The India-EU Strategic Agenda 2025 and its Joint Communique represent a qualitative deepening of bilateral engagement at a time of heightened maritime insecurity stretching from the Euro-Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific. Recent political signalling — sustained high-level engagement, the successful conclusion of an India-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the operationalisation of the Trade and Technology Council, and the India-EU Security and Defence Partnership — underscore Europe’s growing recognition of India as an indispensable maritime stakeholder and provider of public goods rather than a peripheral partner.[1]
As Europe seeks a greater role as a “Maritime Security Provider” and India’s consolidates its position as a “Preferred Security Partner”, the convergence appears both timely and consequential. Although strategic convergence does not automatically imply a strategic necessity to collaborate, the two are frequently conflated in contemporary India-EU discourse. From an India-centric maritime perspective, the core policy question remains unchanged: does deeper India-EU cooperation and collaboration materially advance India’s long-term security interests in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) or does it primarily serve European transit-security imperatives? This article critically examines this question by assessing the Agenda’s maritime provisions against India’s enduring strategic priorities, operational realities and sovereignty consideration. It argues that while selective cooperation offers high-value augmentation in specific domains, it must remain tightly governed, geographically calibrated and subordinate to India’s core security architecture.
Setting the Maritime Context: India’s Enduring Interests and the EU’s Emerging Posture
The IOR functions as India’s economic lifeline, with approximately 95 per cent of its trade by volume and 68 per cent by value transiting these waters.[2] This structural dependency dictates that India must prioritise the stability and security of International Shipping Lanes (ISLs). Additionally, India’s maritime policy has evolved strategically over the last decade; the foundational policy of SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region; also the Hindi word for “sea”) initially emphasised five core aspects, including a safe, secure and stable IOR;[3] deepening economic and security cooperation with its maritime neighbours and islands States through several foundational, political and operational frameworks that encourage capability enhancement and capacity building.[4]
This policy has since expanded into MAHASAGAR (Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Region; denoting “confluence of seas” or “ocean” in Hindi), which signifies an evolution towards a extra-regional maritime vision that encompasses the entirety of the Global South, including of course, the Indo-Pacific.[5] Crucially, in response to the ever-rising geopolitical competition (for example, China’s expanding naval presence, the proliferation of strategic infrastructure in certain nation-States, and China-US economic rivalry, amongst other trends), India has striven to assert itself as the ‘Preferred Security Partner’ and ‘First Responder.’[6] This shift necessitates the abandonment of traditional caution, demands increased capabilities (not just capacities) and requires the strengthening of reliable partnerships to safeguard regional and global maritime interests while counterbalancing external influences. Uch partnerships create tensions as they potentially conflict with the idea of strict strategic autonomy (freedom from great power influence) that New Delhi has historically prized.[7]
The EU’s updated Maritime Security Strategy (EUMSS 2023), and the Strategic Agenda signal an ambition to act as a “security provider” across the interconnected maritime theatres.[8] Recent EUNAVFOR (European Union Naval Force) activity in response to the Red Sea (Operation ASPIDES) disruptions reinforces this intent. However, ambition must be analytically separated from structural capacity. The strategy aims to safeguard freedom of navigation, protected critical maritime infrastructure and respond to evolving threats such as piracy and cyberattacks.[9] However, a distinction must be maintained between articulated political intent, episodic operational presence and long-term strategic endurance — areas in which the EU’s performance remains uneven. The “Strategic Agenda 2025” explicitly reinforces this focus by seeking to improve coordination on the links between the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific, specifically highlighting the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean as key interfaces. This geographic framing underscores the EU’s intense reliance on the security of global maritime chokepoints.[10] Europe’s prosperity is fundamentally reliant on maritime routes or ISLs extending into the western segment of the Indo-Pacific (the Arabian sea and the Bay of Bengal) which serve as a central corridor linking Asian manufacturing and subsea data routes. Around 30 per cent of global container traffic transits the Red Sea and major subsea cable systems traverse the north-western Indian Ocean, once again creating structural dependency on the stability of these maritime routes.[11]
This dependency reveals a critical divergence: the EU’s strategic interest is fundamentally one of transit security — protecting its global commerce and supply chains extending outwards from Europe. This limited, commerce-driven focus contrasts with India’s need for comprehensive systemic regional stability and maintaining a regional balance against great-power competition and more importantly, influence.[12] Moreover, the EU’s operational presence is not derived from a unified European Navy but relies on voluntary, fragmented deployments by member States — primarily France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands.[13]
Against this backdrop of converging rhetoric but divergent structural interests, the Strategic Agenda’s maritime provisions warrant closer scrutiny, not as a declaratory intent but as instruments with varying strategic utility for India.
