There are moments in geopolitics when a single infrastructure project changes the calculus of an entire region. The Great Nicobar Island Development Project is one such moment. A sprawling, $10 billion initiative to transform India’s southernmost island into a commercial and military hub, it has the potential to fundamentally alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. For Beijing, it represents not merely a strategic inconvenience but something approaching an existential threat. To understand why China would be desperate to see this project fail, delayed, or diluted, one must first understand the single most dangerous word in Beijing’s strategic vocabulary: Malacca.
THE MALACCA DILEMMA: CHINA’S ACHILLES HEEL
The term “Malacca dilemma” was coined in 2003 by Chinese leader Hu Jintao, describing the strategic challenge China faces in securing access to critical energy and trade routes. The arithmetic is staggering. As of 2025, more than 80% of China’s oil imports, valued at approximately $312 billion a year, pass through the Strait of Malacca, which is only 2.8 km wide at its narrowest point. Approximately $3.5 trillion in global business—two-thirds of all Chinese marine traffic—travels through these waterways annually. Every day, China uses more than 15 million barrels of oil, of which only 3.7 million are transported by overland pipelines. The arithmetic is not merely staggering; it is terrifying for Chinese strategic planners. The world’s second-largest economy, with the second-largest military, has threaded the needle of its entire industrial civilisation through a chokepoint narrower than many rivers. The United States is viewed within Chinese strategic analysis as a potential threat to maritime energy flows through the Strait of Malacca. In the event of a conflict, particularly over Taiwan, the United States could interdict oil shipments to China by disrupting maritime routes. Beijing has spent decades trying to solve this problem. It has built pipelines from Central Asia, Myanmar, and Russia. It has developed the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to access the Arabian Sea through Gwadar. It has proposed, at one stage, funding a canal across Thailand’s Kra Isthmus to bypass Malacca altogether. None of these alternatives fully solves the problem—and now India is about to make it dramatically worse.
THE NATURAL AIRCRAFT CARRIER THAT INDIA HAS FINALLY BOARDED
Geostrategically speaking, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands—a 700-kilometre stretch that spans the entrance to the Malacca Strait—are a natural aircraft carrier that India was gifted by geography. Great Nicobar, the southernmost island in this series, is nearly equidistant from Singapore, Port Klang, and Colombo. The island does not merely sit near the Strait of Malacca. It dominates its northern approaches. The Six Degree Channel, one of the main routes used by ships to enter and exit the strait, is overlooked by these islands. The waterways around them are used for 60% of China’s entire trade. For decades, India treated this extraordinary geographic inheritance as dormant real estate. That era is now ending. The Great Nicobar Island Project, launched in 2021, is a mega project involving a transshipment port, an international airport, township development, and a 450 MVA gas- and solar-based power plant. Built on a naturally deep harbour of 18 to 20 metres, the transhipment port at Galathea Bay aims to handle 4 million TEUs by 2028 and 16 million TEUs by 2058. This is not merely a port. It is the physical assertion of Indian dominance over the world’s most strategically significant maritime chokepoint—and from Beijing’s perspective, the transformation of a sleeping giant into a sentinel.
THE MILITARY DIMENSION: LOCKING THE DOOR
The project’s commercial components, formidable as they are, are merely the visible portion of a much larger strategic iceberg. India has formally begun constructing a second airfield on Great Nicobar at Chingen, adjoining Galathea Bay, which lies 150 km north-west of Banda Aceh in Sumatra, Indonesia. Great Nicobar already hosts INS Baaz, an operational naval airbase at Campbell Bay, overlooking the vital Six Degree Shipping Channel between Great Nicobar and Sumatra. India’s military buildup includes upgrading naval air stations to accommodate larger aircraft including P-8I Poseidon maritime patrol planes and fighter jets. A modern hangar and dispersal system were installed at naval air station INS Utkrosh, which was equipped in 2024 with a precision approach radar and the Integrated Underwater Harbour Defence and Surveillance System. Naval communication network centres were opened at INS Kohassa, INS Baaz, and INS Kardip to strengthen operational capabilities. The strategic implication is clear and chilling for Chinese planners. Chinese trade routes would be particularly vulnerable because the sea lines of communication from the Middle East to China run near the Indian coast for much of their journey. Without a substantial naval presence, China would be unable to protect these shipping routes, and convoys would probably have to avoid the Malacca Strait entirely, since Indian facilities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are rapidly improving, making it difficult for Chinese forces to protect against aircraft or submarines in that area. In the event of a major conflict—over Taiwan, or any other flashpoint—India’s fortified presence at Great Nicobar would allow it to effectively close the tap on China’s economic lifeblood. No number of overland pipelines or alternative routes fully compensates for the loss of Malacca access. This is not a scenario; it is a vice, and India is tightening it.
