New Delhi, Nov 4 An era of intense competition and contestation, shifting power equations, enormous technological disruption and competing strategic interests is being witnessed today, and the maritime domain lies at their very centre, Navy Chief Admiral Krishna Swaminathan said on Wednesday.
In his address at the Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue hosted in Delhi, he also pitched for deepening collective understanding of factors that impact security at sea and strengthening regional cooperation.
“I was in November 2019, at the 14th East-Asia Summit in Bangkok, that our honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI), providing a framework for regional maritime cooperation across seven pillars. The theme of IPRD 2026, Science, Technology and Academic Cooperation, draws directly from one of these pillars,” the Navy chief said.
Long before the term Indo-Pacific entered strategic vocabulary, nature had already connected the two oceans in complete harmony — beneath the surface through currents, and above it, through climate. Through the Indonesian archipelago, ocean currents carry around 15 million cubic metres of water from the Pacific into the Indian Ocean every second, he added.
“As we take stock of global security today, we witness an era of intense competition and contestation, shifting power equations, enormous technological disruption and competing strategic interests. The maritime domain is not insulated from these developments. It rather lies at their very centre,” the admiral said.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh attended a session at the IPRD 2026.
The Navy chief said, the “task before us is clear: to deepen our collective understanding of factors that impact security at sea, and strengthen regional cooperation”.
“This, in my view, is one of the issues that this important dialogue can examine and advocate strongly,” he said.
He said there was a need to turn shared interests into positive, practical results and build stronger prospects for long-term regional cooperation, adding that IPRD 2026 can perhaps play a small, but crucially important, role in that.
(PTI News)