Extraction of Key Maritime Provision from the Agenda
The Strategic Agenda organises maritime cooperation under several critical pillars demonstrating a comprehensive (albeit broad) mandate.
Under the Security and Defence Pillar, the document identifies maritime security, cyber defence and counterterrorism as key areas for expansion. Provisions explicitly call for combined naval exercises and enhancing maritime security cooperation in the Indo-Pacific.[14] The Connectivity and Global Issues pillar mandates strengthening regional connectivity, focusing on ports and emphasising the crucial protection of critical underwater infrastructure. This commitment aligns with the EU’s Global Gateway Initiative aimed at building smart and clean infrastructure linkages.[15] Finally, the Agenda confirms the EU’s participation in the India-launched, structure-light Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative (IPOI). This engagement reflects the EU’s readiness to cooperate on shared priorities such as maritime ecology, marine resources, capacity-building and Resource Sharing, disaster risk reduction, maritime security amongst other spokes.[16] The EU’s buy-in to the IPOI is strategically important because it allows India, as the initiative’s originator, to steer cooperation toward its own thematic and geographical priorities (e.g. environmental security, Eastern IOR focus), providing a built-in mechanism to mitigate the EU’s inherent WIO-centric bias.
While the Agenda outlines a broad and ambitious framework for maritime cooperation, its practical value for India depends on how these provisions translate into operational depth, technological leverage, and policy alignment
Evaluating the Imperative: What Deepened Cooperation Offers India
While India’s security requirements are ultimately met through indigenous capacity and core partnerships (the US, Japan, Australia, France), the Strategic Agenda offers specific, high-leverage benefits that strategically augment New Delhi’s position in the IOR:
- Cooperative Naval Presence and Strategic Burden Sharing
The EU’s willingness to partner on specific maritime security issues offers India multilateral legitimacy and diplomatic depth. Engagement with a major economic and normative bloc outside the Quad framework provides India with additional partner support in the IOR, creating a crucial non-Quad and non-US pathway for the development of a complementary secondary maritime security architecture. This, in turn, supports India’s Preferred Security Partner role by demonstrating international backing and supplementing regional deterrence against non-state actors and forms of maritime coercion.[17] Further, combined naval exercises — particularly those focused on advanced counter-piracy and tactical manoeuvres — contribute to operational standardisation on a tactical level but do not materially alter the balance of power vis-à-vis China or Pakistan. They nonetheless foster interoperability and improved communication protocols, which are invaluable for coordinated regional responses, especially to high-seas threats in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) and the Gulf of Aden, which remain volatile.[18] For both entities, this cooperation is motivated by a partial convergence in threat perception, particularly regarding maritime instability, supply chain disruption and coercive behaviour, rather than a fully aligned view of China as a systemic adversary.[19]
- Enhancing Maritime Domain Awareness and Information Exchange
Cooperation on MDA represents one of the highest potential returns for India in the maritime domain. The Agenda provides concrete frameworks to enhance pre-existing mechanisms for information sharing, shared assessment and operational coordination. The transnational nature of Illicit Maritime Activities such as piracy, armed robbery, IUUF, smuggling of narcotics and arms, human trafficking, etc., has been jointly addressed by India and the EU across theatres including the Gulf of Guinea, the Red Sea, Gulf of Oman and Aden and along the eastern littorals of Africa.[20] Notably, the Agenda opens pathways for access to advanced technology by leveraging European research infrastructure and High-Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities. Under the existing EU-India Administrative Arrangement on HPC, collaboration is already underway in areas such as weather modelling and natural hazard prediction. Extending this cooperation to the maritime domain enables more sophisticated threat prediction, simulation and development of AI solutions as regional public goods.[21] Access to advanced, trustworthy and human-centric AI design and prototyping, when coupled with India’s strengths in chip design, directly strengthen India’s ability to develop AI-driven MDA capabilities to counter both, traditional and non-traditional maritime threats in the IOR. These capabilities can generate scalable operational models applicable across the wider Indo-Pacific.[22] This technological leverage is instrumental for maintaining India’s technological edge in IOR. Unlike naval presence or exercises, MDA cooperation generates asymmetric and enduring advantages, making it one of the few areas where EU engagement meaningfully enhances India’s strategic position.
