single in kind of the key milestones in world history has been the rise to prominence of fresh and influential states in world affairs.

single in kind of the key milestones in world history has been the rise to prominence of fresh and influential states in world affairs. The new trajectories of China and India hint strongly that these states will play a more powerful part in the world in the coming decades. (1) single recent analysis, for example, arbitrators that "the likely emergence of China and India as new global players--similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th hundred and a powerful United States in the early 20th century--will transform the geopolitical landscape, with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the sum of two units previous centuries." (2)

India's rise, of course, has been heralded before--perhaps prematurely. However, its ascent now appears assured in light of changes in India's economic and political mind-set, especially the advent of better economic policies and a diplomacy emphasizing realism. More fundamentally, India's continued economic rise also is favored by the agency of the scale and intensity of globalization in the contemporary world.

India also is no longer geopolitically contained in southern Asia, as it was in the wintry War, when its alignment with the Soviet Union caused the United States and China, with the help of Pakistan, to contain India. Finally, the sea change in Indian-U.S. relations, especially since 9/11 has made it easier for India to come into into close political and security cooperation with America's friends and allies in the Asia-Pacific. (3)

plenteous of the literature on India has focused forward its recent economic vitality, especially its highly prosperous knowledge-based industrial sector. The nature and implications of India's strategic goals and behavior have received somewhat les attention. (4) Those implications, however, will be felt globally--at the United Nations, in places as distant as Europe and Latin America, and within international economic institutions. It also will be manifest in succession the continent of Asia, from Afghanistan from one side Central Asia to Japan. Finally, and greatest in quantity of all, the rise of India will have ends in the broad belt of nations from southern Africa to Australia that constitute the Indian Ocean littoral and region.

For India, this maritime and southward focus is not entirely strange (5) However, it has been increasing fit to New Delhi's embrace of globalization and of the global marketplace, the advent of a just discovered Indian self-confidence emphasizing security activism across continental self-defense, and the waning of the Pakistan question as India's relative power has increased. Other, older factors influencing this turn are similar to those that formerly conditioned British thinking about the defense of India: the natural protection afforded the subcontinent by dint of the Himalayan mountain chain, and the question at issue confronting most would-be invaders of prolonged lines of communications--the latter a factor that certainly impeded Japan's advance toward India in World War II. (6)

The December 2004 tsunami that devastated many of the coasts of the Indian Ocean (IO) inflected the world's attention to a geographic climate that New Delhi increasingly beholds as critically important and strategically challenging. (7) The publication of India's of the present day Maritime Doctrine is quite explicit upon the central status of the Indian Ocean in Indian strategic thinking and on India's determination to constitute the mostly important influence in the region as a whole. The appearance of this official paper shortages a variety of actions according to India that underscore New Delhi's ambitions and intent in the region. (8)

to what end THE OCEAN IS INDIAN

to what end does New Delhi care about the Indian Ocean region? India is, after all, a large nation, a subcontinent in itself. to what end is it driven to exercise itself in a larger arena, undivided larger in fact than the southern Asian subregion?

The reality is that while India is a "continental" power, it occupies a central position in the IO region, a fact that will exercise an increasingly touching influence on--indeed almost determine--India's security environment. Writing in the 1940 K M Pannikar argued that "while to other countries the Indian Ocean is no other than one of the important oceanic areas, to India it is a vital sea. Her lifelines are concentrated in that area, her freedom is hanging on the freedom of that water surface. No industrial progression in a continuously ascending gradation no commercial growth, no stable political make is possible for her unles her shores are protected" (9) This was also emphasized in the greatest in number recent Annual Report of India's defending Ministry, which noted that "India is strategically located vis-a-vis the two continental Asia as well as the Indian Ocean Region." (10)

From of the present day Delhi's perspective, key security considerations include the accessibility of the Indian Ocean to the swifts of the world's most powerful states; the large Islamic populations forward the shores of the ocean and in its hinterland; the oil wealth of the Persian Gulf; the proliferation of conventional military power and nuclear weapons among the region's states; the importance of [i]clavis[/i] straits for India's maritime security; and the historical turn of continental Asian peoples or powers (the Indo-Aryans, the Mongol Russia) to spill periodically gone out of Inner Asia in the direction of the Indian Ocean. (11) The position of India in this environment has sometimes been compared to that of Italy in the Mediterranean, no other than on an immense scale. To this list may be added the general consideration that, in the words of India's navy chief, Indians "live in uncertain times and in a unhewn neighborhood. A scan of the littoral exhibits that, with the exception of a scarcely any countries, all others are afflicted with individual or more of the ailments of need backwardness, fundamentalism, terrorism or internal insurgency. A number of territorial and maritime disputes linger upon Most of the conflicts since the cessation of the Cold War have also taken place in or around the [Indian Ocean region]." (12)