Discuss the significance of the 1991 India-Pakistan Agreement on Advance Notice on Military Exercises in maintaining strategic stability. Examine its relevance in light of recent naval incidents.

The Agreement on Advance Notice on Military Exercises, Manoeuvres and Troop Movements, signed at New Delhi in April 1991, is a core India-Pakistan confidence-building measure (CBM) [1]. The collision between INS Kolkata and PNS Hunain in the North Arabian Sea on 15 September 2026 shows it still restrains escalation, even as its design limits stand exposed.

Significance for strategic stability

• Predictability: graded advance notice of major exercises — 15 days for certain air and naval exercises, 60 days for corps-level and 90 days for army-level manoeuvres — denies either side the excuse of misreading routine activity as mobilisation [1].
• Spatial restraint: major exercises must avoid close proximity to the other side, with the strategic direction of the main force turned away and no logistics build-up nearby [1].
• Maritime separation: Article 10 bars warships and submarines from closing within three nautical miles (~5.6 km) in international waters, expressly to avoid accidents [1].
• Institutionalised restraint: with the 1988 nuclear-installations pact and the 1991 air-space violations pact, it forms a standing risk-reduction architecture that survives political breakdown.

Relevance tested by recent naval incidents

• No verification machinery: the pact fixes a rule but creates no joint inquiry or arbitration, so each navy authored its own account of the September 2026 collision and recourse ended with a diplomatic protest [2].
• A distance rule, not a driving rule: give-way and overtaking duties lie in the 1972 COLREGs, not Article 10, leaving the actual collision question unanswerable under the bilateral text [3].
• Changed operating pattern: written for announced exercises, it fits poorly with navies now kept mission deployed on station in the North/Central Arabian Sea for months [4].
• Escalatory containment held: armed warships touched, yet the dispute moved to the Ministry of External Affairs rather than to weapons [2].

The pact does not prevent incidents; it converts them into diplomacy — no small gain between nuclear neighbours. Its credibility can be renewed cheaply through a protocol to the same agreement: a direct navy-to-navy channel usable in real time, advance intimation of patrol areas, and explicit mutual acceptance of COLREGs. Updated thus, a thirty-five-year-old CBM remains India's most practical instrument of maritime restraint.