📄 Abstract
India’s maritime neighbourhood has become a central arena in the reorganisation of Indo-Pacific power. Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bangladesh occupy different maritime subregions, yet each sits close to routes, chokepoints, ports and surveillance spaces that shape India’s economic security and naval strategy. Their significance is frequently interpreted through the language of Chinese ‘encirclement’ and Indian ‘primacy’. Such formulations capture an element of competitive geopolitics but obscure the political character of access. Ports do not automatically become bases; infrastructure ownership does not by itself establish military control; and smaller states are not passive terrain upon which great powers act. Strategic access is produced through negotiation among host governments, commercial actors, security institutions, domestic constituencies and external partners. This chapter develops a multidimensional conception of strategic access encompassing commercial connectivity, logistics, maritime-domain information, defence cooperation and crisis response. It compares Sri Lanka’s port-centred bargaining, the Maldives’ security dependence combined with sovereignty-sensitive domestic politics, and Bangladesh’s connectivity strategy in the Bay of Bengal. The comparison demonstrates that India’s advantages derive from proximity, economic interdependence, first-responder capacity and institutional familiarity, whereas China’s appeal often rests on infrastructure finance, construction capability and political optionality. Neither advantage is self-executing. Access remains contingent upon legitimacy within the partner state and upon the perceived distribution of benefits and risks. The chapter argues that India will secure more durable maritime influence by replacing an exclusionary sphere-of-influence logic with a consent-based architecture of reciprocal access, local capacity, transparent infrastructure, non-traditional security cooperation and credible respect for sovereign agency.
🏷️ Keywords
📚 How to Cite:
Dr. Shivendra Shahi , INDIA'S MARITIME NEIGHBOURHOOD AND THE POLITICS OF STRATEGIC ACCESS , Volume 12 , Issue 9, September 2026, EPRA International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (IJMR) , Pages: 33 - 38 , DOI: https://doi.org/10.36713/epra31458