- Maritime Connectivity and Critical Infrastructure Resilience (CMIP)
The “Connectivity” pillar offers tangible benefits by focusing on corridors, ports and critical infrastructure. India could leverage the EU’s Global Gateway as a source of clean and smart infrastructure financing and technical expertise.[23] This partnership enables India to strategically de-risk its regional supply chains and connectivity footprint by presenting credible non-Chinese alternatives to regional infrastructure development schemes, particularly when engaging with Large Island Developing States (LIDS). More importantly, it provides India influence over standards-setting in third-country maritime infrastructure, rather than merely an alternative source of capital. Further, securing CMIP is a shared priority. The protection of critical maritime infrastructure — including underwater infrastructure such as subsea communication cables, electricity cables, pipelines, and offshore infrastructure—which includes Single Point Moorings (SPMs), cable landing stations, offshore oil rigs and offshore wind farms—forms the backbone of maritime connectivity and is essential for India’s economic and digital security.[24] Monitoring and safeguarding such infrastructure is a key action point within the EUMSS 2023 Action Plan.[25]
- Rules-based order and Normative Reinforcement
The unambiguous and clearly-articulated commitment by both the EU and India to upholding a rules-based maritime order, anchored firmly in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is strategically advantageous for New Delhi.[26] This alignment reinforces India’s preferred legalistic and diplomatic approach to maritime governance, providing shared normative legitimacy in responding to States that challenge international law and freedom of navigation.[27] Collaboration in this area could also deepen Indian expertise in Public International Maritime Law (PIML), enhancing its capacity to articulate and defend its maritime rights. At the same time, normative convergence alone is insufficient: norms amplify power, but they do not substitute for it. India therefore derives tangible benefit from EU’s normative alignment only when such commitments are underpinned by credible enforcement capacity and sustained political will.
- Capacity building and Standardisation Benefits
The EU’s substantial regulatory and technological capacity offers a practical advantage for India’s maritime sector at a time when the global shift towards ‘green shipping’ is driving significant domestic policy chances and technological adjustment. Access to EU regulatory frameworks and technical expertise can support India’s shipping and port operations in meeting emerging international sustainability standards, particularly those related to decarbonisation.[28] While these standards pose risks, some of which are detailed in succeeding paragraphs, structured partnerships could facilitate technology transfer and joint training, help narrow the technological gap and ensure that Indian maritime operators retain access to global markets.[29] However, strategic utility alone does not justify deepened cooperation. Any assessment of gains must be balanced against structural risks, implementation gaps and long-term sovereignty implications.
Strategic Friction and Caution: Assessing the Need and the Risks
The question of whether India needs to deepen maritime cooperation with the EU ultimately turns on the assessment of strategic risk. An uncritical embrace of the Agenda’s provision could undermine India’s Strategic Autonomy and misallocate scarce diplomatic and operational resources towards European-centric geographical priorities
- The Strategic Autonomy Conflict
India’s signature strategic autonomy (the freedom to choose partners and policies independent of great power blocs) is inherently complicated by deeper security cooperation with the EU. Such engagement is not purely transactional; it carries broader geopolitical implications. New Delhi’s intensified outreach to Europe following the Russia-Ukraine conflict, partly intended to offset the criticism of India’s position, suggests that enhanced cooperation entails an implicit political price.[30] If the EU were to define “maritime order” or “security engagement” in ways that constrain India’s geopolitical choices — for instance, by pressing for specific positions regarding China’s regional activities or on India’s sustained defence relationship with Russia — such cooperation would conflict with the principles that India considers central to its emergence as a global power.[31] The challenge, therefore, is not to preserve strategic autonomy, but to manage selective dependence: limiting integration to clearly defined areas of capacity-building against primary security challenges, while retaining full diplomatic freedom in broader external policy.
