The IN has faced three significant challenges since its founding that have
constrained its ability to reach its full potential as a potent, flexible instrument
of national power. The first is the nation’s colonial legacy. On the one hand,
the IN has benefited from its historical connection to the world’s most successful
navy, the Royal Navy. Indian naval officers trained and were educated at Royal
Navy institutions immediately following independence. New Delhi thus devel-
oped a capable officer corps more rapidly than it could have if forced to build
indigenous education and training programs from scratch starting in 1948.
Moreover, the British officers in charge of the RIN (Royal Indian Navy) before
and during World War II began working with their Indian counterparts to lay
the groundwork for a sea service for an independent India.
On the other hand, the division of the RIN into Indian and Pakistani navies
was devastating for the service. The RIN was far more ethnically integrated than
the army, meaning that the partition broke up cohesive units as well as splitting
platforms and infrastructure between the two new navies. Early planning for IN
roles and capabilities, moreover, bore the stamp of British policy in the Cold
War. Early IN requests to the U.K. government for assistance revealed divided
views: the British accentuated the support Commonwealth nations could provide
in Cold War contingencies, while the new IN staff focused more naturally on
Pakistan.^14
C. Raja Mohan has suggested that an unusual piece of India’s historical legacy
could be of real value to Indian maritime strategists if they can only break habits
of thinking developed since independence. He urges Indian strategic thinkers,
particularly those interested in maritime strategy, to rediscover Lord Curzon,
viceroy of India at the turn of the last century. Mohan notes that Curzon provides
the kind of thinking necessary to place Indian affairs in a maritime context, look-
ing out to the Indian Ocean littoral and beyond.^15
The IN did an admirable job of shedding its colonial legacy in terms of
outlook and planning, but it still faced a challenge that continues to haunt it
today: resources.^16 India boosted defense resources significantly after the
1962 Sino-Indian war. Five-year defense plans were drawn up for each of
the armed services, but every one of these (through 1997) had to be deferred
or restructured before it was completed, owing largely to resource constraints.
In 1964, a base force of fifty-four principal combatants was established for
the IN. The service has never reached this goal.^17 The reasons for this strategy–
policy mismatch are threefold. First, as Rahul Roy-Chaudhury notes in the
second of his studies of Indian maritime issues, the five-year plans were often
the services’ wish lists. They were neither connected to broader national security
goals nor compiled with resource limitations in mind. Even if the services’
plans were constructed without realistic budgets in mind, various shortfalls and
crises in the overall Indian economy nonetheless made the shortfalls even more
dramatic.134 Asia Looks Seaward