OPINION | The Arabian Sea is getting crowded. India needs a new maritime playbook

How close is too close at sea? On the evening of September 15, two navies found out.

Here is what is known, and who is saying it. India says a Pakistan Navy vessel, reported to be PNS Hunain, closed at high speed on a frontline Indian warship that was on routine surveillance in the north Arabian Sea, and manoeuvred in what the ministry of external affairs called an unprofessional and unsafe manner. The ships collided. The next day, New Delhi summoned Pakistan's chargé d'affaires and pointed to a 1991 agreement between the two countries, which, as reported, keeps naval ships at least three nautical miles apart. Press reports later had the ministry's spokesperson naming the Indian ship as INS Kolkata.

Islamabad tells it differently. Its foreign office says the Pakistan Navy was in the middle of its biennial exercise, SEASPARK-26, inside its own exclusive economic zone, and that the Indian ship had tried to enter the area again and again since 7 September before making aggressive manoeuvres. Indian sources say Hunain took the heavy damage. Pakistan has not said. I cannot settle any of this from a desk, and I would be wary of anyone who claims to. Ship tracks, bridge logs and radio recordings can. None of us has seen them.

What nobody disputes is the contact itself. And going by the PTI report, it is the first publicly known military incident between the two countries since the four days of fighting in May 2025.

Friction, not a plan

Clausewitz had a word for this. “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” He called the gap friction: weather, fatigue, a misread signal, a captain who holds his course a minute longer than he should.

Nobody planned a collision on September 15. That is exactly why it should worry us. A destroyer doing its job. A corvette doing its job, in the middle of an exercise. A rough sea, after dark. Put them in the same few miles of water, each sure it has every right to be there, and you do not need a villain. A bad ten minutes will do.

Why the water is getting smaller

Look at what each side calls routine. For India, shadowing a neighbour's naval exercise is surveillance, the ordinary business of knowing what is going on in your own backyard. For Pakistan, a foreign warship hanging about at the edge of an exercise area is something else altogether. One side's routine is the other side's provocation, and both are doing more of it, with more ships and aircraft and sensors, in a sea that has not got any bigger.

I am an Army officer. The sea was never my element, and I will leave the seamanship to those who know it. But the logic of a close encounter is the same on any ground. Keep watching each other from closer and closer, and sooner or later somebody reads a move wrong.

Seeing is not understanding

India has spent years building ways to see its waters: satellites, shore radars, long-range patrol aircraft, information shared with partners. Sensible, and nobody should argue for less. But knowing where a ship is does not tell you what its captain intends. And the quickest way to find out is to go closer. That is how a tool meant for early warning can nudge ships towards the very distance at which accidents happen.

So, the question for the Navy and for South Block is a plain one. Can awareness give us warning without giving us new ways to stumble? I think it can. But only if it comes with two things we talk about less: discipline about distance, and a way to speak to the other side.

What I would put in the new playbook

First, a line to pick up. A retired Pakistan Navy vice admiral, Ahmad Saeed, told Al Jazeera there is no bilateral incidents-at-sea agreement between the two countries, of the kind the United States and the Soviet Union signed in 1972, and no navy-to-navy hotline. I could not find anything public that says otherwise. On land, the two armies' operations chiefs have had a hotline for years. At sea, India's protest leaned on the 1991 agreement, whose title tells you what it was written for: advance notice of exercises, manoeuvres and troop movements. It was not written for two bridge teams at nine at night. A short protocol for ships, and a channel tested every month even when nothing is wrong, would cost very little. Washington and Moscow managed theirs in the middle of the Cold War.

Second, written rules for watching. When an exercise runs in waters Pakistan calls its EEZ and India calls open sea, that argument will not be won on a ship's bridge. An EEZ gives a coastal state rights over resources. It is not sovereign territory. Both sides can be right about different things. So, decide beforehand what an Indian surveillance ship does when it meets an exercise: how far off it stays, what it does if approached, when it breaks away. A commanding officer should not be left to improvise that in the dark. A former Navy spokesperson, Captain D.K. Sharma, wrote after the collision that the lesson is to detect intent and not merely movement. He is right, and bridge teams need to be trained for exactly that.

Third, evidence, and fast. Within a day, two capitals had two stories. In that kind of contest, the side that can put the tracks and the recordings on the table first holds the stronger hand, and usually the calmer one.

Fourth, keep the political door open. India's response so far, a summons and a protest, was measured. That should be the habit and not the exception, because the next incident may not end with both ships sailing off.

Luck is not a doctrine

A warship is a very large, very expensive thing to keep close to another very large, very expensive thing in the dark. Nobody fired this time. The contact was glancing, the sea was rough but the ships stayed afloat, and both capitals chose words. I would not bank on all three holding again.

The playbook India needs is not a thicker doctrine of presence. It is a plain, practised way of staying out of each other's way, and of talking when we cannot.

(The author is a Defence & Strategic Affairs Expert, Certified Independent Director (IICA), ESG Advocate and Governance Thought Leader.

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(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.)