A year after Op Sindoor, India must look east & militarise Nicobar islands urgently

ELI5/TLDR

Op Sindoor was last May’s 87-hour air skirmish with Pakistan. India has spent a year celebrating it. Shekhar Gupta argues that’s a mistake — the next fight won’t look like the last one. He wants India’s strategic gaze to swing from the Punjab border to the Bay of Bengal, where China is quietly buying influence in Myanmar and Bangladesh and where Thailand keeps flirting with a canal that would let Chinese warships skip the Malacca Strait entirely. The fix, he says, is to militarise the Andaman and Nicobar Islands — especially Great Nicobar — into a forward defensive shield.

The Full Story

The piece opens by trying to spoil a party. The first anniversary of Op Sindoor is next week and Gupta wants the country to stop replaying the highlight reel.

Not even prudent, imprudent. We need to think of wars of the future instead. We also need to shift our gaze across our landmass from the west to the east.

The eastern flank is quiet — and that’s exactly the problem. He cites Field Marshal Asim Munir’s August 2025 speech in Tampa, where Pakistan’s army chief promised that next time the war would start from the east, “where they have located their most valuable resources,” and roll westward from there. Whatever Munir actually meant, the line is worth taking seriously because, in Gupta’s reading, Munir is a “reckless big mouth” who tends to telegraph his thinking.

The map nobody looks at

India’s eastern seaboard runs 3,416 km. Above it sits 600 km of Bangladesh coast, then 2,227 km of Myanmar, then Thailand, then the Andaman Sea opening into the Pacific via the Malacca Strait. Both Bangladesh and Myanmar are leaning Chinese — Myanmar especially, given the chaos there. And the old Thai dream of a canal across the Isthmus of Kra keeps refusing to die.

That idea might cost $55 billion today and sometimes may seem like a fantasy, but there is enough juice in it to have survived 350 years since it appeared as a vision in a Thai monarch’s dream.

If the canal ever gets dug, it cuts three days off the Pacific-to-Andaman sail and guts Malacca’s chokepoint value. It would almost certainly be built with Chinese money or co-ownership. The Chinese navy could then arrive on India’s eastern doorstep without ever threading the strait.

Unsinkable aircraft carriers

Geography hands India the answer. The Andaman and Nicobar chain sits across the throat of the Bay of Bengal. Long-range aircraft and refuelers based there can watch the entire bay, the Andaman Sea, and well beyond. Great Nicobar, the southernmost speck, is the prize asset — the contested transshipment-port-and-military-base project Rahul Gandhi went to oppose this week.

Gupta is careful to deflate the heroic version of why this matters. The popular line is that India can choke China at Malacca. He doesn’t buy it.

To block it India would need to be as reckless as Iran with Hormuz because it would hinder friend and foe, Japan, South Korea, Russia for example.

The real point isn’t blocking — it’s watching, and being able to intervene if things get genuinely desperate. Any ship in or out of Malacca passes through the Six Degree Channel, which sits inside India’s exclusive economic zone off Great Nicobar. Presence and surveillance are the deliverable; blockade is theatre.

The Chinese already have a foothold

Twenty kilometres from Landfall Island, the northernmost tip of the Andaman archipelago, sits Myanmar’s Great Coco Island — 14.57 sq km, with a 7,500 ft airstrip already longer than anything India has built at Great Nicobar. Four smaller islands hang off it. Chinese visits have been recorded. Given Myanmar’s collapse, ruling out a permanent Chinese presence there is, in Gupta’s words, something history won’t forgive.

The shift he wants

Indian forces are still oriented north and west — army and air force toward Pakistan and the Himalayas, navy mostly toward the Arabian Sea. He wants the eastern islands treated as a “defensive phalanx” — base ships, submarines, combat aircraft, reconnaissance — and developed patiently into what the Himalayas are to the north. The next ten to fifteen years, he argues, are far more likely to involve China coming at India through the east than India sailing out to fight China in the open Pacific.

Key Takeaways

Op Sindoor was an air skirmish, not a template. Future wars will probably look maritime and eastern.
The Andaman & Nicobar chain is geography’s gift — a forward base sitting on top of every ship moving through Malacca.
Great Nicobar’s port-cum-military-base project should be defended on surveillance and presence grounds, not on the implausible promise of choking Malacca.
Watch Myanmar’s Great Coco Island. A Chinese airstrip 20 km from Indian territory is a live possibility.
The Kra Canal is a 350-year-old idea that keeps not dying. If it’s ever built, it’ll be built with Chinese capital, and India’s eastern coast becomes a frontier overnight.
Asim Munir’s “war from the east” line shouldn’t be read as Siliguri. Read it as the eastern seaboard.

Claude’s Take

Gupta is a hawk writing for a hawkish audience, but the geographic argument lands cleanly even if you strip the rhetoric. The honest core: India’s threat models are still shaped by 1971 and the Punjab border, and the maritime east has been treated as benign for fifty years. That’s a real lag.

The weak link is the Kra Canal — interesting historical detail, but $55 billion canals across sovereign Thai territory are not the kind of thing China just builds. Treating it as a near-term planning input is a stretch. The Coco Islands point is sturdier and the Six Degree Channel point is the strongest in the piece — it reframes the Great Nicobar project from “block Malacca” (silly) to “watch Malacca” (boring but achievable).

What he won’t say — and flags openly — is what Munir meant by India’s “most valuable resources.” The column wisely doesn’t speculate. The reader is left to fill in the obvious candidates: refining capacity around Jamnagar’s eastern equivalents, the IT belt, the eastern naval command at Visakhapatnam, the offshore gas in the KG basin. Take your pick.

Score 7. Solid op-ed-as-video, a useful reframe of why the Great Nicobar project matters, but more strategic-affairs commentary than original analysis.