An Indian-made corvette, INS Kirpan, is currently sailing for Vietnam. This is not a courtesy visit, but the first handover by India to another country of a warship currently in service. A clear political message, as the China Sea is a hot zone, in which several countries are in dispute over the limits of their respective territorial waters.
Previously, India had given away patrol boats or smaller military vessels, which were not in service, as a sign of good neighborliness to modest countries, such as the Maldives or Mauritius, far removed from areas of friction. It also ceded a submarine to Burma.
The Indian-made INS Kirpan entered service in 1991. Relations between India and Vietnam have been excellent for decades, and both countries share the same decolonizing mystique. Although both China and Vietnam are governed by the Communist Party, relations have been strained since the late 1970s, when the People’s Army wanted to punish Hanoi for having overthrown the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. That military adventure, which ended badly, is to date the last Chinese military incursion outside its recognized borders.
New Delhi, however, has had a border dispute with China since it became heir to most of British India and its Himalayan conquests. India is, along with Bhutan -in practice an Indian protectorate- the only state that has not delimited its land borders with China.
China, for its part, literally takes the name of the China Sea – or South China – and claims practically all of its territorial waters, in which several other sovereign states of Southeast Asia have their own claims list.
The Indian Navy has stated that the transfer of the Kirpan “reflects India’s commitment to assisting and improving the capabilities of its related partners”, in a statement with a background and tone similar to those issued by Quad, the strategic dialogue forum that brings together informally to the US, India, Australia and Japan in what they call “the Indo-Pacific”.
The Indian gift was announced coinciding with a visit earlier this month by Vietnamese Defense Minister Gen Phan Van Giang. And it materializes the same week that a US aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, returns to call, after several years, in the Vietnamese port of Danang, which was key for the US during the Vietnam War.
The Kirpan is equipped with short and medium range guns and anti-ship missiles. The day before he cast off with honors in Visakhapatnam, for his last voyage under the Indian flag, Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu had met with his Vietnamese counterpart, with the aim of “strengthening communication”. Vietnam, whose economy has been growing at a very good rate for two decades, has recovered its pulse in the last quarter, although it is still suffering from the secondary effects of the war in Ukraine. Russia, for its part, continues to count on Cam Rahn Bay as a support base, although it ceased to be a Russian naval base – before, a Soviet one – more than twenty years ago.
This transfer of a larger ship is also a sign of confidence from the Indian navy, after two decades of modernization that have left its main rival far behind. Pakistan, plunged into a serious financial crisis and with hardly any reserves to pay for its vital imports, was fighting this Friday to secure, after eight months of delay in talks, a loan from the International Monetary Fund that would keep it afloat until the elections scheduled for autumn. .
The situation is so desperate that this week, for the first time, a Russian tanker has landed in the Pakistani port of Karachi. It should be remembered that negotiating something similar, in February of last year, would have been among the main triggers for a well-oiled motion of no confidence against then Prime Minister Imran Jan.
The stagnation of the Pakistani economy prompts many families in a handful of rural districts to sell land to pay for the passage of one of their offspring on the deliberately unsafe boats with which illegal immigration merchants enrich themselves in Libya, Turkey and the country itself. Europe.
However, India’s attention is right now on its own East, on the state of Manipur, whose head of government, Biran Singh – from the same party as the prime minister, Narendra Modi – was going to resign to the governor. The resignation letter, however, was promptly snatched up and torn to pieces by his own followers. Last month, 249 Baptist churches of the Kukis – one of Manipur’s three main ethnic groups, along with the Nagas in the northern hills and the Meiteis in the central valley – were burned, vandalized or demolished in that state.
Neither New Delhi nor Imphal (the capital of Manipur, dominated by the Meiteis) have managed to put an end to the tension, which has left more than a hundred dead -almost all Kukis- and tens of thousands displaced, both in camps and in the neighboring Mizoram state (Mizos, Kukis and Chin -in Burma- are basically the same tribal people). The visible face of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, was officially prevented from traveling from Imphal to the unofficial Kuki capital, Churachandpur, on Thursday because he feared for the safety of his entourage.