- Operational Implementation Gap and Coherence
India must objectively assess the EU’s real and sustained maritime footprint in the IOR. While the Agenda’s outlines an ambitious scope for maritime cooperation, several of its provisions risk remaining high-level political declarations that outpace operational capacity. The EU operates without a standing “European Navy”, and its maritime engagements rely on voluntary and fragmented deployments by individual member-States often shaped by distinct national foreign policy priorities.[32] Moreover, the EU’s established operational footprint in the IOR, largely centred around EUNAVFOR Op ATALANTA since 2008, has been primarily focused on counter-piracy actions. While counter-piracy exercises remain important, these do not, in and of themselves, address India’s core strategic security challenges. The latter include great power competition, naval deterrence vis-à-vis China and Pakistan, and broader, regional crisis-management.[33] The principal risk is one of strategic overstretch: India could commit significant resources based on an expectation of EU support, which may prove episodic or be rapidly redirected to contingencies closer to Europe, such as renewed instability in the Red Sea and the Denmark Strait.[34] The EU’s operational contributions should thus be viewed as complementary and situational, rather than as reliable pillars for India’s high-end maritime security planning.
- Misalignment of priorities and Geography
A significant structural risk is the misalignment between India’s comprehensive IOR requirements and the EU’s primary geographical interests. As previously established, the EU’s strategic imperative is closely tied to the security of the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and WIO interfaces, reflecting its commercial dependence on these maritime chokepoints.[35] India’s maritime focus, on the other hand, encapsulated as it is in the policy of MAHASAGAR, is necessarily holistic and region-wide, spanning the entire IOR, including the eastern littorals, the Bay of Bengal and the developing needs of island States.[36] By contrast, the EU’s connectivity and third-country initiatives under the Agenda may disproportionately lean towards serving Europe-Asia trade routes and WIO security concerns. This divergence risks strategically diluting India’s focus by way of resource allocation and also by way of being demanding of Indian attention towards European transit interests rather than India’s own core objectives of regional stability, capacity building and development. To counter this structural bias, India must proactively employ the IPOI as a steering mechanism, ensuring that the EU’s financial resources and technical assistance are explicitly aligned with India’s MAHASAGAR priorities, thereby mitigating geographical dilution.
- Regulatory and Standards Burden
While collaboration on standards and green maritime technology offers tangible benefits, the extra-territorial reach of EU regulations imposes a substantial financial and technological burden on Indian maritime operators. The EU has proposed the inclusion of shipping in the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) and the implementation of the Fuel EU Maritime regulation, which entered into force in January 2025.[37] These measures introduce market-based mechanisms that place a price on carbon emissions. Compliance with these regimes entails stringent technological conditionalities for Indian shipping in order to retain access to European ports and markets.
From India’s perspective, these standards function as strategic non-tariff barriers (NTBs). If not accompanied by compensatory financial assistance, phased implementation or meaningful technology transfer, these EU-driven standards (despite their sustainability objectives), risk placing Indian maritime operators at a structural disadvantage. India must therefore ensure that the “Prosperity” pillar of the Agenda incorporates concrete mechanisms to mitigate these economic burdens, aligning regulatory cooperation with India’s developmental and competitiveness imperatives.[38]
- Data Sovereignty and Critical Infrastructure Risks
Deeper cooperation on MDA, particularly where this involves the linking of advanced sensor networks and the development of shared awareness-architectures, introduces long-term risks to data sovereignty.[39] The integrity and security of national intelligence databases — especially those operated by agencies such as the IFC-IOR (Information Fusion Centre Indian Ocean Region) — could be compromised through interconnected systems, raising concerns about foreign access to sensitive national security data. In this context, data governance in MDA cooperation constitutes a first-order strategic concern rather than a purely technical issue. Similarly, collaboration on Critical Maritime Infrastructure Protection (CMIP) may entail partner involvement in the monitoring or protection of highly sensitive national assets, including port operating systems and submarine cable landing stations. This potential presence of foreign technology, platforms or personnel at such sites raises deep-seated sovereignty and security concerns, necessitating rigorous, legally binding bilateral protocols governing access, data ownership and operational control.
