India’s geopolitical vision has primarily been continental; the announcement of a brand new doctrine in the maritime domain changes that radically.
In this context, India, a shining star in the comity of nations, finds itself slowly adapting to that reality. From a historical perspective, India’s vision of power has been interpreted primarily through a continental lens, due to tense relations with her neighbors China and Pakistan on one hand and the compulsions of the bipolar world order during the Cold War.
However, the end of the Cold War slowly but surely made the Indian foreign policy elite realize the need to expand the horizons of her geopolitical vision to the seas where the geopolitical competition has intensified today.
From the point of view of commerce and trade, the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) accounts for more than 95% of India’s trade by volume and 70% by value. Apart from this, India has strong security considerations in the maritime domain.
It is in that vein that India has announced the MAHASAGAR doctrine.
The Idea
During his state visit to Mauritius in March 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the MAHASAGAR vision. The idea stands for Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth across Regions. It represents the metamorphosis of India’s earlier SAGAR vision.
Under MAHASAGAR, India seeks to position itself as a ‘trusted security partner’ and ‘first responder’ to the needs and aspirations of countries of the Global South. It covers not just the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), India’s immediate neighborhood, but also expands to other maritime areas—Eastern Africa, Latin America and the broader Indo-Pacific theatre, extending as far as the South China Sea.
Unlike the SAGAR doctrine where India applied a regional security-centric lens to fulfill her national interests, MAHASAGAR expands the terms of India’s engagement. Under MAHASAGAR, India will focus on strengthening economic relations, particularly maritime trade with her partner littoral states.
This vision manifests itself through a concerted effort to develop the blue economies of India and its partner states. This would be done through the integration of job-creation, economic growth, and security via oceanic resources such as offshore energy, tourism, marine biotech and fisheries. Apart from this, India also seeks to tackle both traditional security threats such as sea-piracy, drug trafficking, among others as well as non-traditional security threats like climate-induced natural and human disasters such as tsunamis, oil spills, overfishing to name a few.
Geopolitical Vision
For any great power, maintaining a high degree of influence in the maritime domain in general and control over important trade routes in particular is the operating motivation. This is precisely what India seeks to do with her newly unveiled maritime doctrine. In recent years, the Indo-Pacific region has become an arena of contestation among a multitude of naval powers, particularly India and China.
India’s geopolitical vision behind the MAHASAGAR doctrine is to balance China. Even though India and China have started mending their fences following the Galwan conflict of 2020, the element of great power competition will continue to persist. In that context, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the String of Pearls strategy has contributed to a mammoth increase in China’s geo-economic power profile across Africa, Latin America, South-East Asia, East Asia and South Asia.
While it will take some time for India to match China’s economic largesse, the MAHASAGAR vision aims to ensure that key SLOCs (Sea Lanes of Communication) remain inclusive and open to every country in the different regions.
Through the MAHASAGAR doctrine, India seeks to maintain strategic parity with her Himalayan neighbor across the sea lanes of the Global South. That said, the ocean floor, in India’s case the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) is a hotbed for mineral resources such as polymetallic nodules (manganese, cobalt, nickel, copper), heavy mineral sands (ilmenite, rutile, monazite), gas hydrates, and potential offshore oil/gas reserves.
India’s MAHASAGAR vision, therefore, seeks to reinforce India’s search for exploration and use of such critical mineral resources for her energy security and development of national power. That said, the MAHASAGAR vision must not devolve into rhetorical grandstanding; rather, it should be far more substantive. In order to do that, India needs a national maritime security strategy in order to clearly identify the actors involved, the relevant stakeholders, and a concrete institutional strategy for promoting synergy among the stakeholders.
Pranay Kumar Shome, a research analyst who is a PhD candidate at Mahatma Gandhi Central University, Bihar, India
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