Neighbour’s advantage as a hub – India’s role as an emerging regional giant in shipping - is it competition or collaboration?

Sri Lanka has thrown its weight behind a maritime future. And it is attempting, despite bureaucratic bottlenecks, to knit a commercial and security architecture that seeks to both ensure and insure this future. There is of course the geopolitical and geo-economic context in which it operates, and the regional dynamic that includes India and China, besides the United States and other powers.

That is the context with which Sudeep Chakravarti, Executive Director, Stepwell Centre for Asian Futures, addressed a session of the Colombo International Maritime Conference (CIMC 2026) on 10 September 2026.

Nobody is taking their eyes of the Indian Ocean, Professor Chakravarti said. While China spreads its net of national interest, India is too, bolstering its naval capabilities in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. The regional maritime traffic atop which Sri Lanka sits is firmly in the arc of influence and, if need be, interdiction, by India.

The United States also keeps a watch on the country. Indeed, it has for long kept an eye on the entire arc. For instance, the United States had more than a decade earlier attempted to prevail over the Maldives with a SOFA—or Status of Forces Agreement—that would give the petulant superpower port facilities and a staging area in the Indian Ocean region beyond Diego Garcia. Expectedly, India and China were wary of such a move, given the competitive elements of strategic control and regional prestige. Nothing came of it, Professor Chakravarti mentioned, but it has not reduced global focus on South Asia’s smallest nation that strategically punches way above its weight. And Sri Lanka lies in this strategic chain.

The gaze, as Professor Chakravarti suggested, ought to be also on India’s burgeoning blue economy and maritime plans in general and its naval plans in particular. India’s western seaboard on the Arabian Sea and its eastern coastal aspect on the Bay of Bengal were firmly geared to protection of its neighbourhood. This includes the arc of the Bay of Bengal that brings global shipping—and Chinese shipping, and shipping of its BRI associates like Myanmar and Bangladesh—within reach of that ‘unsinkable’ aircraft carrier, as it were: the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, also the overwatch for shipping transiting through the Strait of Malacca a little to the east.

At a conference pivoting heavily on navigating a world gone VUCA—an acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—the logic surely lay in securing futures. China will clearly not step back, Professor Chakravarti maintained. But the neighbourhood will also see an India that is trying to step up.

For more information, please write to: asian.futures@ahduni.edu.in