🛡 Security & DefenceMAINS · GS2.18 · GS3.17

India, Seychelles begin 11th Exercise LAMITIYE

The biennial India–Seychelles joint military exercise, this edition fielding all three Indian services for the first time.

What happened

An Indian Armed Forces contingent has reached Seychelles for the 11th edition of joint military Exercise LAMITIYE-2026 with the Seychelles Defence Forces (SDF).
The exercise runs from 09 to 20 March 2026 at the Seychelles Defence Academy.
This is the first edition in which all three Indian services participate together — Army, Navy and Air Force.
The Indian contingent is built around ASSAM Regiment personnel, with the Navy fielding the frigate INS Trikand and the Air Force a C-130 transport aircraft.
The drill is focused on sub-conventional operations in a semi-urban environment and on interoperability during Peace Keeping Operations.
The schedule comprises Field Training Exercises, combat discussions, case studies, lectures and demonstrations, closing with a two-day Validation Exercise.

Background & context

LAMITIYE — the word means "Friendship" in Seychellois Creole — is the flagship bilateral land-forces exercise between India and Seychelles. It is a biennial event (held once every two years) and, since its first edition in 2001, it has always been hosted in Seychelles rather than rotating between the two countries. That fixed venue is itself a fact worth holding: unlike many Indian exercises whose host alternates between the partners, LAMITIYE has historically been conducted on Seychellois soil, reflecting India's long-standing role as a security and capacity-building partner to the small island archipelago.

Seychelles is an island nation in the western Indian Ocean, northeast of Madagascar, and sits astride sea lanes that matter for India's maritime interests. It is a member of the African Union, the Commonwealth and the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), and it falls squarely within India's SAGAR doctrine — "Security and Growth for All in the Region" — the policy framework, announced in 2015, through which India frames its Indian Ocean neighbourhood engagement. Defence cooperation with Seychelles has long included hydrographic surveys, supply of patrol vessels and aircraft, training slots in Indian military academies, and coastal-surveillance support. LAMITIYE is the recurring, named anchor of that wider relationship.

What sets the 2026 edition apart is its tri-service character. Earlier editions were essentially an Army-to-Army engagement between an Indian infantry contingent and the SDF. By adding the Navy's INS Trikand and the Air Force's C-130, the 2026 exercise turns a single-service land drill into a joint exercise spanning land, sea and air — mirroring the broader Indian military push toward jointness and theaterisation, the doctrine of fighting as an integrated force rather than as separate services. For an island partner whose own security challenges run from coastal policing to maritime domain awareness, a tri-service Indian footprint is a meaningful upgrade in the kind of interoperability the two forces can rehearse.

It helps to place the individual assets the contingent brings. The ASSAM Regiment is an infantry regiment of the Indian Army, and infantry is exactly the arm best suited to the exercise's stated focus — sub-conventional operations in semi-urban, populated terrain, where the threat is irregular rather than a massed conventional force. INS Trikand is a Talwar-class guided-missile frigate of the Indian Navy, a class built to a Russian design; deploying it to Seychelles lets the navies practise the maritime-security tasks — patrolling, boarding, surveillance of sea lanes — that dominate the western Indian Ocean. The Indian Air Force's C-130 is a tactical transport aircraft used for moving troops and equipment and for special-operations support; its presence demonstrates the strategic and tactical airlift that lets India project a contingent thousands of kilometres to an island partner at short notice. Together the three assets let the exercise rehearse the full arc of a joint deployment: getting forces there, securing the maritime approaches, and operating on the ground.

The exercise's format is also instructive and examinable. LAMITIYE-2026 is not a single field manoeuvre but a structured programme: Field Training Exercises (the practical, on-ground rehearsal of tactics), combat discussions, case studies, lectures and demonstrations (the classroom and doctrinal exchange where each side shares techniques and lessons), and a concluding two-day Validation Exercise in which the combined force is put through a scenario to test whether the interoperability built over the preceding days actually holds under simulated conditions. This build-up-then-validate structure is a common template across India's bilateral exercises and is worth recognising as a pattern rather than a one-off detail.

The relationship LAMITIYE anchors is broad. India has extended Seychelles a steady stream of defence support over two decades — gifting and supplying fast-attack and patrol craft and a Dornier maritime-surveillance aircraft, conducting hydrographic surveys of Seychellois waters, supplying coastal-surveillance radar for maritime domain awareness, and offering training berths to SDF personnel in Indian defence institutions. Indian Navy ships make regular goodwill and patrol visits, and the two governments have discussed cooperation on infrastructure of mutual security interest. LAMITIYE is the named, recurring, headline event that gives this cooperation a visible rhythm and lets it be tracked edition by edition.

