Wary of China, India to boost eastern naval fleet

KOLKATA (India)—India will strengthen its naval fleet on the eastern front, the regional commander said on Wednesday, adding destroyers and frigates among other ships, in an apparent move to counter Chinese interest in the region.
Over the next five years or so, India’s plans include stationing an aircraft carrier in the Bay of Bengal along with at least half of the 32 new warships and six submarines India plans to add to its fleet, Vice Admiral Raman Suthan said in Kolkata.
The announcement comes a few months after India’s air force said it would strengthen its presence in the east, adding new fighter jets and moving two squadrons of 36 state-of-the-art Russian-built Sukhoi-30 aircraft to the area. They are also adding advanced helicopters, strengthening runways and upgrading other air force facilities - an apparent move to counter China’s might.
“China has fuel interests of its own as fuel lines from Africa and the Gulf run through these waters, and so they are also building up their navy,” Suthan said on board INS Sukanya, a naval warship at the Kolkata dockyard. India has air and naval bases and listening posts across the eastern region. It considers the eastern sea routes vital to its security.
Many Indian defence experts believe that China has military or intelligence facilities on Myanmar’s Coco Islands, a few miles away from India’s Diglipur, 185 km north of Port Blair, capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. “We keep hearing about China’s interest in Coco Island and are wary of its growing interest in the region, and we are keeping a close watch,” Suthan said.
Although Suthan said he believed China had no facilities on Coco, he said the navy could not let its guard down. “The naval fleet in east India has long legs and, with the government’s emphasis on the look east policy, we are strengthening east now,” Suthan added.
ndia India’s troubled coalition is close to a compromise over the future of an atomic energy deal with Washington that had threatened to bring down the government, an official said.
The official close to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said left-wing politicians, who prop up the dominant Congress party, may allow the government to engage in talks on moving the deal forward while retaining their veto right. “From their recent comments, it would seem there is a softening of their position,” the top government official said of the Communists and other left-wing coalition members who are opposed to the deal.
The deal, clinched in August, aims to bring New Delhi into the loop of global nuclear commerce after a gap of three decades and is seen as the cornerstone of India’s rapidly warming ties with the United States.
But left-wingers argue the pact — which would involve India allowing international inspections of some of its nuclear sites — could also restrict India’s nuclear weapons programme. They are also opposed to closer ties with Washington, and had threatened to force early elections.
But the official, who asked not to be named, said the government may now be allowed to open talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on a nuclear safeguards agreement that needs to be signed before the pact can be implemented. Left-wing parties could then examine any proposed accord and then make a decision on whether they should veto it, he said. The official said the Communists are “unlikely to have any objections to the IAEA pact.”
“Their objections are to the India-US agreement,” he said, referring to the wider pact that critics here view as going against India’s traditional position as a non-aligned country.
Fresh talks on the issue between the government and its allies are scheduled to take place in New Delhi on Friday. According to political analyst Rasheed Kidwai, the sign of a compromise means the government is likely to stay intact for some time to come — with all the parties saving face rather than facing uncertainty in elections.—Agencies