Silent Sentinel

India’s newest naval induction, INS Mahe, is an unassuming vessel by the standards of great-power fleets. It is a 78-metre, 900-tonne shallow-water craft designed not for blue-water bravado but for the disciplined business of hunting submarines. Yet its commissioning is far more consequential than its modest frame suggests. As underwater warfare emerges as a pivotal arena of Indo-Pacific rivalry, Mahe signals a shift in India’s maritime posture towards stealth, distributed capability and growing industrial self-reliance.

With over 80 percent indigenous content, Mahe is a marker of industrial maturity. For a country long dependent on foreign suppliers for undersea-warfare hardware, the arrival of an indigenous platform optimised for littoral operations is not trivial.

For years, Indian naval planners have watched the dramatic expansion of regional submarine fleets, not least those belonging to China and Pakistan. Islamabad is expected to receive six Hangor-class submarines from Beijing, a transfer that will materially alter the balance in the Arabian Sea. China operates one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing undersea fleets and has shown a readiness to deploy vessels deep into the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). Both countries are investing heavily in underwater platforms because submarines offer strategic reach, deniability and the ability to threaten critical sea lines of communication.

The Mahe-class is an answer to this evolving threat. Equipped with torpedoes, anti-submarine rockets, and advanced sensors, Mahe provides the Navy with the means to detect and neutralise intruding submarines before they slip into traffic-heavy coastal corridors. It fills a crucial niche between deep-water assets and coastal patrol craft, acting as the first line of defence at the very threshold of India’s maritime domain.

The IOR is undergoing a submarine build-up unprecedented in its history. China uses submarine deployments as strategic signalling, underscoring its ambition to project influence across the region. Pakistan’s expanding fleet, supported by Chinese technology and financing, is designed to complicate Indian naval planning and strengthen its own deterrent posture. Littoral states from Southeast Asia to West Asia are similarly upgrading their anti-submarine warfare capabilities.

India’s response has been to develop a layered anti-submarine warfare envelope: a networked system of sensors, aircraft, helicopters, corvettes and shallow-water combatants arrayed across its coastline. The commissioning of Mahe strengthens that lattice.

There is also a political and industrial dimension to the vessel’s arrival. Its high level of indigenous content dovetails with the government’s ambition to build a self-sustaining defence manufacturing ecosystem. For a navy that will require dozens of platforms in the coming decade, indigenisation is not merely a slogan but a strategic necessity.

Named after the historic coastal town of Mahe on the Malabar coast, the vessel reflects India’s deep maritime heritage even as it prepares the country for a future in which power increasingly lurks beneath the waves. With the Mahe-class entering service, India has signalled that the contest for control of the Indo-Pacific will not only be fought on open waters but also in the quiet, contested shallows.