CHINA’S STRING OF PEARLS, AND INDIA’S COUNTER-MOVE
To appreciate the full depth of Beijing’s anxiety, one must view the Nicobar project against the backdrop of China’s own longrunning strategic offensive in the Indian Ocean. Since 2004, the “string of pearls” hypothesis has posited that China would expand its naval presence by building civilian maritime infrastructure along the Indian Ocean periphery—at Gwadar Port in Pakistan, Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka, and Kyaukphyu Port in Myanmar. The strategy was always dual-use: commercial on the surface, military in potential. It was designed precisely to counter the kind of pressure that a strong Indian presence at the Malacca chokepoint could exert. India has now begun to play the same game—and from a far more advantageous geographic position. China is also attempting to build a military facility on the Coco Islands in Myanmar, located just 55 km north of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands. That proximity cuts both ways. The closer China edges toward the Andamans, the greater the surveillance and deterrent value of a fully operational Indian base at Great Nicobar becomes. Every Chinese spy ship in the Bay of Bengal, every PLAN submarine probing these waters, is now being watched from an island that will soon host advanced radar, patrol aircraft, and naval strike capability. In August 2024, the Indian Navy was placed on alert after a Chinese survey ship was detected in the Bay of Bengal about 120 kilometres from where India had announced plans to conduct a subsurface firing. This is the texture of the ongoing confrontation—a slow, tense, informationgathering war of position, in which India’s Great Nicobar development is a decisive move.
THE COMMERCIAL THREAT: RIVALLING SINGAPORE
China’s strategic alarm is compounded by the commercial dimensions of the project. The Galathea Bay port is being positioned as a logistics hub to rival Singapore—a statement that should not be read lightly. Singapore sits at the southern mouth of the Malacca Strait and is one of the world’s most important transshipment hubs. A rival Indian facility at the northern approaches, offering comparable draft depths and connectivity, would redraw the map of Indian Ocean commerce. Currently, 25% of India’s cargo passes through foreign ports—a national vulnerability and a logistics inefficiency. As that cargo shifts to Galathea Bay, India will be both enriched and insulated. China, by contrast, will find a competitor growing powerful at the very gateway it cannot afford to lose.
THE IRREVERSIBILITY PROBLEM
What makes Beijing’s situation particularly dire is the irreversibility of what India is building. Military positions can be contested; political relationships can be subverted; treaties can be renegotiated. But a deep-water port carved into a natural harbour, a dual-use airfield capable of hosting nuclear-capable bombers, a naval command infrastructure wired into India’s national grid—these things, once built, become permanent features of the strategic landscape. The Great Nicobar is essential to India’s new maritime policy as part of measures to restrain Chinese aggressiveness, and it will be useful in cutting off China’s shipping lines in the event of a conflict. To restrain China, this would necessitate the backing of other South Asian countries—cooperation that India is actively cultivating through the Quad, its bilateral partnerships, and its expanding Indian Ocean network. China understands all of this. It understands that the Great Nicobar Project, once complete, transforms India from a passive beneficiary of geographic fortune into an active maritime power capable of threatening China’s most fundamental economic dependency. It understands that the window to prevent, delay, or dilute this project is narrow and closing. And it understands that once the cranes fall silent at Galathea Bay and the airfield at Chingen is operational, the Malacca dilemma, already Beijing’s greatest strategic anxiety, will have acquired a permanent, Indian face. The dragon is not merely uncomfortable with what is being built at the southern tip of India’s island chain. It is, in every strategic sense of the word, desperate to stop it.
- Hindol Sengupta is professor, and executive dean, of school of international relations, and director of the India institute, at O.P. Jindal Global University.
