India Maintaining Presence In South China Sea

Despite India get­ting out of oil explo­ration blocks in the South Chi­na Sea, the navy is keen to main­tain a strong role for itself in the South Chi­na Sea.

 -

 -
Here you can find more infor­ma­tion about the Indi­an Defense Sector 

Four Indi­an Navy war­ships, INS Rana, Shak­ti, Shiv­a­lik and Kur­mak are cur­rent­ly mov­ing across the South Chi­na Sea and are on their way to Shang­hai, where they will dock at Shang­hai port for a good­will vis­it in a cou­ple of weeks. At the same time, two of the four ships, INS Rana and Shak­ti have been min­gling with the Philip­pines navy in Subic Bay. Two oth­er war­ships, INS Shiv­a­lik and INS Kur­mak, are mak­ing port calls at Hai­fong in Vietnam. 

In the recent past, Philip­pines and Chi­na have locked guns over each oth­er over ter­ri­to­r­i­al rights on Scar­bor­ough Shoal. The area is believed to be extreme­ly energy-rich. 

In the next cou­ple of days, offi­cials from ONGC Videsh (OVL) will meet their coun­ter­parts from Petro Viet­nam in Hanoi to look at ener­gy coop­er­a­tion after OVL pulled out from Block 128 in South Chi­na Sea. ONGC had entered into an ener­gy agree­ment with the Viet­namese com­pa­ny dur­ing the vis­it of Viet­namese Pres­i­dent Truong Tan Sang to India in Octo­ber 2011. 

India is believed to have paid a $15 mil­lion exit fee to Petro Viet­nam for get­ting out of the block. 

But despite India’s pull out from the oil block, the navy con­tin­ues to have a strong inter­est in the South Chi­na Sea, because it is key to India’s Look East pol­i­cy. In July 2012, Indi­an and US offi­cials will hold dis­cus­sions on a key project in south­east Asia. The project is about fur­ther devel­op­ing East-West Mekong con­nec­tiv­i­ty cor­ri­dors. The project is envis­aged as a tri­lat­er­al project with Japan. This project intends to set up a mul­ti-modal trans­port and trade cor­ri­dor from India, tra­vers­ing through Myan­mar, Thai­land, Cam­bo­dia and Laos and end­ing in Viet­nam. Japan has recent­ly stepped up it’s fund­ing com­mit­ments to this corridor. 

How­ev­er, Chi­na is much ahead with it’s own con­nec­tiv­i­ty plans and these run north-south and has done much to put a grid of con­nec­tiv­i­ty in the Mekong region in south­east Asia. 

On June 6, India’s for­eign min­is­ter S. M. Krish­na will trav­el to Bei­jing to rep­re­sent India as an observ­er at the Shang­hai Coop­er­a­tion Orga­ni­za­tion (SCO) meeting. 

Source:
www.DefenceNews.in

The web­site is ded­i­cat­ed to give a com­plete, swift and day-to-day cov­er­age of all the lat­est hap­pen­ings in the world of Indi­an Defence and Aero­space in an accu­rate, objec­tive, cred­i­ble and com­pre­hen­sive manner. 

Team GlobDef

Seit 2001 ist GlobalDefence.net im Internet unterwegs, um mit eigenen Analysen, interessanten Kooperationen und umfassenden Informationen für einen spannenden Überblick der Weltlage zu sorgen. GlobalDefence.net war dabei die erste deutschsprachige Internetseite, die mit dem Schwerpunkt Sicherheitspolitik außerhalb von Hochschulen oder Instituten aufgetreten ist.

Alle Beiträge ansehen von Team GlobDef →