would be the entire 3,000-man brigade parachuting and airlanding to capture key installations like airfields before a larger friendly seaborne force arrived. The brigade’s emblem, a winged centaur drawing a bow, symbolises its composite capabilities. It has seen action in all of independent India’s conflicts—two successes in the modern era involved an operation behind enemy lines in erstwhile East Pakistan in 1971 and thwarting a coup in the Maldives in 1989.

From high above, Teressa Island resembles a giant green boomerang, frozen mid-throw over an azure sea. Last December, this island in the Nicobar chain was a military objective for over 100 soldiers from an elite army unit. Leaping out of the back of a C-130J transport, paratroopers from the Agra-based Shatrujeet Brigade practised parachuting onto the island and securing a drop zone, simulating how India would react to an invasion of the islands. In a real-world scenario, it would be the entire 3,000-man brigade parachuting and airlanding to capture key installations like airfields before a larger friendly seaborne force arrived. The brigade’s emblem, a winged centaur drawing a bow, symbolises its composite capabilities. It has seen action in all of independent India’s conflicts—two successes in the modern era involved an operation behind enemy lines in erstwhile East Pakistan in 1971 and thwarting a coup in the Maldives in 1989.

Graphic by Tanmoy Chakraborty

The last time the Andaman & Nicobar (A&N) Islands were invaded was 80 years ago, in 1942, when the Imperial Japanese Navy—then the most powerful naval force in Asia—drove out the British and occupied the archipelago. In recent years, the PLAN (People’s Liberation Army Navy) has mimicked the rise of the Japanese navy, growing at an astonishing speed. In 2021, it added more submarines, destroyers and amphibious assault ships to its fleet than all the warships in the Vizag-based Eastern Naval Command. This means it can continue to deploy an increasing number of warships in the Indian Ocean region, as it has done over the past decade. It also has bases in Gwadar in Pakistan and Djibouti on the horn of Africa. A strong naval force helps China project power and overcome what is called ‘Beijing’s Malacca dilemma’—of 65 per cent of its oil imports transiting through the narrow Malacca Straits.

China’s rise, and this possible maritime vulnerability, have prompted New Delhi to look more closely at the potential of its island outposts to act on that vulnerability. The 572 islands in the A&N chain, of which only 32 are inhabited, constitute an area larger than the state of Sikkim. The group sits 1,400 km from the Indian mainland—closer, in fact, to Indonesia, Myanmar and Thailand than India itself.

In a report tabled in Parliament last December, the parliamentary standing committee on defence recommen­ded that the islands be developed into ‘aircraft carriers’ of a kind. The islands, the committee said, were well suited to ‘blocking and dominating ingress routes [into the Indian Ocean], provided runways there are made operational’. The archipelago is close to three critical chokepoints—the Ombai Wetar, Lombok and Sunda straits—through which the PLAN can enter the Indian Ocean. Aircraft based on the islands would have shorter flight times to these choke points than from the Indian mainland, and submarines based from here can reach in five days instead of eight, meaning they could spend more time patrolling. Currently, India is seeking basing rights for its P-8I anti-submarine warfare aircraft on Australia’s Keeling Islands, also located near these points.

The A&N Islands currently have four airstrips, which host a handful of IAF helicopters, naval and coast guard surveillance helicopters and drones. A few patrol ships belonging to the navy and coast guard also operate in these waters. The IAF only occasionally bases fighter aircraft here—the islands are seen more as forward operating bases than full-strength military installations. The late Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat had described the islands as “unsinkable aircraft carriers”; in an October 2021 interview with india today, he said fighters operating from the islands had none of the vulnerabilities of aircraft carriers, which were expensive, vulnerable to detection and could be targeted by an adversary. (The concept of an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ originated in World War II, when the US built up a series of island airbases in the Pacific to target mainland Japan.)

This view is echoed by military analyst Rear Admiral Raja Menon, who recommends the islands be made the fulcrum of India’s strategy to counter China’s maritime buildup and offset Beijing’s overland pressure on New Delhi. In an independent paper submitted to the government last month, he writes that upgraded Chinese infrastructure in Tibet—from expressways to bullet trains—allows the PLA to swiftly move around smaller overall numbers of acclimatised troops, giving it the ability to overwhelm Indian forces at any point along the boundary. Creating an ‘eastern battlespace’ at the Malacca Straits would give India offensive options at sea, allowing the country to throttle Chinese maritime commerce and force incoming PLA naval units through a choke point where they could be targeted.

In recent years, contingency planning like this has been going on in several countries threatened by the rise of a belligerent China. In September 2021 the US, UK and Australia announced a trilateral security pact—AUKUS—to act as a force multiplier in the Indo-Pacific. On September 24, US president Joe Biden hosted the first in-person security dialogue of the Quad Leaders’ Summit in the White House, hosting PM Narendra Modi, Japan PM Yoshihide Suga and Australia PM Scott Morrison.

