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India’s investment in Seychelles’ surveillance infrastructure grew out of anti-piracy operations conducted in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Sunrise Command of the Indian Navy warmly welcomed PS Zoroaster of the Seychelles Coast Guard. (Image: X/Eastern Naval Command)
It’s easy to miss Seychelles on the map. A group of 115 islands in the western Indian Ocean, with a small land area. But these islands lie on shipping routes connecting East Africa, West Asia and the Indo-Pacific, the same corridors that move Gulf oil and Asian cargo westward every day. Its Exclusive Economic Zone extends over 1.3 million square kilometres. Whoever helps Seychelles keep an eye on the place has their eye on some very important waters.
Modi visited Victoria on June 27 for a three-day state visit. He addressed the National Assembly, participated in the Golden Jubilee celebrations and left behind enough defense equipment to bring about meaningful change in the Seychelles People’s Defense Forces. The visit was the first by an Indian Prime Minister in eleven years, and came at a time of growing congestion in the Indian Ocean. China now runs a military base outside Djibouti and has invested money in ports from the northern Indian Ocean to Gwadar. India is watching this and making adjustments accordingly.
That adjustment is not about matching China port to port. India has focused on local capacity building in partner countries, enhancing maritime domain awareness and creating long-term interoperability rather than military dependence. Seychelles is one of the clearest examples of that approach in practice, which is why the defense transfer from Modi’s visit has meaning beyond bilateral relations.
What did India hand over?
The equipment transferred during the visit reflects the model that India has followed in Seychelles for years: building local maritime capacity rather than creating military dependency. Each platform handed over strengthens Seychelles’ ability to patrol its waters while strengthening India’s comprehensive maritime security architecture. India gifted one indigenously built fast patrol ship, 10 utility vehicles and five Laser Radial class boats to the Seychelles Defense Force, announced completion of refit of PS Zoroaster for Seychelles Coast Guard and upgradation of Dornier aircraft with glass cockpit.
The patrol ship fills a real operational gap. The Seychelles Coast Guard has always been small in size relative to the area it has to cover. Interdiction, anti-poaching, search and rescue across 1.3 million square kilometers is nothing a handful of old boats can’t handle. For India, helping Seychelles patrol the vast EEZ also means that a reliable partner is able to maintain a strong security presence in one of the busiest parts of the western Indian Ocean. India has been quietly maintaining that fleet for years, replacing ships as they become old, rather than coming up with something shiny once in a while and disappearing. “It is our firm belief that the defense and security of India and Seychelles are interlinked,” Modi said directly during the bilateral talks.
The Dornier upgrade is well worth understanding. Seychelles already operates two Dornier maritime surveillance aircraft gifted by India over the years. Both are carrying out missions against smuggling and other threats at sea. Instead of replacing them, India upgraded the cockpit avionics. Crews continue to fly their familiar aircraft, platforms remain in service longer, and Seychelles remains a working part of the surveillance network that India is piecing together across the Indian Ocean.
PS The story of Zoroaster is the most telling. Earlier this year the ship departed for India, participated in Exercise MILAN and International Fleet Review in Visakhapatnam, then went for refit at Garden Reach Shipbuilders in Kolkata. It was not sent for maintenance. Before Spanner came out it had been put to work in a major multilateral naval exercise. This is exactly the kind of operational integration that India wants from its maritime partners.
monitoring architecture
Attention is paid to ships and aircraft. The radar network is quieter but possibly more important. If patrol vessels make an appearance, the surveillance network creates awareness; It is the foundation of India’s maritime strategy in the Indian Ocean.
Six coastal surveillance radar systems installed by India in 2015 are being repaired and upgraded. These stations monitor the movements of vessels in Seychellois waters in real time. Suspicious traffic is flagged. Commercial shipping is tracked. When something needs to be stopped, the Coast Guard has a real picture instead of acting blindly.
India created similar networks in Mauritius, Sri Lanka and Maldives. Tie them together and you have maritime awareness across a significant part of the Indian Ocean, detecting suspicious shipping before it even reaches Indian waters. The network feeds into the Information Fusion Centre, Indian Ocean Region, which operates from Gurugram, India and where partner countries collect data on piracy, illegal fishing and other threats.
India’s investment in Seychelles’ surveillance infrastructure grew out of anti-piracy operations conducted in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The threat eventually subsided but the infrastructure remained, and has since been expanded much more extensively.
Exercise Lamity and What Tri-Service Really Means
The 11th edition of Exercise LAMITYE was held in Victoria in March 2026 and was run as a tri-service exercise for the first time, bringing together the Army, Navy and Air Force. Lamiti means friendship in Creole. It has been running biennially for years, but it has always been a naval affair. Going tri-service means both sides are now working through joint planning, logistics, communications and command processes across all three services. For India, interoperability is the objective. Equipment can be moved in one day; It takes years to build forces that can work together.
Seychelles has also stated that it wishes to join the Colombo Security Conclave as a full member, and is already present for meeting and progress. The pattern is of a small nation actively deepening its integration into the Indian-led maritime security order on multiple tracks simultaneously.
Assumption Island: What India learned
There was a moment in 2015 when India and Seychelles signed an agreement to develop military infrastructure on Assumption Island, an outlying island near the Mozambique Channel. An airstrip, a jetty, a real forward presence in the south-western Indian Ocean. It never happened. Political opposition within Seychelles, coupled with environmental concerns, ultimately led to the project being halted.
India drew the right conclusion. Instead of emphasizing infrastructure that small democracies could not sustain politically, it focused on support that host governments could actually provide to protect their populations: ships, radar, training, maintenance.
India’s Island Network and Ocean Vision
Seychelles is a point on the long line. India’s maritime partnerships now extend through Mauritius, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Duqm and Djibouti. The joint picture provides India’s presence and awareness in the Indian Ocean from the Gulf of Aden to the Mozambique Channel, maintained not through bases but through decades of accumulated relations. Within that network, Seychelles serves as India’s Western Indian Ocean partner, complementing similar relations elsewhere in the region.
India is also updating the ideological language around all this. The original SAGAR framework of 2015 focused on collective maritime security. More recently, India has pioneered the Oceans Initiative, a collaborative and holistic approach to security and development across all sectors, which brings together development, digital infrastructure and climate at the core of security. Defense cooperation with Seychelles sits within that security pillar.
why the model works
India’s maritime security does not start from Mumbai or Visakhapatnam. It starts where a threat can be detected early. Nearly 90 percent of India’s trade is carried out by sea and no navy, no matter how capable, can handle it all alone.
That’s why India has spent decades equipping partners in the Indian Ocean with patrol ships, surveillance aircraft, coastal radars and the means to share what they see. Seychelles occupies a strategically important position in that network. This gives India an opportunity to keep an eye on the western Indian Ocean without the political burden and strategic cost of maintaining a permanent foreign base.
Fifty years of sustained investment have made this possible. Seychelles is not in India’s maritime strategy due to its size. It’s there because of where it sits and how much of the ocean it can see.
About the author
Vallari Parashar is Senior Deputy Editor at News18. She writes on geopolitics, defense and strategic affairs
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