Taken in aggregate, these frictions underscore the need for a calibrated policy approach that maximises selective gains while preventing strategic overreach or unintended dependency.
Policy Outlook: Shaping the Future Agenda
The “India-EU Strategic Agenda 2025” provides concrete and valuable avenues for collaboration, particularly in advanced technology transfer (AI-driven MDA), financial support for CMIP via the Global Gateway, and normative reinforcement through UNCLOS adherence. These benefits are strategically relevant insofar as they complement India’s role as a “preferred security partner” in the IOR. However, the preceding analysis demonstrates that cooperation does not automatically constitute a strategic necessity for India to address its core maritime security requirements. The EU’s maritime commitment remains structurally constrained by its reliance on fragmented member-State capacities and its primary geographical focus on the Western Indian Ocean chokepoints, driven by European commercial transit security. India’s indigenous capabilities and its existing, robust multilateral partnerships therefore continue to form the primary pillars its maritime security architecture
From an India-centric maritime, the core policy recommendation is that cooperation under the Agenda must be selective, transactional and tightly governed. The objective should be to extract maximum value from areas — technology, standards and finance — that directly augment Indian capacity, while maintaining firm red lines to preserve strategic autonomy and prevent geographic dilution.
To maximise benefits and mitigate risks as the Agenda is operationalised, the following strategic policy actions are recommended:
- Proactive IPOI implementation:
India must assert its leadership within the framework of the IPOI to deliberately steer EU financial commitments and technical resources towards capacity-building, environmental resilience and developmental needs of the eastern IOR and island states. The IPOI should not only function as an influencing mechanism to balance the EU’s inherent Northwestern-Indian Ocean-centric operational bias but also as a structured platform through which India can calibrate and assess EU involvement in Southeast Asia. While selective EU engagement in the region could reinforce capacity-building and provide non-coercive alternatives to Chinese influence, it also carries the risk of norm-setting and agenda-shaping that may not always align with India’s regional priorities. The IPOI can, therefore, serve as an instrument for both coordination and strategic due diligence, allowing India to shape, test and where necessary, constrain EU engagement in Southeast Asia in line with India’s maritime interests.
- Establishing Iron-Clad Governance Protocols:
Given the high strategic value and corresponding risk of MDA cooperation, India could institute rigorous bilateral protocols for data access, filtration, storage and use. These protocols must ensure that national intelligence assets and indigenous sensor networks are neither compromised or integrated in ways that undermine India’s data sovereignty or operational control. In this context, India should resist the adoption of externally developed, turnkey MDA platforms — such as the EU-developed IORIS — without provisions for co-development, co-production and joint governance with regional partners. Embedding such platforms through collaborative design processes preserves partner ownership, mitigates data asymmetries, and reinforces India’s role as a capacity-enabling rather than data-extractive maritime security partner in the IOR.
- Negotiating Regulatory Mitigation and Technology Transfer:
India could leverage the Agenda’s framework to negotiate compensatory mechanisms —such as joint R&D funding, targeted grants for green maritime technologies and subsidised technical assistance — to offset the financial and technological burdens imposed by forthcoming EU environmental directives, including the FuelEU Maritime and the EU ETS. Regulatory alignment must therefore function as an enabler of India’s maritime competitiveness and economic growth, rather than as a structural constraint.
Conclusion
This analysis concludes that while cooperation under the Strategic Agenda offers high-value augmentation — particularly in Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA), Critical Maritime Infrastructure Protection (CMIP), green shipping standards and normative reinforcement — it is not structurally indispensable for India’s core IOR security objectives. These objectives continue to rest primarily on indigenous capability development and tightly aligned strategic partnerships (notably with the Quad countries, France, and select regional actors). Accordingly, India’s optimal strategy is to engage with the EU only in capability domains wherein European inputs provide measurable value (such as advanced technologies, financial instruments, regulatory expertise and normative alignment), while keeping cooperation compartmentalised, legally bounded and reversible; thereby, safeguarding strategic autonomy and avoiding diversion towards European transit-centric priorities.
