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Abhijit Singh is Senior Fellow and Head of the Maritime Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF).
A maritime professional with specialist and command experience in front-line Indian naval ships, he has been involved the writing of India’s maritime strategy (2007). He is a regular commentator on maritime matters and has written extensively on security and governance issues in the Indian Ocean and Pacific littorals. His articles and commentaries have been published in the Asian Bureau for Asian Research (NBR), the Lowy Interpreter, the World Politics Review, the Diplomat and CSIS Pacific Forum.
He is the editor of two books on maritime security — Indian Ocean Challenges: A Quest for Cooperative Solutions (2013) and Geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific (2014). He has published papers on India’s growing maritime reach, security of sea-lines of communication in the Indo-Pacific region, Indian Ocean governance issues and maritime infrastructure in the Asian littorals. In 2010, he assisted the late Vice Admiral G. M. Hiranandani (Retd) in the authorship of the third volume of Indian Naval History, Transition to Guardianship.
This essay examines India’s recent naval diplomatic forays in the Middle East within the broader context of its strategy to strengthen maritime cooperation across the Asian littorals. The essay describes the activities comprising India’s expanding naval operations in the Arabian Sea and maritime cooperation with the G.C.C. states and with Iran, and discusses the strategic imperatives that are driving these efforts, as well as the limits to India’s raising its security profile.
