Security Challenges in the Indian Ocean Region - 2 | UPSC Mains: International Relations PDF Download

The Emerging Challenges in the Indian Ocean:

• The geostrategic and geoeconomics interface are linked not only with traditional maritime conflicts between nation-states but also are linked with nontraditional threats, such as environmental threats and threats by non-state actors (maritime terrorism and piracy). After the delimitation of the maritime boundaries, Bangladesh realized the need for safe and secured territorial water. The BIMSTEC, IORA, ASEAN now focuses on maritime piracy in the modern era, learning from the lessons from Somalia’s coast. Although piracy in the India-Bangladesh waters, the Indo-Pacific is increasingly becoming a hotspot for maritime crime. If we take the example of the Bay of Bengal, criminal nexus is found to be active in extortion, armed robbery, and kidnappings in the sea. The Straits of Malacca witnesses robbery, the Sulu Sea is confronted with a string of piracy linked with extremist groups such as Abu Sayyaf (Benson, 2020).
• Apart from maritime piracy and terrorism, illicit maritime trades and trafficking are on the rise too. In particular, Bangladesh suffers from a multitude of crimes in its waters, including acts of piracy and drug trafficking on top of the list (in that order) in the trajectory of transnational maritime crimes for Bangladesh. The Bay of Bengal, a geopolitical and geoeconomic pivot for the BIMSTEC countries, connects Bangladesh with South and Southeast Asia. This is perhaps a critical zone for the sub-regional South-Southeast Asia’s forgotten “Quad,” popularly known as BCIM – Bangladesh, China, India, Myanmar Economic Corridor. At present, population growth, climate change, overexploitation of fisheries, degradation of critical habitats, pollution, and deteriorating water quality are reshaping the Bay.
• The pace and breadth of these challenges require regional cooperation that encourages the countries around the Bay to rise above their political fault-lines to work together. The Maldives, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia are currently working together under the Bay of Bengal Large Marine Ecosystem (BOBLME) Project designed to improve the lives of the coastal populations through improved regional management of the Bay of Bengal environment and its fisheries (Kabir & Ahmad, 2015). Located at the northeastern tip of the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal is bounded by the coastlines of Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. It offers a US$3.71 Trillion of the combined economy (Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, 2019).
• Despite the agreements and international or regional arrangements, the Bay remains a route for piracy, narcotics, human trafficking, arms smuggling, and illegal fishing. Preventing piracy, smuggling of illegal drugs, especially methamphetamine pills, illegal human trafficking, illegal trespassing, and cross-border terrorism has become critical security issues not only for the countries surrounding the Bay of Bengal but also for the multilateral and regional institutions such as the UN, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), and Association for South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN). Perhaps, the security-related issues have become focal concerns for the emerging initiatives such as the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) and the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (IONS), which seeks to build cooperative security and political frameworks to address the common challenges stemming from the Indian Ocean.
• The Bay of Bengal, sandwiched between the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescnet – hotbeds for narcotics, human, and small arms narcotice – continues to see a rise in narco-economy and human trafficking. In 2019, the Malaysian Police intercepted boats laden with meth that left the Malaysian city of Penang. Syndicates also use “motherships” that pick up the drugs in the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal and distribute them as far afield as Australia and New Zealand. Meth from Myanmar has also been found smuggled in shipping containers in the Philippines and Malaysia. According to the report published by the Police, chemists are brought in from Taiwan and China to run the meth labs in Myanmar, while the precursors and lab equipment mostly comes from China (Allard, 2019).
• In Bangladesh and Myanmar’s case, the bulk of drug trafficking happens through the Bay of Bengal and the land point of transits between Bangladesh and Myanmar. The maritime drugs trafficking remained active throughout 2019 and 2020, in particular along the Bay of Bengal linking the Andaman Sea and the Strait of Malacca Straits to reach crystalline methamphetamine markets in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia as well as onward trafficking to the Pacific islands, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand (UNODC, 2020).
• The geographic proximity of Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives have enabled human and geographical networks for drug trafficking. Myanmar and Thailand, which are major opium-producing regions of the world, have put all countries, including Bangladesh and the island nations such as Sri Lanka and the Maldives, in a precarious position as far as the drug menace is concerned. Bangladesh’s location is more vulnerable as it is situated between the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan) and the Golden Triangle (Myanmar-Thailand). The drug trafficking modus operandi constantly changes with fluid and clandestine networks spanning from Afghanistan to the Maldives to the Indian Northeast to Thailand to the Strait of Malacca. The drug and human traffickers can now use information and communication technologies to navigate their transport vehicles clandestinely.
