How Seychelles Fits Into India's Maritime Defence Strategy

Last Updated:June 29, 2026, 11:45 IST

India's investment in Seychelles' monitoring infrastructure grew out of the anti-piracy operations that ran through the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Seychelles is easy to miss on a map. A scatter of 115 islands in the Western Indian Ocean, with a tiny land area. But the islands sit across shipping routes that connect East Africa, West Asia and the Indo-Pacific, the same corridors that carry Gulf oil and Asian cargo westward every day. Its Exclusive Economic Zone runs past 1.3 million square kilometres. Whoever helps Seychelles watch that space has eyes on some very important water.

Modi flew to Victoria on June 27 for a three-day state visit. He addressed the National Assembly, attended the Golden Jubilee celebrations, and left behind enough defence equipment to make a meaningful difference to the Seychelles People’s Defence Forces. The visit was the first by an Indian prime minister in eleven years, and it came at a moment when the Indian Ocean is getting crowded. China now runs a military base out of Djibouti and has put money into ports from the northern Indian Ocean to Gwadar. India has been watching that and adjusting accordingly.

That adjustment has not been about matching China port for port. India has instead focused on building local capability in partner nations, extending maritime domain awareness and creating long-term interoperability rather than military dependence. Seychelles is one of the clearest examples of that approach in practice, which is why the defence transfers from Modi’s visit matter beyond the bilateral relationship.

What India Handed Over

The equipment transferred during the visit reflects the model India has followed in Seychelles for years: build local maritime capability rather than create military dependence. Every platform handed over strengthens Seychelles’ ability to monitor its own waters while reinforcing India’s wider maritime security architecture. India gifted an indigenously built fast patrol vessel, 10 utility vehicles and five Laser Radial class boats to the Seychelles Defence Force, announced the completion of refit of PS Zoroaster for the Seychelles Coast Guard, and the upgrade of a Dornier aircraft with a glass cockpit.

The patrol vessel fills a real operational gap. The Seychelles Coast Guard has always been undersized for the zone it is supposed to cover. Interdiction, anti-poaching, search and rescue across 1.3 million square kilometres is not something a handful of ageing boats can handle. For India, helping Seychelles patrol that vast EEZ also means a trusted partner is able to maintain a stronger security presence across one of the busiest stretches of the western Indian Ocean. India has been quietly keeping that fleet functional for years, replacing vessels when they age out rather than arriving once with something shiny and disappearing. Modi said it directly during the bilateral: “It is our firm belief that the defence and security of India and Seychelles are inextricably linked."

The Dornier upgrade is worth understanding properly. Seychelles already operates two Dornier maritime surveillance aircraft that India gifted over the years. Both have been flying missions against smuggling and other threats at sea. Rather than replacing them, India upgraded the cockpit avionics. The crews keep flying aircraft they know, the platforms stay in service longer, and Seychelles remains a working part of the surveillance network India has been piecing together across the Indian Ocean.

The PS Zoroaster story is the most telling of the lot. Earlier this year the vessel sailed to India, joined Exercise MILAN and the International Fleet Review at Visakhapatnam, then went into refit at Garden Reach Shipbuilders in Kolkata. It was not dispatched for maintenance. It was put to work in a major multilateral naval exercise before the spanners came out. That is exactly the kind of operational integration India wants from its maritime partners.

The Surveillance Architecture

The vessels and aircraft get the attention. The radar network is quieter but probably more important. If the patrol vessels build presence, the surveillance network builds awareness; it is the foundation of India’s maritime strategy in the Indian Ocean.

Six Coastal Surveillance Radar Systems that India installed in 2015 are being repaired and upgraded. These stations watch vessel movements across Seychellois waters in real time. Suspicious traffic gets flagged. Commercial shipping gets tracked. When something needs intercepting, the coast guard has an actual picture to work from rather than going in blind.

India built similar networks in Mauritius, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. String them together and you have maritime awareness running across a significant stretch of the Indian Ocean, picking up suspicious shipping well before it reaches Indian waters. The network feeds into the Information Fusion Centre, Indian Ocean Region, which India runs out of Gurugram and where partner nations pool data on piracy, illegal fishing and other threats.

India’s investment in Seychelles’ monitoring infrastructure grew out of the anti-piracy operations that ran through the late 2000s and early 2010s. The threat eventually receded but the infrastructure stayed, and has since been expanded into something considerably more comprehensive.

Exercise Lamitye and What Tri-Service Actually Means

The 11th edition of Exercise LAMITYE was held in Victoria in March 2026 and ran for the first time as a tri-service exercise, bringing the Army, Navy and Air Force in together. LAMITYE means friendship in Creole. It has been running biennially for years, but it has always been a naval affair. Going tri-service means both sides are now working through joint planning, logistics, communications and command procedures across all three services. For India, interoperability is the objective. Equipment can be transferred in a day; building forces that can operate together takes years.

Seychelles has also said it wants to join the Colombo Security Conclave as a full member, and it already shows up for MILAN and PRAGATI. The pattern is of a small nation actively deepening its integration into Indian-led maritime security arrangements, across several tracks at once.

Assumption Island: What India Learned

There was a moment in 2015 when India and Seychelles signed an agreement to develop military infrastructure on Assumption Island, an outer island near the Mozambique Channel. An airstrip, a jetty, a genuine forward presence in the southern western Indian Ocean. It never happened. Political opposition inside Seychelles, compounded by environmental concerns, ultimately stalled the project.

India drew the right conclusion. Instead of pushing for basing arrangements that small democracies cannot politically sustain, it concentrated on cooperation that host governments can actually defend to their own publics: vessels, radars, training, maintenance.

India’s Island Network and the MAHASAGAR Vision

Seychelles is one point on a longer line. India’s maritime partnerships now run through Mauritius, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Duqm and Djibouti. The combined picture gives India presence and awareness across the Indian Ocean from the Gulf of Aden to the Mozambique Channel, maintained not through bases but through decades of accumulated relationships. Within that network, Seychelles functions as India’s western Indian Ocean partner, complementing similar relationships elsewhere in the region.

India has also been updating the conceptual language around all of this. The original SAGAR framework from 2015 centred on collective maritime security. More recently India has put forward MAHASAGAR, Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions, which brings in development, digital infrastructure and climate alongside the security core. The defence cooperation with Seychelles sits inside that security pillar.

Why the Model Works

India’s maritime security does not begin at Mumbai or Visakhapatnam. It begins wherever a threat can be caught early enough to matter. Nearly 90 percent of India’s trade moves by sea, and no navy, no matter how capable, can watch all of it alone.

That is why India has spent decades equipping partners across the Indian Ocean with patrol vessels, surveillance aircraft, coastal radars and the means to share what they see. Seychelles occupies a strategically important position in that network. It gives India eyes over the western Indian Ocean without the political weight and strategic costs of maintaining a permanent overseas base.

Fifty years of consistent investment have made that possible. Seychelles is not in India’s maritime strategy because of its size. It is there because of where it sits and how much ocean it can watch.

About the Author

Vallari Parashar

Vallari Parashar is a Senior Sub Editor at News18. She writes on geopolitics, defence, and strategic affairs

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