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About the Author
Ms Saaz Lahiri is an experienced Research Associate at the National Maritime Foundation (NMF). She holds a Bachelor’s degree in ‘History and International Relations’, and a Post Graduate Diploma in ‘International Relations’ from Ashoka University. Her research focuses upon the manner in which India’s maritime strategies interface and interact with those of the European Union (EU). She can be reached at eu4.nmf@gmail.com
Endnotes:
[1] European Commission, “Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council on a New Strategic EU-India Agenda,” High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Brussels, 17 September 2025. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2025/documents/JOIN_2025_50_1_EN_ACT_part1_v9.pdf
See also,
European Commission, “MEMO: EU-India Free Trade Agreement Chapter by Chapter Summary,” Trade and Economic Security, 27 January 2026. https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-country-and-region/countries-and-regions/india/eu-india-agreements/memo-eu-india-free-trade-agreement-chapter-chapter-summary_en
See also,
European Parliament, “EU-India Trade and Technology Council,” February 2023. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2024/757587/EPRS_ATA(2024)757587_EN.pdf
See also,
European External Action Service, “Security and Defence: EU and India Sign Security and Defence Partnership,” Strategic Communications, 27 January 2026. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/security-and-defence-eu-and-india-sign-security-defence-partnership_en
[2] Suyesha Dutta, “Explainer: What’s Behind India’s Shift from ‘Non Alignment’ to ‘Strategic Alignment’ in the Indian Ocean?” Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, 29 January 2025. What’s Behind India’s Shift from ‘Non-Alignment’ to ‘Strategic Alignment’ in the Indian Ocean?
[3] SAGAR
[4] Ministry of Defence, “Maritime Cooperation with Regional Partners,” Press Information Bureau of India, 21 March 2022. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1807607®=3&lang=2
[5] Suchitra Durai, “From India’s Maritime Vision: from SAGAR to Indo-Pacific to MAHASAGAR,” Former Ambassador of India to Thailand. https://eoibelgrade.gov.in/public_files/assets/pdf/SAGAR_to_MAHASAGAR_18_08_2025.pdf
See also,
Ministry of External Affairs, “Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi announced Vision MAHASAGAR,” Government of India, 21 March 2025. https://www.mea.gov.in/newsdetail1.htm?13355/
See also,
Tanya Singh Yadav, “From SAGAR to MAHASAGAR: India’s Strategic Evolution in the Indian Ocean Region,” Indo-Pacific Studies Centre, https://www.indo-pacificstudiescenter.org/commentaries/india-mahasagar-initiative
[6] Ministry of Defence, “Raksha Mantri at Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue 2024,” Press Information Bureau of India, 04 October 2024. http://pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=2062068®=3&lang=2
[7]Suyesha Dutta, “Explainer: What’s Behind India’s Shift from ‘Non Alignment’ to ‘Strategic Alignment.’
[8] European Commission, “Maritime Security Strategy,” Ocean and Fisheries, 03 March 2021. https://oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu/maritime-security/maritime-security-strategy_en
[9] European Commission, “Maritime Security Strategy.”
[10] European Commission, “Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council on a New Strategic EU-India Agenda.” Pg 10.
[11] Lizza Bomassi and Rossella Marangio, “Ocean of Stakes: The Western Indian Ocean’s Complex Maritime Order,” European Union Institute for Security Studies, 10 November 2025. Ocean of stakes: The Western Indian Ocean’s complex maritime order | European Union Institute for Security Studies
[12] Lok Sabha Secretariat, “Report on the Subject ‘Evaluation of India’s Indian Ocean Strategy’,” Press Release, 11 August 2025. https://sansad.in/getFile/lsscommittee/External%20Affairs/pr_files/Press%20Release%20Indian%20Ocean.pdf?source=loksabhadocs
[13] Saaz Lahiri, “A Critical Analysis of the European Union’s Key Maritime Security Engagements in the Indian Ocean,” National Maritime Foundation, 17 April 2024. https://maritimeindia.org/a-critical-analysis-of-the-european-unions-key-maritime-security-engagements-in-the-indian-ocean/
[14] European Commission, “Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council on a New Strategic EU-India Agenda.” Pg 10-12.
