Stretching from the eastern coast of the continent of Africa to the western shores of the Americas, the Indo-Pacific represents the world’s most dynamic maritime space.
As we await the formal raising of the curtain to mark the commencement of the Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue 2025 (IPRD 2025) at the resplendent Manekshaw Centre in New Delhi this Tuesday, its theme—Promoting Holistic Maritime Security and Growth: Regional Capacity Building and Capability Enhancement—is already resonating deeply across the region, capturing the essence of India’s strategic engagement with the wider maritime world. The IPRD, hosted annually by the Indian Navy in partnership with the National Maritime Foundation, serves as India’s premier regional platform for debate and policy exchange on Indo-Pacific maritime affairs. This year’s theme is both timely and significant, reflecting the region’s evolving security challenges, economic interdependence, and climate-induced vulnerabilities that demand cooperative and sustainable responses.
Stretching from the eastern coast of the continent of Africa to the western shores of the Americas, the Indo-Pacific represents the world’s most dynamic maritime space. It carries over two-thirds of global trade and supports the livelihoods of billions of human beings. For India, these waters are indispensable as over 80% of the country’s trade travels upon them. It is, therefore, a matter of great disquiet that these waters are witnessing increasingly disruptive geopolitical rivalries, illegal fishing, environmental degradation, and growing disaster risks. Addressing these challenges requires a multidimensional approach that goes beyond combat capability alone and focuses on the very foundations of capacity and capability across the region.
Understanding Capacity Building and Capability Enhancement
The theme of IPRD 2025 is anchored in two interrelated but distinct concepts—capacity building and capability enhancement. Capacity building refers to the development of tangible physical resources—the “hardware” of maritime security—such as ports, shipbuilding and ship-repair yards, coastal radar systems, fixed shore-based material infrastructure, and mobile, seagoing platforms as well as airborne and space-based ones, and a host of high-technology applications for surveillance. It provides the physical means for States to safeguard their maritime zones and sustainably harvest their maritime resources.
Capability enhancement, on the other hand, focuses upon the “skinware/humanware”—the human skills, organisational structures, training systems, governance frameworks, legal acumen, and the overall human capital that enables an organisation to maximise whatever capacities it possesses. For the Indo-Pacific, where disparities in resources, capacities, and capabilities are striking, this dual approach lays the foundation for collective resilience and shared prosperity.
India’s Role: Strengthening Regional Institutions
India’s maritime diplomacy has been instrumental in shaping cooperative regional frameworks for the Indian Ocean. Five institutions stand out particularly sharply in this regard—the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS), the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), the Djibouti Code of Conduct-Jeddah Amendment (DCOC-JA), and the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC).
Established in 1997, the IORA now includes 23 member States and 12 dialogue partners. Although its remit extends beyond security—encompassing trade, connectivity, and sustainable development—maritime safety and security, as also disaster risk reduction and management, feature prominently among its priorities. Its comprehensive approach ensures that maritime security is seen not in isolation but as something that is integral to economic and environmental wellbeing.
The IONS, founded in 2008, serves as the preeminent forum that collates the collective wisdom of the principal maritime-security agencies of States of the Indian Ocean. For the most part, these are navies. Currently comprising 25 members and nine observers, the IONS fosters cooperative and confidence-building measures through regular meetings, exercise coordination, as also a number of capacity-building/sharing and capability-enhancing initiatives. IONS strengthens operational collaboration in humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and maritime domain awareness—all vital for regional stability.
In the western reaches of the Indo-Pacific, the DCOC-JA is a collective that is rapidly acquiring both weight and salience. As an observer within the DCOC-JA construct, India has been a committed contributor to the former’s capacity-building and capability-enhancement initiatives and recently hosted the first “Maritime Information-Sharing Workshop” for DCOC member States at the Information Fusion Centre-Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR). The success of the Indian Ocean Ship SAGAR and the Exercise AIKEYME (Africa-India Key Maritime Engagement)—meaning “Unity” in Sanskrit—and involving ten eastern African coastal and island nations, stands eloquent testimony to Indian cooperative and collaborative endeavours.
Likewise, BIMSTEC, founded in 1997, represents an ambitious vision for regional integration, spanning South and Southeast Asia and positioning itself as a vital conduit for economic and strategic engagement. It currently comprises nations with a combined GDP of over $3.7 trillion, encompassing over 1.68 billion people—nearly 22% of the global population. The Bay of Bengal is one of the world’s most disaster-prone regions, facing frequent cyclones, floods, and tsunamis. It is very encouraging to note that disaster management is an area where BIMSTEC has shown particular promise, with Indian initiatives like the Indian Ocean Tsunami Early Warning System underscoring the potential for BIMSTEC to become a global leader in disaster management.