• While the use of technology by the non-state actors is nothing new, the new technologies will have consequences leading to serious maritime incidents, leading to loss of life, environmental pollution, and cargo loss, directly affecting society and the economy. Safety, security, and pollution prevention are of the utmost importance for maritime transport. Series of criminal incidents at sea shows no sign of abating, despite significant investments and the application of new technologies. Human factors and training are essential to reduce incidents at sea and manage the applications of new technologies, particularly the interaction between man and machine (European Council for maritime Applied R&D, 2020).
• Another critical challenge is determining future risk levels and developing standard procedures to relate risk levels to maritime movements. Terrorist threats show no signs of decreasing, and both ships and ports may continue to face the threat of terrorist acts. This is further supplemented by severe concerns about cyber-security that can undermine the security of SLOCs. In the future, the transnational criminal groups would be able to use autonomous ships, underwater vehicles, shore-based control, and fully autonomous remote operations for criminal activities. In addition to the criminal-terrorism dimension, the Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IIU) Fishing and Hidden Harvest remains a critical problem. The unregulated movement of trawlers and boats should be monitored. This would require regional and extra-regional collaborations.
• In 2015, Sri Lankan authorities claimed to have spotted 40,544 Indian trawlers in Sri Lanka’s territorial waters (Lobo & Ghosh, 2017). Twenty trawlers were seized, and 450 fishermen were arrested. At least 100 deaths have been reported. Conversely, many Sri Lankan tuna fishermen have also been arrested in India. On the other side of the subcontinent, large numbers of Indian fishermen are frequently arrested in Pakistan: 220 were released in December 2016 as a goodwill gesture (Lobo & Ghosh, 2017). In Myanmar, until a ban was enacted in 2014, the catch collected by foreign fishing boats was 100 times greater than that of local fishermen (Lobo & Ghosh, 2017). In the troubled Arakan region, where 43% of the population is dependent on fisheries, catches have declined so steeply that many families are mired in debt (Aung, 2017). The Mergui archipelago on the Thai-Myanmar border is a secluded part of the Bay, once rich with the underwater marine ecosystem, that has become ravaged by dynamite-fishing and climate-change-induced bleaching (Amrith, 2015).
• However,  IUU fishing harms fisheries’ health by contributing to the overexploitation of fish stocks. Despite the general increasing trend in fish production, IUU fishing could further escalate overfishing. In a 2015 assessment, BOBLME showed that the total value of illegal fishing catches was between $3.35 billion and $10.40 billion annually. Unported fishing could be valued between $2.7 billion and $1.35 billion annually (Bay of Bengal Large Marine Ecosystem Project, 2019). Indeed, illegal fishing without reporting violates Article145 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The use of plastic further exacerbates the depletion of fishing and ecosystems. This unregulated fishing can be traced back since the 1960s. In the 1960s, western aid agencies encouraged the growth of trawling in India, so that fishermen could profit from the demand for prawns in foreign markets. This led to a “pink gold rush”, in which prawns were trawled with fine mesh nets that were dragged along the seafloor. But along with hauls of “pink gold,” these nets also scooped up whole seafloor ecosystems as well as vulnerable species like turtles, dolphins, sea snakes, rays and sharks (Lobo & Ghosh, Bay of Bengal: Depleted Fish Stocks and Huge Dead Zone Signal Tipping Point, 2017). These were once called bycatch, and were largely discarded. Today the collateral damage of the trawling industry is processed and sold to the fast-growing poultry and aquaculture industries of the region. In effect, the processes that sustain the Bay of Bengal’s fisheries are being destroyed in order to produce dirt-cheap chicken feed and fish feed.
• Apart from fishing problems, the Indian ocean has become another hotspot for plastic. A recent report published by the Scientific Report (2019) identified that 414 million plastic waste items, weighing 238 tonnes, are polluting Cocos Keeling Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean (Lavers, Dicks, Dicks, & Finger, 2019). The report further identified that the group of islands, touted as Australia’s last unspoiled paradise, is located 2,100 kilometers off the northwest coast of the continent and has tourism as a primary source of income. The large plastic buildup included about 25 percent single-use or disposable plastics — packaging, drink bottles, straws, plastic cutlery, bags, toothbrushes — and shoes (Lavers, Dicks, Dicks, & Finger, 2019). This colossal amount of plastic waste is a symbolic representation of plastic circulation across the Indian ocean.
