The Long Way Round: Red Sea Shipping Attacks, the Indian Navy's Response and Chokepoint Risk in India's Maritime Supply Chains

B.A.P-I Retrospective, 2020 to 2024. This paper looks back at 2023 and the lesson it holds for the protection of India's critical infrastructure.

1. Introduction

When Houthi forces seized the Bahamas-flagged car carrier Galaxy Leader in the southern Red Sea on 19 November 2023, taking its 25 crew hostage (Briscoe, 2023, Nov. 21), the event looked at first like one more episode in the long insecurity of the waters off Yemen. It proved to be the start of a campaign that would, over the following twenty months, target more than 100 merchant ships, sink four, seize one and kill at least eight seafarers (Reuters, 2025, Jul. 10). Major carriers turned their ships south around the Cape of Good Hope; Maersk announced that it would divert all its vessels for the foreseeable future (ITLN, 2024, Jan. 5).

India was not a party to the conflict that motivated the attacks, yet its trade was heavily exposed to them. What distinguishes India's experience is that it did not simply absorb the shock: it answered it with a sustained naval deployment across the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden (PIB, 2024, Mar. 23). This paper revisits the crisis with hindsight: what it did to India's trade and freight costs, how the Indian Navy and the Government responded, and what it teaches about chokepoint risk in the maritime supply chains on which India's critical sectors depend.

2. A Chokepoint India Cannot Avoid

For India's trade with Europe, North Africa and the eastern seaboard of America, the Bab-el-Mandeb strait and the Suez Canal are not one route among many; they are the route. Observer Research Foundation analysis put the traffic through the Red Sea corridor at close to 15 per cent of international shipping and about 10 per cent of global oil supply (Gupta, 2024, Apr. 22). CRISIL Ratings data reported by PTI showed that the route carried 50 per cent of India's exports, worth Rs 18 lakh crore, and 30 per cent of its imports, worth Rs 17 lakh crore, in the previous fiscal year, and that sea-borne trade accounted for 68 per cent of India's merchandise trade by value and 95 per cent by volume (PTI, 2024, Jan. 28).

Dependence of this kind is not a weakness in itself; geography makes it unavoidable. It becomes a vulnerability only when a single passage carries a large share of the inputs and outputs of essential sectors and no plan exists to protect or replace it. The Red Sea crisis tested exactly that condition, and India's response showed how much national capability can offset geographic exposure.

3. The Cost of Going the Long Way

The commercial effect arrived quickly. In the first week of January 2024 the Drewry World Container Index rose 61 per cent to $2,670 per 40-foot container, with rates from Shanghai to Rotterdam and Genoa more than doubling (ITLN, 2024, Jan. 5). CRISIL noted that container rates from Shanghai to Northern Europe had risen by over 300 per cent since November 2023, and that the Cape route added 15 to 20 days to delivery (PTI, 2024, Jan. 28). The Global Trade Research Initiative projected shipping cost increases of 40 to 60 per cent and insurance premium increases of 15 to 20 per cent (Hellenic Shipping News, 2024, Jan. 8).

The impact fell unevenly. CRISIL identified Basmati rice and marine foods as the most exposed, given perishability and thin margins, while crude oil, pharmaceuticals and metals faced limited impact (PTI, 2024, Jan. 28). The refining sector felt it on the export side: ORF recorded that India's exports of processed crude to Europe fell from 1.31 to 1.11 million barrels a day between December 2023 and February 2024 (Gupta, 2024, Apr. 22). The Government's position in Parliament was clear and measured: some increase in freight cost had been reported, ships carrying Indian containers had been diverted via the Cape, container availability at most ports was not significantly affected, and the Export Credit Guarantee Corporation had been directed to keep a moratorium on premium rates for Indian exporters (Lok Sabha, 2024, Feb. 7). Trade continued, and Indian exporters were given cover against the worst of the cost shock.

4. The Indian Navy: First Responder of the Western Indian Ocean

The Indian Navy's response defined India's role in the crisis. When the chemical tanker Chem Pluto, with 21 Indian crew aboard, was struck about 200 nautical miles southwest of Veraval on 23 December 2023, the Navy established through analysis of the debris that it had been a drone attack and deployed the guided missile destroyers INS Mormugao, INS Kochi and INS Kolkata on the western seaboard, with P-8I aircraft maintaining surveillance (Deccan Herald, 2023, Dec. 25). By early January naval ships and aircraft were on mission deployment across the North and Central Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden, with the Information Fusion Centre for the Indian Ocean Region monitoring merchant traffic (PIB, 2024, Jan. 3).

The rescues that followed showed the Navy's reach and readiness. On 5 January 2024 INS Chennai intercepted the Liberian-flagged MV Lila Norfolk after a reported boarding, and its marine commandos evacuated all 21 crew, including 15 Indians, from the citadel (Deccan Herald, 2024, Jan. 5). On the night of 26 January INS Visakhapatnam answered a distress call from the missile-struck MV Marlin Luanda, which had 22 Indian crew, and its team fought the blaze alongside the ship's crew for six hours (WION, 2024, Jan. 27). In March, INS Kolkata, supported by INS Subhadra, a P-8I and marine commandos air-dropped from a C-17, forced the surrender of all 35 pirates aboard the hijacked MV Ruen about 1,400 nautical miles from the mainland and freed its 17 crew unharmed after an operation of more than 40 hours (Indian Navy, 2024, Mar.).

The Ministry of Defence's account of the first hundred days of Operation Sankalp, from 14 December 2023 to 23 March 2024, gives the scale: more than 21 ships and over 5,000 personnel deployed, 18 incidents responded to, more than 110 lives saved including 45 Indian seafarers, over 450 merchant vessels assured of naval presence and about 1.5 million tonnes of critical commodities, including fertilisers and crude oil, escorted (PIB, 2024, Mar. 23). By any honest assessment, this established India as a net security provider in the waters through which its trade passes.

5. What Hindsight Shows

The disruption proved recurrent. After a lull, the Houthis sank the Magic Seas on 6 July 2025 and the Eternity C on 9 July 2025 (Reuters, 2025, Jul. 10). One finds that the most important lesson is temporal: planning should assume a corridor that opens and closes unpredictably over years, not weeks. For so far as India's critical sectors are concerned, fertiliser supply stands out, since CRISIL reported that India sources 60 per cent of its rock phosphate imports from Jordan and Egypt and 30 per cent of its phosphoric acid from Jordan (PTI, 2024, Jan. 28). Energy, on both the import and refined export side, is the other, and so is the export economy of small and medium enterprises, which have the least capacity to absorb freight shocks.

6. Recommendation: Turn the Sankalp Model into Standing Doctrine

What comes through from all of this is that India met the Red Sea crisis with capability and resolve, and that the next step is to institutionalise what worked. Three measures follow. First, chokepoint exposure should be mapped sector by sector, with fertilisers, energy and essential medicines treated as critical supply chains whose dependence on Bab-el-Mandeb, Hormuz and Malacca is measured and reported. Second, buffer stocks and pre-negotiated alternative sourcing for those inputs should be set for a disruption horizon of many months. Third, the Operation Sankalp model of escort, surveillance and rescue should be written into standing doctrine with defined triggers, so that India's demonstrated naval capability is matched by pre-planned commercial and logistical support.

These measures sit naturally within a national resilience architecture that treats maritime supply chains as critical infrastructure in their own right, coordinated through a single platform across commerce, shipping, petroleum, fertilisers and defence (Dash, 2025, Jan. 30). The sea lanes are as much a part of India's infrastructure as its ports and pipelines, and the Indian Navy has shown that India can protect them.