For most of the last decade, India watched China’s navy grow the way one watches weather move in from a distance — visible, slow, and easy to postpone worrying about. That distance has now closed. China’s ships, submarines, and survey vessels are routinely present in waters India has always considered its own strategic backyard, and the PLA Navy no longer treats the Indian Ocean as somewhere it merely passes through.
A Decade of Quiet Firsts
China’s Indian Ocean presence did not arrive suddenly; it arrived one uncomfortable first at a time. In February 2014, the PLA Navy deployed a Type-093 nuclear-powered attack submarine to the Gulf of Aden — the moment Indian planners date the start of serious maritime strategic competition between the two countries. Later that year, a Chinese Song-class submarine docked in Colombo, at a terminal a Chinese company had built and operated for over three decades; Indian officials called it a matter of “serious concern,” and Sri Lanka shrugged it off as routine port traffic. By 2016, satellite imagery showed a Chinese Han-class nuclear submarine had docked at Karachi — deep inside what India considers its own western maritime approaches. Indian Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba acknowledged at the time that the service was tracking PLA Navy movements closely on “both its oceanic flanks.”
None of these events, taken alone, amounted to a crisis. Taken together, they describe a pattern: China building comfort and infrastructure in the waters around India, port call by port call, years before anyone would need to ask permission for anything more.
Presence That Doesn’t Ask Permission
What has changed since is the frequency and the framing. Chinese research and survey vessels now work the Indian Ocean on a near-continuous basis, gathering exactly the kind of seabed and hydrographic data that makes future submarine operations easier. Analysts at Indo-Pacific defense publications describe this as a deliberate build-out of Chinese logistics infrastructure around India’s rim — Djibouti, Gwadar, Hambantota, Kyaukpyu — each individually explainable as commercial investment, each collectively forming something closer to a support network for a navy that intends to operate here permanently.
The carrier picture reinforces the point. China commissioned its third and most advanced carrier, the Fujian, in November 2025, and Chinese military commentators expect it to reach full combat capability during 2026 — not merely able to launch aircraft, but able to operate as a complete strike group with its own destroyer and submarine escort, extending well beyond China’s coastal waters. Its electromagnetic catapult system, the same technology that powers America’s newest carriers, lets the Fujian launch heavier aircraft, including China’s J-35 stealth fighter, at a tempo its earlier carriers could not match. Where the Fujian has sailed since commissioning — through the Taiwan Strait toward the South China Sea, rendezvousing with escort vessels at the Yulin naval complex on Hainan — makes clear the near-term focus remains its own contested waters. But a navy that builds this kind of expeditionary carrier capability for the South China Sea today is building the capability to project the same power westward tomorrow, and Indian planners are treating it that way.
India’s Answer: A Base of Its Own
India’s most concrete response is not a ship. It is a hole in the ground. By 2026, the Navy expects to commission INS Varsha, a new nuclear submarine base at Rambilli in Andhra Pradesh, built with underground pens and tunnel networks specifically designed to shield India’s ballistic-missile and attack submarines from satellite surveillance — a direct answer to China’s Longpo submarine base on Hainan Island, which anchors Beijing’s own sea-based nuclear deterrent. The parallel is deliberate: Longpo gives China a hardened home for the submarines that patrol the South China Sea; Varsha is meant to do the same for India’s eastern seaboard, decongesting Visakhapatnam and giving the Eastern Naval Command a base built to watch the eastern Indian Ocean specifically because that is where Chinese naval activity is growing fastest.
On the western seaboard, the Navy’s Project Seabird expansion at Karwar follows a parallel logic on the surface fleet side — a two-phase build-out designed to eventually berth up to fifty major warships, including both of India’s carriers, alongside expanded dockyards and logistics support. The message in both cases is the same: bases, not just hulls, are now part of how India intends to compete.
Building a Navy of Neighbors
India’s other answer has been diplomatic rather than industrial. In April 2026, an Indian warship sailed from Mumbai under the banner of IOS Sagar — Indian Ocean Ship Sagar — carrying not just an Indian crew but 38 naval personnel from sixteen countries, on a deployment spanning the Maldives, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It was the second run of an initiative launched only the year before, and the logic behind it is straightforward: India cannot match China’s shipbuilding output ship-for-ship in the near term, so it is instead trying to make itself indispensable to the region’s smaller navies, embedding foreign officers directly into Indian crews and building the kind of operational trust that no communiqué can substitute for. New Delhi has designated 2026 the ASEAN-India Year of Maritime Cooperation for the same reason. This is a navy trying to compensate for a numbers gap by making itself the partner of first resort across a dozen coastlines China is also courting.
Sea Control, Not Just Sea Presence
Indian naval planners are direct about what all of this is meant to prevent. In 2017, the Navy formally adopted its “Mission Based Deployments” posture, committing itself to maintaining presence — ships, aircraft and submarines — at every major ingress and egress route across the Indian Ocean Region, rather than waiting to react once a crisis had already begun. During the 2020 Ladakh standoff, when China and India were eyeball to eyeball along their disputed land border, the Indian Navy’s response is often overlooked in favor of Army and Air Force troop movements. But the Navy quietly stepped up submarine and warship deployments around the Strait of Malacca and conducted exercises with the US and Japanese navies within weeks of the Galwan Valley clashes — a reminder to Beijing that the same competition playing out on a disputed mountain border could just as easily be answered at sea, where India, not China, still holds the advantage of geography.
That advantage, though, is not permanent. Analysts tracking the balance of naval power in the region are blunt about the arithmetic. Given the pace of Chinese naval construction, simply maintaining superiority in India’s own ocean is becoming a genuinely difficult task, not an assumed one. Geography gave India a head start in the Indian Ocean. Whether that head start survives the next decade depends less on the map than on how many hulls, bases and partnerships India is willing to build before China’s ocean-going navy stops treating the Indian Ocean as somewhere it merely visits.
Ashu Mann
Ashu Mann is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. He was awarded the Vice Chief of the Army Staff Commendation card on Army Day 2025. He is pursuing a PhD in Defence and Strategic Studies. His research focuses include India-China territorial dispute, great power rivalry, and Chinese foreign policy.