• If we take the case of the Indian sub-continent, the situation could be seen as more problematic. This region is characterized by high population density (almost a fifth of the world’s total population), low-income development indicators, and high dependence upon natural resources for livelihood. Recent studies indicate that eight of them come from Asia, among the top ten most polluted rivers globally. Two of them are in the South Asia subregion (i.e., sixth – the Ganges, and third – Indus) (The Thaiger, 2019). The top ten plastic polluted rivers are accountable for 88% of the total plastic load in the oceans (Kapinga & Chung, 2020). Rivers Indus, Meghna, Brahmaputra, and the Ganges in South Asia region account for roughly 22% of the plastic weight of the top ten plastic polluting rivers, which translates into approximately 19% of the global marine plastic pollution (Kapinga & Chung, 2020).
• A scientific study conducted by Mheen, Sebille & Pattiaratchi (2020) identified that Large amounts of plastic waste enter the ocean every year, potentially harming marine species and ecosystems. However, the awareness and research on plastic debris (“plastics”) is relatively new in the Indian Ocean. This is a significant gap in governing the marine ecosystems in the Indian ocean. The Indian Ocean’s atmospheric and oceanic dynamics are unique, so plastic deposition and pollution in the Indian Ocean differ from those in the other oceans (Mheen, Sebille, & Pattiaratchi, 2020). Therefore, plastic will be another critical area leading to the creation of more “dead zones.” The burden-sharing can potentially cause tensions among states and can be a source of environmental crisis. It is just a matter of time. That means we need to have effective and realtime information exchange related to pollution data, build infrastructure for plastic recycling, and enforce regional norms for plastic control. We should remember that AI is increasingly becoming a tool for policy making in the developed world. Hence, the IOR countries need to find AI driven solutions to understand the biogeochemical drivers of variability of the air-to-sea CO2 exchange, spanning from regional to global spatial scales, and from monthly to inter-annual time scales (Schuster, 2019).
• While plastic is emerging as a source of tension, the seabed exploration for mineral deposits is a potential source of competition among the states. Growing demand for batteries to power electric cars and store wind and solar energy has driven up the cost of many rare-earth metals and bolstered the business case for seabed mining (Heffernan, 2019). the International Seabed Authority (ISA) has issued 15 years contract for 21 contractors to exploit the resources in the Clarion-Clipperton zone to India to Mid Atlantic to South Atlantic and Pacific. As a result, new technologies will become a significant factor in resource exploitation and maritime economic architecture. Environmental scientists and conservationists have raised their eyebrows since they are worried about the industry’s capabilities and technological limitations to avoid serious environmental harm. The Nature magazine identified that there is scarce data that suggest that deep-sea mining will have devastating, and potentially irreversible, impacts on marine life (Heffernan, 2019).
• Moreover, both the Northern Hemisphere Indian Ocean (NIO) and the Southern Hemisphere Indian Ocean (SIO) are vulnerable to other challenges such as climate change and natural disasters. Countries in the Bay of Bengal are particularly vulnerable to climate shocks, and the region’s average vulnerability is rated well above the global average (Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, 2020). The ND-GAIN Country Index 2020 identified that Thailand was considered the least vulnerable in the region (just above the global average) due to its relatively strong public health, water systems, and infrastructure, and Myanmar was considered the most vulnerable due to projected impacts on its food security and public health (Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, 2020). Extreme weather events such as Cyclone causes colossal economic damage and are becoming increasingly frequent.
• The changing weather patterns can also lead to drought, threatening agriculture and the region’s booming cities, sea-level rise and salinization threatens 40 percent of productive land in southern Bangladesh alone and endangers agriculture and access to drinking water across the region. That means sea level rise, increased storm surges, and shifting river flows threaten coastal and low-lying megacities such as Kolkata, Dhaka, and Yangon, with an increased risk of massive economic damage and large-scale displacement. Climate change and the effect of sea-level rise threaten coastal welfare, agricultural practices, and regional stability in terms of climate-induced migration and displacement. That further means competition over limited resources and exploitation of marine resources can potentially lead to traditional threats. The regional countries would require cooperating in building climate adaptation and resilience efforts using a cooperative framework that should include innovation, engineering, energy and agricultural technologies, climatology, urban development, and a host of other areas.
• Therefore, climate change vulnerabilities, asymmetry in water governance in the region, and lack of technological solutions has accelerated the possibility of more climate-induced migration in the region. A study by the Wilson Center noted, “Many observers, when thinking about climate vulnerability in South Asia, reflexively fixate on Bangladesh—a low-lying, lower riparian nation often convulsed by destructive floods. In reality, the entire region is dangerously vulnerable” (Kugelman, 2020). Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives face risk of climate induced risk due to rising salinity, sea level rise, and poor river management. The landlocked Afghanistan, Bhutan, and Nepal are no exception and encounter rising temperatures, drought, and glacial melt. As such, the entire region are facing the risk of prolonged migration which requires collective response and a reformed attitude toward the reality emerging from non-cooperation in the area of migration.