[15] European Commission, “Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council on a New Strategic EU-India Agenda.” Pg 12-15.
[16] European Commission, “Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council on a New Strategic EU-India Agenda.” Pg 10.
[17]Suyesha Dutta, “Explainer: What’s Behind India’s Shift from ‘Non Alignment’ to ‘Strategic Alignment.’
[18] European Union External Action, “EU and India to Carry out Joint Naval Exercise in Indian Ocean to Reinforce Maritime Security Cooperation,” EEAS Press Team, 29 May 2025. EU and India to carry out joint naval exercise in Indian Ocean to reinforce maritime security cooperation | EEAS
[19] Javier Fernández Aparicio and Harsh Pandey, “A Strategic Partnership: Security Cooperation between India and the European Union,” Insituto Espanol de Estudios Estrategicos, 11 February 2025. Pg 14. A strategic partnership: security cooperation between India and the European Union
[20] “India-EU hold 4th Maritime Security Dialogue,” Akashvani News, 22 March 2025. A strategic partnership: security cooperation between India and the European Union
[21] European Commission, “Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council on a New Strategic EU-India Agenda.” Pg 8
[22]Lok Sabha Secretariat, “Report on the Subject ‘Evaluation of India’s Indian Ocean Strategy’.” Pg 5
[23] European Union External Action, “Second Eu-India Maritime Security Dialogue,” EEAS Press Team, 01 February 2022. Second EU-India Maritime Security Dialogue | EEAS
[24] European Commission, “Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council on a New Strategic EU-India Agenda.” Pg 9.
[25] European Commission, “EUMSS Action Plan,” Ocean and Fisheries, 03 March 2021. https://oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu/maritime-security/maritime-security-strategy_en. Pg 18, 21, 26.
[26] European Commission, “Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council on a New Strategic EU-India Agenda.” Pg 1, 11 and 14.
[27] European Union External Action, “EU and India to Carry out Joint Naval Exercise in Indian Ocean to Reinforce Maritime Security Cooperation.”
[28] European Union External Action, “EU and India to Carry out Joint Naval Exercise in Indian Ocean to Reinforce Maritime Security Cooperation.” Pg 3.
[29] Swan Defence and Heavy Industries Limited, “Swan Defence and Heavy Industries Limited Secures Chemical Tanker Order from Europe’s Rederiet Stenersen AS,” PR Newswire, 26 January 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/swan-defence-and-heavy-industries-limited-secures-chemical-tanker-order-from-europes-rederiet-stenersen-as-302669760.html
[30] Raja Mohan, “India: Leaning to One Side (Cautiously),” Harvard Kennedy School, Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs, 20 November 2025. India: Leaning to One Side (Cautiously) | The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
[31] Suyesha Dutta, “Explainer: What’s Behind India’s Shift from ‘Non Alignment’ to ‘Strategic Alignment’ in the Indian Ocean?”
[32] Saaz Lahiri, “A Critical Analysis of the European Union’s Key Maritime Security Engagements.”
[33] Lok Sabha Secretariat, “Report on the Subject ‘Evaluation of India’s Indian Ocean Strategy’.” Pg 5 (Recommendation 01)
[34] Lizza Bomassi and Rossella Marangio, “Ocean of Stakes: The Western Indian Ocean’s Complex Maritime Order.”
[35] European Union External Action, “EU and India to Carry out Joint Naval Exercise in Indian Ocean to Reinforce Maritime Security Cooperation.” Pg 10.
[36] Ministry of External Affairs, “Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi announced Vision MAHASAGAR.”
[37] Directorate General of Shipping, “Indian Coastal Green Shipping Programme,” DNV, 2023. Pg 6. DNV Report.pdf
[38] European Union External Action, “EU and India to Carry out Joint Naval Exercise in Indian Ocean to Reinforce Maritime Security Cooperation.” Pg 3-7.
[39] European Union External Action, “Second Eu-India Maritime Security Dialogue,” EEAS Press Team, 01 February 2022. Second EU-India Maritime Security Dialogue | EEAS
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