https://sundayguardianlive.com/editors- ... ct-166297/
Who’s afraid of India’s Andaman and Nicobar project?
While still relatively under-the-radar, this project is already facing the kind of pressures once applied to try and stop India’s nuclear programme. India must not relent.
Hindol Sengupta, January 25, 2026
The question of who controls which global maritime chokepoints and sea routes has been brought brutally on the table by US President Donald Trump’s demand for a handover of Greenland to American control. As Trump hopes to counter China in the northern sea routes, the crisis in the Bay of Bengal is deepening. Even as India moves ahead with its big Andaman and Nicobar development projects (especially the Great Nicobar Island project), the noise against the project from assorted activists, environmentalists, and even major political players is increasingly reminiscent of the clamour nearly three decades ago against India’s nuclear programme.
STRATEGIC ARCHITECTURE OF GREAT NICOBAR PROJECT
The Great Nicobar Island (GNI) project—conceived by NITI Aayog and launched in 2021—aims to create an International Container Transshipment Terminal (ICTT), a greenfield international airport, a township, and a gas-solar power plant, implemented by ANIIDCO. Strategically, official policy commentary frames this as dual-use infrastructure that can reduce reliance on foreign hubs like Singapore and Colombo while improving India’s ability to monitor sea lanes near the Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok Straits. The wider Andaman & Nicobar posture is anchored by the Andaman and Nicobar Command (ANC), India’s only tri-service theatre command, alongside bases such as INS Baaz and INS Utkrosh that expand surveillance and operational reach in the eastern Indian Ocean.
A major base-plus-port complex in the Nicobars changes peacetime “maritime geography” into wartime leverage: it strengthens India’s capacity to observe, track, and potentially interdict movements through approaches to the Strait of Malacca—one of the world’s busiest maritime chokepoints—thereby sharpening great-power threat perceptions. Indian strategic writing also notes that fortifying the ANC can intensify grey-zone competition and raise the spectre of blockade logics, which is exactly the sort of scenario competitors plan against in the Indo-Pacific.
Add to this a practical constraint: the archipelago’s ecological fragility and the GNI project’s environmental/tribal controversy create multiple handles (litigation, activism, international scrutiny, standards-based finance constraints) that can be amplified externally to slow or delegitimise the build-out. From Beijing’s perspective, stronger Indian air and naval reach in the Nicobars tightens the strategic environment around China’s energy and trade flows that pass near Malacca, deepening China’s long-running vulnerability to chokepoint pressure in a crisis. Indian policy commentary explicitly links Great Nicobar’s location to monitoring vital sea lanes and responding to rising presence of China and other navies in the Indian Ocean Region, signalling that the project has a balancing function—not only an economic one.
That combination—capability plus declared intent—makes it rational for China to lean into countervailing moves (surveillance, undersea presence, influence campaigns, competitive port access in the region) that would turn the project into an enduring strategic contest. The Andaman and Nicobar geography intersects with India’s sea boundaries in the Bay of Bengal neighbourhood, and Indian commentary notes the islands’ proximity to multiple regional maritime frontiers (including Bangladesh) and their role as a “first line of maritime defence.”
For Pakistan, any Indian shift toward an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” posture in the east adds to India’s ability to shape maritime domain awareness and power projection across the wider Indian Ocean strategic theatre, encouraging Pakistan to coordinate narratives and diplomatic positions that frame the build-up as destabilising. An “unsinkable aircraft carrier” refers to a land-based territory, typically an island or archipelago, leveraged as a fixed, durable platform for projecting air and naval power, much like a mobile aircraft carrier but immune to sinking.
For Bangladesh, the more likely friction point is not direct military competition but the politics of regional balance: Dhaka will be sensitive to anything that looks like coercive control of Bay of Bengal sea space, even if India frames it as counter-piracy, anti-trafficking, and sea-lane security. Separately, the most credible “American” constraint is often indirect: environmental and indigenous-rights scrutiny (including in global civil society and standards-driven capital) can constrain timelines and reputations—exactly because the islands are described as a globally significant biodiversity zone with vulnerable indigenous communities.
The maritime geography of the 21st century is increasingly defined by the transition of remote archipelagos from peripheral territories into central nodes of power projection. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI), a chain of 836 islands and islets stretching over 700 kilometres from Landfall Island in the north to Indira Point in the south, represent the most critical component of India’s nascent maritime grand strategy. Long termed “neglected maritime terrain,” these islands are now the site of the $10 billion Great Nicobar Island (GNI) Development Project—a mega-infrastructure initiative designed to integrate commercial transshipment, civil aviation, and tri-service military command. However, the strategic elevation of the ANI has catalysed a profound geopolitical reaction.
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Gautam
good point
