How to draw maritime boundaries is as much a long standing legal battle on paper as it is in real water and has an interesting history. I’ll give you the gist of the current issues especially in the wake of a rising China and its growing list of maritime disputes.
As per international law, every nation can claim territorial water and an Exclusive Economic Zone. There is a legal provision that allows a country to have its EEZ extended by making a formal application to the international body, which in turn recognizes it as such.
In case of India, we have territorial waters plus a 200-mile EEZ and applied for an extended economic zone. We continue to treat that total area as our de facto zone of control, which the US disagrees with and deliberately runs warships through just to make a point.
Legally, the US has the right to challenge India in extended waters since an extended economic zone is not the same as territorial waters and it cannot be considered an intrusion or an act of war. But legality is not the only relevant benchmark because the current global order derives its legality from laws written by victors of the Second World War.
There are many nuances and technicalities within these guidelines, including submerged continental reefs and archipelago baselines. Because ocean beds are uneven and the dichotomy between land and sea is not always well defined, maritime borders are often disputed.
The same game is being played out in the 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 disputed areas. Since claims over territorial waters extend themselves into Air Defence Identification Zone protocols, it impacts the control of airspace as well.
The US allowed a large overlapping claim to arise between China and Japan by encouraging Japan to redefine territorial claims over Senkaku Islands. The article argues that this provoked China to open another front in the South China Sea.
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.
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 Christian hegemony.
This ‘challenging’ business has got more to do with geopolitics than legality. The framework for these laws was laid when the US was a rising global power, and the US weakened and subverted international forums once it became the apex power. Now that the world is moving from a unipolar to a multipolar one, the US is again strengthening these laws to make it difficult for new powers to rise.
Consider the ranges and speeds of missiles these days: 200 miles is only a stone’s throw away. Yet, a warship parked just beyond this distance is technically considered to be in international waters, disregarding the fact that it can hit vital targets in seconds. This is gunboat diplomacy.
Maritime security, or security and geopolitics in general, has always been given step-motherly treatment by Indian politicians, despite the fact that the fate of our civilization hangs from it. No other civilization shuns their responsibilities like we do. In light of all the vultures who have an eye on India’s maritime interests, let’s Shun No Varuna, or as the Navy likes to say it: शन्नो वरुणः.