[Trump and the late Senator Lindsey Graham]

Two good things happened in the last few days. Trump re-started the Hormuz war, and handed all countries, lucky enough geographically to have some nearby “straits” to potentially lord over, to chuckle at the US annointing itself the “Guardian of Hormuz” and setting a precedent for them to follow in future crises in their waterway by imposing a blockade and a toll of 20% on all traffic and trade passing through it to meet, Trump said, the policing expenses.

And secondly, just like that, Senator Lindsey Graham, who had likened Trump’s presidential candidacy to “a shot in the head” for the Republican Party but since then had turned into the president’s poodle, up and died (of a cardiac arrest, or some thing) over the weekend. The scene was thus instantly vacated of an American politician who was growingly a pain in India’s neck! Most recently, he had taken to screaming for 500% tariffs on all Indian exports to America! May be he just had a bad meal at the Indian ambassador’s, who knows! More likely as a supposed Trump whisperer, Graham displayed the animus to please Donald, who post-Sindoor, pivoted markedly towards Asim Munir marshalling the Pakistani field to enrich the Trump Family.

Hope somebody in government, starting with the external affairs minister S Jaishankar is taking notes because we have three critical straits — Malacca, Lombok and Sunda to harrass China’s energy and other trade flowing through them. Applying the choke on Lombok and Sunda has become more doable after the PM’s trip to Indonesia that formalised Indian development of the Sabang port into a naval base for joint use. Some in MEA rued the fact that it was Sabang on Sumatra’s northwestern tip that had been made available rather than an inlet on the eastern end of Java or a location on Sulawesi (Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi being three main islands of that archipelagic nation), either of the latter two would have provided an opening on the South China Sea. A former ambassador to Indonesia told me that Delhi, as usual, was simply not thinking strategically and did not press Jakarta on the Java and Sulawesi options.

As it is, PLA Navy (PLAN) is reconciled to the Indian naval “steel curtain” coming down on the Malacca Strait, leaving it just the Lombok and Sunda openings to the Indian Ocean to negotiate. If these two “narrow seas” too come under stress, PLAN activity India-wards would be restricted, if not negated. This then should be the larger military objective. The more immediate concern, as I have been iterating over the past three plus decades is for India to establish a forward armed presence in China’s backyard by having Indian naval and air force elements on permanent station east of Malacca on both the littoral and archipelagic sides of the South China Sea. Meaning on Nha Trang on the central Vietnam coast and in Subic Bay and Clark’s air force base in the Philippines. Nha Trang has long been offered by Hanoi for India to exploit. And Manila would be only too happy to have Indian warships anchor at Subic and an IAF Su-30MKI squadron or two at Clark’s in support, what with the Brahmos cruise missiles already in its employ which can, if Manila is pushed, sink big PLAN ships. A brace each for the carriers Liaoning, Shandong, and Fujian, perhaps!

Such a military setup will be the only apt counter to China cementing its hold on Gwadar (under the pretext of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) and more recently in Mongla port in Bangladesh that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party of Tariq Rahman handed over to China to run, thanks to the Indian government failing to develop the port along the lines its was committed to doing. So much for Modi’s priority “neighbourhood first” policy! We have no friendly neighbours (Bhutan doesn’t count)!

The pity is not that political agreements for basing such naval and air forces in Southeast Asia are not feasible. But that the Indian government and Navy (and the military, generally) still think defensively in terms of tackling PLA, PLAAF, and PLAN only when it seeks to force an entry into the Indian Ocean which, given the Chinese navy’s size and surge capacity, may be too late.

It is in the context of chokepoints, that the MEA, unsurprisingly, rather than NOT reacting at all to renewed hostilities in the Gulf which’d have been the wise thing to do, bleated mournfully about the principle of freedom of navigation being violated. One thing the country needs less of is Delhi’s Pollyanna-ish sobbing over the imperilling of the liberal order (that freedom of navigation represents), something an ill-advised Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, too indulged in yesterday when condoling an Indian crewman’s death in an Iran missile strike on a passing tanker. What the Modi regime needs to note are the precedents being set by the US and Iran in the Hormuz Strait with respect to imposing a blockade and extracting a toll, and to gird up its loins to do the same when opportunity presents itself against China!

Geography is not just destiny, it is also good strategy and the sooner the Modi regime understands the strategic value of the chokepoints — India has six in its vicinity, other than the ones to the east, the Palk Strait, Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb on the Red Sea (that the Houthis in sympathy with Tehran have now closed off), and how, when, and why to close them, the better. As the main country centered on the Indian Ocean and astride it, India’s goal and attitude ought to be that it is India’s Ocean — not the Indian Ocean, which the Chinese strategists seek to remind Delhi that it is. It is precisely Modi’s fear of military escalation that Beijing time and again has capitalised on since Doklam and Galwan to keep India on the defensive. This state of affairs cannot, and should not, be allowed to continue.

Time India and the Indian Navy came out of Beijing’s shadow, took the initiative and the fight to China. Because, as the academia, commentariat, and media are finally beginning to appreciate, that the US is not to be trusted as strategic partner, least of all to fight India’s fight.