India Maritime Strategy Towards China

The strategic value of Indian Ocean has invited lots of attention from a major power.  For India, the Indian Ocean shows its domain and obvious superiority that it has held for some centuries. However, there seem to be an arise from China presence in the region. This action has prompted India as the leading actor in the area and created a diversified approach to mitigating the issue.  How should India respond to this? What would be the impact of this phenomenon on India maritime strategy? Is China presence should be defined as a threat for India to continue its ambition as a prospect dominant global key player, or it produces opportunity that India should grab in order to remain relevant in Indian Ocean perspective. The objective of this article is to discuss the actions taken by India to enhance its national interest in the India Ocean. This qualitative approach has using secondary data from 2010- 2018. The finding of this study are 1) India has come out with a maritime strategy to counterbalance China, 2) the Act east policy appeared to be a soft power for India to pursuit more strategic goals as compared to the previous Look East policy which seems to be typically rhetoric and concentrated on economic friendship, 3) India continues to develop cooperation with the superpower and major power countries such as the United States, Australia and Japan.