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India to hold trilateral naval exercise with US and Japan

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

New Delhi, April 10, IRNA -- India will hold a trilateral naval exercise with the US and Japan in the Pacific Ocean by end of this month.
The exercise in the Malabar series will take place off the Japanese coast in which Indian warships would carry out training manoeuvres in naval warfare alongside the US Navy and Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force warships, PTI reported.

The Malabar exercise, which began as a bilateral exercise in 1992 with the Americans, has in the recent years taken on a multi-national character with greater participation from US allies and has made China sit up and take a note.

The last Malabar trilateral exercise involving India, US and Japan was held in early 2007 off the Japanese coast.

In the later part of that year, India joined the multilateral 25-warship Malabar exercise involving navies of Singapore and Australia too, apart from US and Japan in the Bay of Bengal.

The multilateral exercise had led to vociferous protests from the Left parties, which accused the UPA government of placing India alongside US "imperialistic designs" aimed at containing Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean regions.

Following the Left protest in 2007, the government had decided to revert back to bilateral naval exercise in the 2008 edition of the Malabar naval exercise series.

Defence Minister A K Antony had just a month before the 2008 September exercise acknowledged that the Left protest had forced the government to rethink on going multilateral with the Malabar exercises.

Though going multilateral had their own operational benefits such as enabling inter-operability and practicing manoeuvres on a much larger scale than in a bilateral setting, India had decided to keep the Malabar exercise in September 2008 a low-key affair and did not want any controversy surrounding it, despite the fact that the Left withdrew their support to the UPA government in July.