India has just launched the US$3 billion-over budget INS Vikrant. But are expensive aircraft carriers the answer to the threat China poses? Tim Marshall looks at the tensions between the two emerging superpowers
Geopolitical Hotspot
We’re gonna need a bigger boat’ as the Indian navy said to the New Delhi government in 2009. Thirteen years later, six years behind schedule, and only US$3 billion over budget, India’s first domestically built aircraft carrier has finally been commissioned, meaning it has been placed in active service.
The INS Vikrant (Courageous) is big: 262 metres long, 62 metres wide, 18 storeys high, and with a kitchen built to serve up 16,000 chapattis a day for the 1,600-strong crew (yes, some people do eat ten or more a day…). A different sort of fuel gives the carrier a top speed of 28 knots and a range of 7,500 nautical miles. This means it could travel across the Indian and Atlantic oceans to South America without having to dock.
But why did they need a bigger boat in an age of increased threats to aircraft carriers from long-range missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles? Some military analysts argue that carriers have had their day, others believe that ‘big surface platform’ ships remain relevant because of the power projection they deliver. In India, the UK, USA, and Japan, carriers have certainly carried the latter argument. Oh, and in China as well – and if China has them, India wants them.
Tensions between the two countries along their 3,800-kilometre-long land border occasionally make headlines, such as when four Chinese and 20 Indian troops died during a clash in the Himalaya in 2020, but their growing rivalry at sea goes almost unnoticed. Earlier this year China launched its third aircraft carrier and the People’s Liberation Army Navy now has about 355 vessels, almost three times as many as India. Since 2008 China has maintained a naval presence in the Indian Ocean with several vessels continuously on patrol. The Indians have refrained from aggressively shadowing them so as not to raise tensions to the levels seen along the land border, but the more assertive China becomes, the more India will have to respond.
An example came last month when a Chinese vessel, the Yuan Wang 5, docked at the strategically significant, and Chinese-built, Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka. Its arrival had been delayed for several days after India raised security concerns about the ship. Beijing insists it is only used for scientific research, but the Indians (and the USA) believe it is a military ship with the capability to track satellites and missile launches. New Delhi suspects the Yuan Wang 5’s tracking targets were India’s spaceport in Sriharikota and a missile test range in Odisha. There was an irritable and public exchange of views between the two countries about the incident.
New Delhi permanently deploys warships at five choke points in the Indian Ocean between the Gulf of Aden and the Malacca Strait. The INS Vikrant shows how the country is now factoring in a far-ranging maritime strategy to its defence posture which has traditionally been focused on land-based conflicts. The navy conducts exercises in the western Pacific with its three partners in the ‘Quad’ group of nations – the USA, Japan and Australia. Now, with the ability to deploy a carrier on both its eastern and western flanks it will be able to contribute one to the exercises and still have the other in the Indian Ocean. As he launched the INS Vikrant, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: ‘In the past, security concerns in the Indo-Pacific region and the Indian Ocean have long been ignored, but today this area is a major defence priority of the country for us.’
The launch was part of the country’s celebration of 75 years of independence from British rule and at the ceremony, the new ensign of the Indian Navy was unveiled. Out went the dominating St George’s cross, oddly left on after the British had run away, and in came the seal of the great Maratha emperor Chhatrapati Shivaji (1674-1680) who built a naval fleet of 60 fighting ships and ‘secured the coastline against external aggression’.
China reacted to the Vikrant with an article in the Global Times warning India not to be fooled by Western ‘flattery’. Apparently, India’s second carrier, and plans for a third, were part of a western plot against China: ‘Their intention couldn’t be any clearer… they want to instigate tension and even confrontation between China and India.’ It was important, said the article, that India did not regard China as its main rival because if so, it would ‘only become a cannon fodder’. That third Indian aircraft carrier looks likely.