For Prelims

Exercise: LAMITIYE-2026 — "LAMITIYE" = "Friendship" in Creole · 11th edition.
Partners: India (Indian Armed Forces) and Seychelles (Seychelles Defence Forces, SDF) — strictly bilateral.
Frequency & venue: biennial; held in Seychelles since 2001, at the Seychelles Defence Academy this edition.
Dates: 09–20 March 2026.
Services involved (2026): all three Indian services — Army (ASSAM Regiment), Navy (INS Trikand), Air Force (C-130). First-ever tri-service edition.
Focus: sub-conventional operations in semi-urban terrain; interoperability for UN Peace Keeping Operations.
Format: Field Training Exercises + combat discussions, case studies, lectures, demonstrations + a 2-day Validation Exercise.
Nodal ministry: Ministry of Defence (Government of India).

What LAMITIYE is NOT. It is not a multilateral or trilateral exercise — only India and Seychelles take part, so it should not be grouped with multi-nation drills such as MILAN or RIMPAC. It is not a naval-only exercise despite INS Trikand's presence; from 2026 it is a tri-service exercise. It is not an annual event — it is biennial. And it is not India's exercise with Madagascar, Mauritius or the Maldives, all of which are separate Indian Ocean partners with their own engagements; LAMITIYE is specifically the India–Seychelles exercise.

The set it belongs to (India's named bilateral land/joint exercises with Indian Ocean & nearby partners). Keep this comparative roster for "match the pairs" and "how many of these" questions: LAMITIYE — Seychelles; AGNI WARRIOR / SIMBEX — Singapore (army / navy); MITRA SHAKTI — Sri Lanka; EKUVERIN — Maldives; VARUNA — France (navy); KONKAN — United Kingdom (navy); AL MOHED AL HINDI — Saudi Arabia (navy). LAMITIYE is the Seychelles entry in this family, distinguished from 2026 onward by being conducted by all three services.

Why it matters

The exercise addresses a concrete problem set rather than a ceremonial one. Both partners contribute to UN Peace Keeping Operations, where contingents from different nations must operate together under a common mandate; rehearsing interoperability — shared drills, communications, command procedures and rules of engagement — reduces friction when forces actually deploy. The chosen theme, sub-conventional operations in a semi-urban environment, points to the kind of low-intensity, populated-terrain situations that peacekeepers and small island security forces are most likely to face, as opposed to conventional state-on-state warfare.

Strategically, LAMITIYE is one strand of India's effort to be the preferred security partner in the western Indian Ocean, a region where external powers have expanded their presence. Through recurring exercises, training and platform support, India builds habits of cooperation with Seychelles' forces, strengthens maritime domain awareness in a critical stretch of ocean, and operationalises the SAGAR vision in a tangible, repeatable way. The move to a tri-service format signals that India can now offer an island partner integrated land-sea-air engagement, not just an infantry exchange — a credible demonstration of the jointness India is pursuing in its own force structure.

For Mains

Exemplification

LAMITIYE-2026 is a ready example of India operationalising its SAGAR vision and its "preferred security partner" posture in the western Indian Ocean through recurring, institutionalised defence diplomacy with a small island state (GS2.18 — bilateral groupings; GS2.17 — neighbourhood).

Data

Concrete, citable facts for an Indian Ocean / defence-diplomacy answer: a biennial exercise running since 2001, now in its 11th edition, upgraded in 2026 to the first tri-service format (Army, Navy with INS Trikand, Air Force with C-130).

Position

It evidences India's stated stance of capacity-building and net-security-provider engagement in the Indian Ocean Region, complementing patrol-vessel transfers, hydrographic support and training slots already extended to Seychelles.

Way-forward

The tri-service jump can be cited as the direction of travel — moving bilateral exercises from single-service exchanges toward integrated, jointness-oriented engagements that match India's own theaterisation reforms (GS3.17 — security challenges and force management).

Deploys into: India's Indian Ocean Region strategy & SAGAR; bilateral defence diplomacy with island neighbours; jointness/theaterisation of the armed forces; India as a net security provider.

Ministry of Defence · 2026-03-09 · PRID 2236791 · PIB source ↗