India Has Reinforced A Mauritius Advantage In The Indian Ocean

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was warmly received in Mauritius for its 57^th National Day celebrations and awarded the country’s highest civilian award during his recent two-day state visit. A large number of MOU’s, numbering eight, were signed. They covered space research, AI, digital health, the ocean economy, pharmaceuticals, ICT, FinTech, Cyber Security and maritime security. India announced a rupee-denominated credit to replace the water pipelines in Mauritius. India has a satellite tracking space station located in Mauritius.

The relationship has just been upgraded to an enhanced strategic partnership with maritime and defence cooperation as its cornerstones. India will continue to extend technology sharing, concessional loans and grants. Prime Minister Modi called Mauritius a bridge between India and the Global South and ‘family’.

The aerial distance between India and Mauritius is 5,247 km. and requires a flight that could take 6 to 8 hours. Its Agalega Islands, north and south, however, are almost half the distance, at 3,000 km from Southern India. This is comparable to that between India and the Maldives (2,200 km), also strategically important to India.

The two Agalega islands, about 25 sq.km. in total area, are 2,500 km southwest of Male in the Maldives where China has made substantial inroads.

India has built a long 3,000 metres runway on Agalega, after an MOU was signed in 2015, and heads of both countries inaugurated it in 2024. A substantial jetty has also been built. Both Mauritius and India deny that The Agalegas, population under 400, dependent mostly on fishing and coconuts, with other supplies coming in by ship, are being developed as an Indian military base. But it certainly helps the marine surveillance of the South Western part of the Indian Ocean both from the air and via radar installations set up by India as in the Port Louis area of the main Mauritius island.

Mauritius has been close to India, even since the British transported a large number of Indians in 1834 to work on the sugar plantations there. Prior to 1810, the French controlled Mauritius and they also took Indians from their holdings in Pondicherry (Puducherry today), and then there were the Dutch before the French. MK Gandhi also stopping by in 1901, and the Mauritius National Day chosen (12^th March) coincides with the start of the Dandi March.

 Mauritius gained its independence from Britain in 1968 and has a population of 1.2 million people, largely of Indian origin. Both French and Creole are spoken on the island. This, in addition to English, Hindi, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telegu and Urdu. Diwali and Holi are celebrated on the island.  

Mauritius has had a defence treaty with India from 1964, and the Mauritius National Security Adviser (NSA) to date is an Indian national.

France, over and above the QUAD countries, also regularly patrols the Indian Ocean Region.

And since 2015, when Prime Minister last visited the island nation, India has done a good deal to ramp up its infrastructure via soft loans and grants of over $1 billion USD. These include a metro system, a hospital, and even a new parliament building presently under construction.

Mauritius is famous in Indian financial circles because a great deal of the FDI (foreign direct investment) into India is routed via the island nation owing to its favourable tax laws and treaties with India. In fact, after Singapore, international companies registered in Mauritius account for the second biggest chunk of FDI. Mauritius, in turn, seeks much greater commercial interest as FDI from other countries, including India.   

Even as China wants to dominate the Indian Ocean with a massive blue water navy, India has strong inherent geographical advantages. Peninsular India not only borders both the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal but abuts the Indian Ocean at Kanyakumari.

China has a long way to come from its home bases on the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea. However, it has indeed created a number of perches - in Sri Lanka’s largely deserted Hambantota, while India is also prominent on the island, on the Cocos Islands, ironically gifted to Myanmar by India’s then Prime Minister Nehru. Lately, it has made inroads into the cash-strapped Maldives. China has built yet another largely unused port at Gwadar in Baluchistan, now under threat of the latter’s independence movement. Earlier, it had set up a base in Djibouti on the Red Sea. It is currently angling for a port in turbulent Bangladesh as well.

India, on its part, has been modernising its existing ports on both seaboards, building new greenfield and sometimes contiguous ones, including transshipment ports, and setting up state-of-the-art ship repair and ship building facilities.

Some of this has been extended to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as well, alongside tourism infrastructure, particularly as some of them, the Nicobar islands, are very near the Malacca Straits, used extensively by Chinese shipping. The Andamans also overlook busy international shipping lanes.

India’s Lakshadweep Islands are just 820 km from the Maldives, and are now being developed by India both as a naval base and for tourism.  The British-American base at Diego Garcia, nominally owned by Mauritius, occupied by  India’s QUAD partners, is roughly 1,796 km southwest of India. The rest of the Chagos Islands, owned also by Mauritius, have just been returned to it. India has been diplomatically assisting this restoration for a long time.

The Indian ship repair and refurbishment facilities are routinely offered to India’s QUAD partners and other friendly countries active in the IOR (Indian Ocean Region). This is very useful for American and European ships operating in the region but far away from their home bases.

India’s ship-building expansion and modernisation includes submarine and aircraft carrier manufacturing, specialised vessels, ones for the coast guard and  last but not least, in-demand commercial tonnage.

All this capacity is developing rapidly, with an eye to bolstering both India’s commercial shipping status, incorporating the use of India-owned and manufactured ships, as well as for military purposes.

This activity is being fast-tracked in response to the rapid expansion and size of the Chinese capabilities, which are also being extended by China to assist Pakistan in our littoral.

The part that the India-Mauritius relationship plays in the stability and prosperity of the Indian Ocean region cannot be over emphasised.

Also, as India marches on towards becoming the 3^rd largest economy in the world, it engagement with the outside world and how it is viewed by it, is also changing fast. This may increasingly take the shape of out-size alliances with friendly countries farther away, and mergers of those countries and regions that are contiguous for mutual benefit.

(1098 words)

March 14^th 2025

For: Firstpost/News18.com

Gautam Mukherjee