Shun No Varuna- India’s maritime security

There are certain nuances and technicalities within the above guidelines so it eventually ends up being 20 miles because if there’s a submerged continental reef, then shall we consider it as deep sea or shallow waters? But rules get applied accordingly. There is a whole chapter on how to handle territorial claims of nations which have archipelago configurations. Shall it be treated as de facto land and given its own TW and EEZ or shall it be granted only a nominal TW?And so, in most cases they end up creating an exception called archipelago baseline (AB). And most of the times AB + TW roughly ends up being 20 miles. Because of the way ocean beds are formed, most of the times they are uneven and the dichotomy between land and sea isn’t well defined so more than 95% of all land-sea borders have a natural continental shelf which ends up extending the AB. So the arithmetic ends up with supplementary TW extension from the legal 12 miles to de facto 20 miles. The earlier diagram was just a make shift one for school children, this one explains it better. The deeper interest you take in it, the more complicated and interesting it gets.

Consider all these rules, exceptions, islands etc and you will understand how difficult it is to define a non-disputed boundary. Imagine now how complicated it gets once there are conflicting or overlapping claims? Our conflict with Myanmar and Bangladesh is one such example which will make anyone pull their hair.

The same game is being played out in South China Sea where China is treating the continental shelf as de facto land and then extending their argument from there to claim full sovereignty over those grey areas. Legally, there’s no right or wrong and so if you observe carefully, no American propaganda channel (colloquially known as ‘media’) ever calls it a legal dispute. The only notion they keep harping on is “this behaviour might lead to conflict”, basically taking not a legal stance, but a moral one. It is a cryptic way of saying “we will beat you if you try to claim the grey area which we have illegally monopolized until now”. Morally and dispassionately speaking, China has a greater right over that area than a foreign power from another continent, but because China has been so rude to its neighbours, they are happy to see China bleed. Compare China’s territorial claims to the one which Japan made, in cohorts with their masters i.e. USA, and China’s transgressions seem trivial in comparison. Since claims over territorial waters extend themselves into Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) protocols, it impacts the control of airspace as well.

The US allowed a large overlapping claim to arise between China and Japan by allowing (read : encouraging) Japan to redefine the territorial claims over Senkaku Islands. In fact, it was this imperialist aggression which provoked China to open up another front and that is how the South China Sea dispute came into being as a response to US over-smartness, just like the Syria and Ukraine came into being, not the other way round, as the American media claims. They are trying to put the horse before the cart and sell snake oil to the world if they claim that intervention in Indian Ocean, SCS, Ukraine, Syria has got anything to do with freedoms and human rights. They are the ones creating the problems by ‘challenging’ countries thousands of miles away from their continent.

Essentially all territorial water disputes until now followed the theme of “this land belongs to us therefore the adjacent waters belong to us”. The paradigm shift that China has brought to this equation is-this water belongs to us, therefore the land belongs to us, therefore more water belongs to us. ‘Land’ here is loosely taken to assume continental reef, and they have dumped sand on the reef and pulled the reefs out of the legal grey area and into firm footing (pun intended) and as a corollary, extended their territorial water and ADIZ. Japan did exactly that, but American propaganda will never tell that side of the story.

Cutting long story short, ‘Freedom of Navigation’ is to capitalism what ‘Freedom of Religion’ is to Christianity. The former is meant to extend western capitalist hegemony and the latter is meant to extend their Christian hegemony. These all terms are misnomers and have nothing to do with the freedom of people who don’t fall in the aforementioned coveted categories.