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🌐 International RelationsMAINS · GS2.17 · GS3.17

Lamitiye 2026 turns tri-services, Navy joins first

The India–Seychelles military exercise widened into its first tri-services edition, with INS Trikand carrying the Indian Navy into Lamitiye for the very first time.

What happened

Background & context

Lamitiye — Creole for "friendship" — is the recurring bilateral military exercise between India and Seychelles. It has been held on a roughly biennial cadence since 2001, and the 2026 round is read as its eleventh edition. For its first two decades it was essentially a joint Army exercise, focused on counter-insurgency, jungle and island-warfare tactics, small-team drills and humanitarian-assistance scenarios — the kind of skills a small island state with a large maritime zone but a modest standing force most needs to build with a partner. The venue has typically alternated between the two countries; recent editions have been hosted on Seychellois soil, which is consistent with the 2026 round playing out at Port Victoria and on Praslin Island.

The 2026 edition changes the character of the exercise rather than merely repeating it. By bringing in the Navy and the Air Force, India turned a land-forces drill into a tri-services engagement, and by sailing INS Trikand into it, the Navy took part in Lamitiye for the first time in the exercise's history. That widening matters because Seychelles sits at the heart of the western Indian Ocean, astride sea lanes that carry a large share of India's energy and trade, and the threats that a partnership there must answer — piracy, illegal fishing, trafficking, and irregular boarding of vessels — are inherently maritime. A purely land exercise could not rehearse them; a tri-services one can.

The engagement also sits inside a wider Indian framework for the region. India has long described its approach to the Indian Ocean through the SAGAR doctrine — "Security and Growth for All in the Region" — articulated in 2015. MAHASAGAR — Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions — is the more recent, expanded articulation of that same idea, broadening the canvas from the immediate neighbourhood to a wider arc of partner states. Lamitiye 2026, and the port call that bracketed it, are presented by the Ministry of Defence as an instrument of that vision in practice: capacity-building with a small partner, interoperability between two forces, and a visible Indian naval presence in waters India treats as its primary area of responsibility.

For Prelims

What it is NOT. Lamitiye is not a naval exercise by origin — it began and ran for two decades as a joint Army exercise, and the Navy's involvement is brand new in 2026; treating it as a long-standing naval drill is the common error. It is not multilateral — only India and Seychelles take part, unlike larger groupings. It should not be confused with India's other Indian-Ocean engagements: VARUNA is the India–France naval exercise; AIKEYME is the multilateral exercise India initiated with African nations off the East African coast; IBSAMAR brings in India, Brazil and South Africa; and broad coordinated patrols and information-sharing run through the Information Fusion Centre – Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR) at Gurugram. Lamitiye is the specific, named, bilateral India–Seychelles exercise, and its 2026 distinction is the tri-services widening plus the Navy's debut.

The platform. INS Trikand belongs to the Navy's Talwar-class guided-missile stealth frigates, a class of Russian-origin warships acquired to add long-range, multi-role surface combatants able to operate far from home waters. As a frigate it is a smaller, faster surface combatant than a destroyer, built around anti-air, anti-surface and anti-submarine roles and a helicopter; its design emphasises a reduced radar signature, which is what "stealth frigate" denotes. Ships of this type are routinely the platforms India sends on overseas deployments, anti-piracy patrols and partner exercises precisely because their endurance and sensor fit make them useful instruments of presence — which is the role Trikand played here, combining a goodwill port call, a logistics hand-over of spares and stores, and the exercise itself in a single deployment.

The partner and the geography. Seychelles is a small island republic in the western Indian Ocean with a tiny population but an exceptionally large Exclusive Economic Zone, which makes maritime-domain security its central strategic problem. India has been a steady security partner there: supplying patrol vessels and aircraft, building coastal-surveillance and hydrographic capacity, and treating Seychelles as a node in its outer-island maritime posture alongside states such as Mauritius and Maldives. Port Victoria on Mahé is the capital and principal port; Praslin, the venue of the troop landing, is the archipelago's second-largest island. The choice of these locations, and the inclusion of VBSS and at-sea boarding, ties the exercise directly to the real-world tasks — interdiction of suspect vessels, anti-piracy boarding, fisheries enforcement — that the partnership is meant to strengthen.

Why it matters

The significance is less about any single drill and more about what the upgrade signals. Converting a two-decade-old Army exercise into a tri-services one, and adding the Navy for the first time, lets the two countries rehearse the threats that actually face Seychelles — almost all of them maritime — instead of only land-warfare scenarios. The problem it addresses is concrete: a small partner state cannot police a vast ocean zone alone, and India's own trade and energy security depend on those same waters staying orderly. Building interoperability — the ability of two different forces to plan, communicate and act together at short notice — is the practical pay-off, and it is what makes India's claim to be a "First Responder" in a crisis credible rather than rhetorical.

It also matters as a marker of competition for influence in the Indian Ocean. Several outside powers have courted the island states of the western Indian Ocean with port access, loans and infrastructure. Recurrent, deepening defence engagement of this kind — a hosted exercise, a logistics hand-over, senior commanders embarked aboard an Indian warship — is how India keeps its position as the preferred security partner of states like Seychelles, without that competition turning into a debt or basing relationship. The episode is a small but clean illustration of defence diplomacy: hard-capability cooperation used as an instrument of foreign policy in the neighbourhood.

For UPSC: Lamitiye is the India–Seychelles exercise — originally Army-only, biennial since 2001; 2026 is its first tri-services edition and the Indian Navy's first participation (INS Trikand, a Talwar-class stealth frigate), framed under the MAHASAGAR vision.

For Mains

Exemplification
A live example of India's "Preferred Security Partner / First Responder" posture in the Indian Ocean — capacity-building with a small island partner, ramped from an Army drill to a tri-services exercise.
Data
Concrete particulars for a neighbourhood/IOR answer: 11th edition, biennial since 2001, first tri-services and first naval (INS Trikand) participation, VBSS and joint at-sea boarding with the SDF, under MAHASAGAR/SAGAR.
Position
Signals the government's stance that defence cooperation, not basing or debt, is India's chosen route to influence among western-Indian-Ocean island states.
Deploys into: India and its neighbourhood / India–island-state relations (GS2.17); maritime security and security actors in the Indian Ocean Region (GS3.17); SAGAR–MAHASAGAR as defence diplomacy.
Ministry of Defence · 2026-03-22 · PRID 2243504 · PIB source ↗