Emphasising the strategic location of the A&N Islands, Sujan Chinoy, director general of the MP-IDSA (Manohar Parrikar Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses) recommends opening them up to the Quad’s navies. In a June 2020 paper, he also noted that a ‘combination of economic and strategic factors has significantly enhanced the strategic salience of the Bay of Bengal and its littorals’. “The A&N Islands are at the intersection of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, and further to the Pacific Ocean, an important fulcrum of the strategic concept of the Indo-Pacific,” he says.

A SLOW AWAKENING

The strategic potential of the A&N Islands has been known for decades. They flank the Bay of Bengal, where India’s growing fleet of ballistic missile-carrying nuclear powered submarines (SSBNs) operates from. The Andaman Sea is a sanctuary from where Indian SSBNs can target both its nuclear-armed adversaries in a retaliatory second-strike. In the late 1990s, navy chief Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat had called for an upgrade of the region’s command and control system, for Fortress Andaman to be converted into a Far Eastern Command, led by a navy flag officer with deputies from the army and air force. However, the proposal was shelved, and in 2001, the island was put under India’s only tri-services command—the Andaman and Nicobar Command (ANC). It is a tiny version of what the defence ministry hopes to reorganise India’s armed forces into—five integrated theatre commands reporting to a single CDS. However, the islands are thinly defended, with few radars or surface to air missile launchers and poor infrastructure.

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In the past five years, New Delhi has been pushing to realise the economic potential of the A&N Islands. They straddle critical sea routes in southeast and east Asia—these include Duncan’s Passage, the Ten Degree channel, the Preparis and the Six Degree channel. In 2017, Rs 10,000 crore worth of potential development projects were identified. The government says it has added over 100 km of roads on these islands between 2014 and 2018. Inaugurating the first submarine optic cable to the islands in 2020, PM Modi said they would be the fulcrum of India’s blue ocean strategy.

However, building military infrastructure on the islands, over a thousand kilometres from the Indian mainland, will not be easy. Creating “unsinkable aircraft carriers” requires massive investment and several years of sustained infrastructure development. It will need tens of thousands of crores for radars and missiles, maintenance and repair facilities, runways for permanently-based fighters and long range maritime patrol aircraft, coastal defence missiles and more dock berths for warships, patrol craft and submarines.

In early 2014, when the Indian Navy deployed long-range patrol aircraft to search for MH370, the Malaysia Airlines flight that went missing that year, it found its sorties limited by the fuel supplies on the island. The tri-services command, which war-gamed military operations from the island, found glaring logistics and infrastructure shortfalls. Most vulnerabilities remain classified, but can be inferred as including limited quantities of fuel for aircraft and warships. The Su-30MKI, a heavy fighter with a range of 3,000 km, is an ideal fighter to be based on the islands. Each Su-30MKI, however, needs 12,000 litres of aviation fuel for a four-hour sortie. Both Port Blair and Car Nicobar lack twin runways (to ensure redundancy in case one is disabled). A new IAF airfield to operate fighter aircraft on the southernmost island, Great Nicobar, is yet to materialise. Since military deployments are not only about presence but also about sustenance, the armed forces will have to build large underground fuel storage tanks that will allow fighter jets to conduct more combat sorties. Freshwater desalination plants will also be needed to supply the increase in personnel. “One-off interventions from the mainland apart, the question remains—can we maintain and operate Su-30s from the Andaman Islands for prolonged deployments?” asks a retired admiral who did not want to be named. Issues like these mean the islands remain peacetime staging posts rather than permanent bases. US military historian Edward Luttwak recommends India leverage the potential of shore-based aircraft rather than aircraft carriers that are WWII relics. Delivering the MP-IDSA’s annual K. Subrahmanyam memorial lecture on February 3, he said: “The Indian Navy spends all its money on an aircraft carrier—when I look at the map, India is an aircraft carrier. The navy should be empowered to buy aircraft all along India, the Andaman & Nicobar Islands and dominate the entry to the Persian Gulf, the Suez Canal, the Straits of Malacca with multiple missiles and aircraft that cost about the [same as] a single aircraft carrier, which is vulnerable and has a limited number of combat aircraft.”

“There are infrastructure issues, but they can be addressed, ” says defence analyst Rear Admiral Sudarshan Shrikhande. “Mobile batteries like Brahmos would be very useful and less vulnerable. The islands would be useful for their dispersed air and missile launch potential as well as for Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR). There may be new complications, as there have always been for any epoch of warfare.” While the existing issues will take time to solve, the larger question of whether the A&N Islands can become significant military bases within this decade remains yet unanswered.