Also complementing these efforts, the IOC, composed of smaller island States such as Mauritius, Seychelles, Comoros, and Madagascar, focuses on ocean governance, fisheries protection, countering illicit maritime activities, and environmental protection. India, an observer at the IOC since 2020, is committed to supporting Small Island Developing States (SIDS), reflecting its policy of MAHASAGAR—Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions. Through these interlocking mechanisms, India contributes to an integrated maritime architecture combining security, sustainability, and inclusivity across the Indian Ocean.
Maritime Cooperation in the Pacific
In the eastern reaches of the Indo-Pacific, two groupings play critical roles. The first is the Western Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS) and the second is the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF)—along with its India-centric avatar, the Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation (FIPIC).
The WPNS, established in 1988, functions fairly similarly to the IONS, facilitating dialogue among over 30 participating navies from Pacific nations, and promoting operational transparency and cooperation in humanitarian assistance, search and rescue, anti-piracy, and maritime domain awareness. The PIF, comprising Pacific Island states along with Australia and New Zealand, provides a political platform addressing both economic and security issues. It emphasises sustainable ocean management, combating illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, and strengthening maritime surveillance against transnational threats. India’s own initiative in terms of FIPIC, which was established in 2014, strengthens the capacities and capabilities of its 14 constituent island nations—Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. It also reflects India’s recognition of the Indo-Pacific as a continuum, wherein the Pacific Islands form an increasingly important component.
ASEAN’s Central Role and the Indo-Pacific Outlook
At the confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans lies Southeast Asia, the geographic and strategic core of the Indo-Pacific. Here, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) anchors multiple maritime security mechanisms that bridge the two oceans. The ASEAN Maritime Forum (AMF) and its Expanded ASEAN Maritime Forum (EAMF) serve as key platforms for cooperation between ASEAN members and their dialogue partners. These mechanisms enable discussions on maritime safety, connectivity, and blue economy development, promoting partnerships that combine security imperatives with sustainability.
The ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) further extends this engagement to broader Asian and Pacific partners. It fosters dialogue on maritime security issues such as piracy, terrorism, and trafficking, supported by practical measures including joint training and information-sharing. Underpinning all these efforts is the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP), adopted in 2019. The AOIP emphasizes openness, inclusivity, and adherence to international law, particularly the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). It reflects ASEAN’s determination to remain central to Indo-Pacific affairs despite intensifying great-power rivalry. India, which shares ASEAN’s commitment to a rules-based order, aligns its own maritime initiatives—from the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI) to SAGAR and MAHASAGAR—with the AOIP’s cooperative ethos.
The Challenges and Aspirations of SIDS
Across the Indo-Pacific, the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) confront the dual pressure of limited resources and expanding vulnerabilities. Their exclusive economic zones are vast, yet their ability to monitor and manage them often remains constrained. Climate change, rising sea levels, and natural disasters further complicate their security and economic prospects. Capacity-building and capability-enhancement efforts—in port infrastructure, maritime domain awareness, and emergency response, combined training institutions, and governance reform—are crucial to sustaining resilience.
India’s Leadership Opportunity
India’s concurrent chairmanship of IORA and IONS from 2025 to 2027 places it in a unique position to lead cooperative maritime initiatives. Under India’s stewardship, greater synergy between economic, environmental, and security dimensions of maritime engagement can be achieved. New opportunities also arise to align with ASEAN and Pacific partners through shared priorities—from sustainable fisheries and climate adaptation to digital connectivity and blue economy partnerships. Through sustained diplomacy, knowledge-sharing, and capacity partnerships, India is poised to catalyse a collective maritime vision rooted in inclusivity and mutual trust.
The Role of IPRD 2025
The Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue 2025 thus arrives at a critical juncture. Beyond its deliberations, it symbolizes India’s convening power—its ability to gather policymakers, practitioners, academics, and industry leaders to shape pragmatic maritime solutions. By focusing on capacity and capability, the Dialogue reinforces that maritime security is not merely about deterrence but about resilience, cooperation, and shared growth.
Conclusion
The Indo-Pacific today lies at the intersection of promise and peril. Its future will depend on how effectively its nations cooperate to secure open, sustainable, and equitable oceans. The IPRD 2025 embodies this collective aspiration. As India assumes leadership roles and strengthens regional partnerships, it holds the compass to guide the region toward a maritime order defined by trust, transparency, and shared prosperity—one that ensures security and growth for all in the region.
Vice Admiral Pradeep Chauhan, AVSM & Bar, VSM, IN (Retd) is the Director-General of the National Maritime Foundation, New Delhi.
