Maritime security and stability remain of utmost importance to both Brunei and Malaysia, and Brunei has enhanced its preparedness in this regard by joining the Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) maritime exercise with the US.

This gradual decline of the environment - with disastrous consequences for the region including northeastern India and Bangladesh - cannot be arrested without the cooperation of the military rulers who are neck-deep in corruption and self-aggrandizement.

The growing maritime competition between China and Japan along with the West will result in the growing militarization of the Indo-Pacific.

The Indian Navy remains a highly trained, disciplined and proficient force that has stepped up cooperation with other navies in the Indo-Pacific through the annual Malabar exercises. India’s naval modernisation are a strategic response to Beijing’s muscle-flexing in the region, including in the Indian Ocean, especially with Beijing’s strategic penetration into India’s neighbours Sri Lanka,  Pakistan and Bangladesh through the 'strings of pearls' encirclement with its wider regional ramifications.

Thus, China views PM Modi’s visit to the US as a gathering storm for its ambitions to dominate Asia in military, economic and technological spheres. That these are due to China’s recent political and strategic choices is ignored.

Bangladesh expressed its commitment to walk alongside Japan, a leading creator of the QUAD alliance in the Indo-Pacific strategy, for the sake of a peaceful Indo-Pacific region.

Unlike in the Indo-Pacific region, where China poses a security issue for India and US, the challenge in the Middle East is from Beijing’s subtle economic and political push through its Belt and Road Initiative. 

Japan now wants to provide its leadership role in the region for the Western world. Washington, which was so long seeking to counter China through India, has now turned to Japan as it felt that New Delhi was not living up to that role.

ASEAN remains ill-equipped to handle the fallout from the tensions in the South China Sea or the potentiality of a full-blown Taiwanese conflict.

Against this backdrop, India has been promoting the idea of ‘net security provider’ in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). 

Following the attack on a mosque in Kunduz, Afghanistan on October 8, 2021, ISK confirmed the recruitment and mobilization of Uyghur fighters. This was the first time that the alliance between IS-K and Uyghurs was affirmed by IS-K on media platforms.

But New Delhi must not be complacent, because a lot more needs to be done in acquisitions and modernisation to match the much larger and more sophisticated Chinese arsenal and to raise India’s politico-diplomatic assertiveness against Beijing's muscle-flexing.

To gain a strong foothold in Sri Lanka, China used the political weakness of the Rajapaksa family to sustain its corrupt and authoritarian regime by funding its electoral campaign in order to gain a strategic advantage in the Indian Ocean Region to marginalize India and other Western countries. especially US influence in the Indo-Pacific region.

Safeguards Defenders, a Spain-based human rights NGO that first drew attention to the Chinese overseas “police stations” last year, listed operations in 30 countries in North and South Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia (but not in India or other South Asian countries).

China has blocked several times attempts to designate Pakistan-based operatives behind attacks on India as global terrorists, which would place them under international sanctions.