♤ Coordination with international community would add to India’s options.

♤ Now, it remains to be seen how India manages to keep China at a distance, reinforcing its position of an ultimate security provider in the South Asia region. •As the strategic competition between India and China in the Indian Ocean gathers pace, we must be prepared to face such situations more frequently. We need to craft a creative and dynamic strategy to counter them.

♤ As Admiral Arun Prakash has observed, certain fundamentals of geography and history are key to remember here: