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🛡 Security & DefenceMAINS · GS2.17 · GS3.20

IOS Sagar deployment advances the MAHASAGAR vision

INS Sunayna, sailing as Indian Ocean Ship Sagar, closes a Thailand port call with a Passage Exercise alongside the Royal Thai Navy and turns for Jakarta.

What happened

Background & context

This is not a stand-alone goodwill cruise; it is one leg of an outreach deployment that India has been running across the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) under the "Indian Ocean Ship Sagar" banner. The format borrows from an established Indian Navy tradition of overseas deployments — sending a single ocean-going warship on a multi-nation itinerary of port calls, joint exercises and capacity-building stops, so that the platform itself becomes a moving instrument of maritime diplomacy. The ship keeps her permanent identity — INS Sunayna, a vessel of the Indian Navy — while operating under the "IOS Sagar" mission name for the duration of the deployment.

The release anchors the whole exercise to the MAHASAGAR vision — Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions. MAHASAGAR is the current framing of India's maritime-neighbourhood policy, and it is the direct successor to SAGAR — Security and Growth for All in the Region, the doctrine India first articulated in 2015 at Mauritius. SAGAR positioned India as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean and tied together maritime security, the blue economy, capacity-building for smaller littoral states, and a rules-based order at sea. MAHASAGAR widens that lens from "the region" to "across regions" — extending the same logic of shared security and shared growth to a broader Global South maritime footprint. For exam purposes the two are best held as a doctrine pair: SAGAR (2015, the original) → MAHASAGAR (the broadened successor framing), with the acronyms decoded in full.

Thailand is a natural node for this kind of outreach. It sits on the eastern rim of the Andaman Sea, controls the Andaman Sea approaches through its Third Naval Area Command, and lies astride the maritime corridor leading to the Malacca Strait — the choke point through which the bulk of trade between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific moves. India and Thailand are both members of BIMSTEC (the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation), and Thailand is a partner in India's Act East Policy, which makes naval engagement here a continuation of a wider regional relationship rather than a one-off. The two navies also run a long-standing coordinated patrol along their International Maritime Boundary Line, so a port call plus a PASSEX slots into an existing rhythm of cooperation.

For Prelims

The PASSEX distinction (a common exam trap): a Passage Exercise is the lightest, most ad-hoc tier of naval drill — two navies that happen to be in proximity run basic communication and manoeuvring serials, with no standing name, no fixed cycle and no formal agreement required. It is not a named bilateral exercise. India's named bilateral naval exercises sit a tier above and are worth holding as a set: Varuna (France), Konkan (UK), Indra (Russia), Malabar (now India–US–Japan–Australia, the Quad navies), SIMBEX (Singapore), SLINEX (Sri Lanka), JIMEX (Japan), AUSINDEX (Australia), Naseem Al Bahr (Oman), Samudra Shakti (Indonesia) and IBSAMAR (India–Brazil–South Africa). With Thailand specifically, the standing engagement is the coordinated patrol (Indo-Thai CORPAT) along the maritime boundary; the Phuket interaction here was a PASSEX, not a CORPAT and not a named bilateral exercise.

For UPSC: MAHASAGAR = Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions — the broadened successor framing to SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region, 2015). IOS Sagar = the mission name for INS Sunayna's IOR outreach deployment. A PASSEX is an ad-hoc passage exercise, not one of India's named bilateral naval exercises.

What it is NOT

Why it matters

The problem MAHASAGAR and these deployments address is structural. The Indian Ocean carries a very large share of the world's seaborne oil and container traffic and is crowded with choke points — Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb, and Malacca — where disruption ripples straight into India's energy security and trade. At the same time, India faces sustained competition for influence in the IOR, most visibly from China's expanding naval footprint, port investments and "string-of-pearls" presence across the littoral. India's answer is not basing or blocs but persistent presence and partnership: keeping ships forward-deployed, exercising routinely with littoral navies, and offering smaller states maritime-domain awareness, training and disaster relief so that they look to New Delhi as a first responder.

A single deployment like IOS Sagar does several jobs at once. It signals India's standing as a net security provider in the IOR; it operationalises the "across regions" ambition of MAHASAGAR by physically connecting Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian partners; it builds the kind of interoperability that matters in a real contingency, when navies that have never drilled together cannot suddenly act in concert; and it advances the Act East Policy by deepening defence ties with ASEAN partners like Thailand and Indonesia. The "plug-and-play" language in the release is the point: the more routinely the Indian Navy can slot alongside a partner navy with shared procedures, the lower the friction in any future coordinated response to piracy, trafficking, search-and-rescue or a humanitarian crisis at sea.

For Mains

Exemplification
IOS Sagar's Phuket call and PASSEX with the Royal Thai Navy are a concrete, datable example of India operationalising the SAGAR/MAHASAGAR vision and acting as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean Region — usable wherever an answer needs a recent instance of India's maritime outreach.
Position
The deployment carries the Government's stated stance: maritime engagement built on partnership and "Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions," extending the SAGAR doctrine's logic of shared security and shared growth from the immediate neighbourhood to a wider footprint.
Substantiation
Supplies hard particulars — IOS Sagar/INS Sunayna, second port call, OTR at Phuket, PASSEX with HTMS Klongyai, next leg Jakarta — to anchor a claim about the tempo and reach of India's naval diplomacy in the IOR.
Way-forward
Routine forward presence plus interoperability ("plug-and-play") with littoral and ASEAN navies is a deployable way-forward for securing India's IOR interests against choke-point risk and extra-regional naval competition.
Deploys into: GS2.17 India and its neighbourhood / India–ASEAN maritime ties under Act East; GS2.18 bilateral and regional groupings (BIMSTEC, the IOR partnership architecture); GS3.20 security forces and agencies — the Navy as an instrument of foreign policy; and the India-as-net-security-provider and maritime-security-in-the-IOR debates.

Source

Ministry of Defence · 2026-04-19 · PRID 2253510 · PIB source ↗
Related: SAGAR / MAHASAGAR maritime doctrine · Security & Defence · This week's cards