ISAS Insights

For nearly half a century, India’s political approach to the Indian Ocean seemed a well - defined one. It was defined in the wake of the decision in the late - 1960s by Great Britain to withdraw its forces from the east of Suez. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has now stepped forward to outline a bold and different framework duri ng his visit to Seychelles and Mauritius in March 2015. The context and the assumptions of Modi’s Indian Ocean policy are fundamentally different from those that guided Delhi from the late - 1960s. Confronted with a definitive moment in the history of Indian Ocean quite early on in her tenure as Prime Minister , Indira Gandhi had rejected the notion of a ‘ power vacuum ’ in the Indian Ocean, expressed concern at new great p ower rivalry in the littoral and asked all major powers to withdraw from the Indian Ocean. She also supported the proposal for the creation of a zone of peace in the littoral and was reluctant to offer security support to other nations. 2 This approach fitted with India’s self - perception as a nonaligned and T hird W orld state.