Moving from SAGAR to MAHASAGAR reflects an expansion in India's maritime vision. Discuss its implications for India's engagement with Southeast Asia.

India's maritime doctrine has grown from SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) to MAHASAGAR (Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions) [1]. The vision now looks beyond "the Region" to work "Across Regions". That makes Southeast Asia, India's gateway to the Pacific, central to how the vision is carried out.

Nature of the expansion

• Geographic: it moves from the Indian Ocean neighbourhood to the wider Indo-Pacific [1].
• Thematic: it moves from security-and-growth to capacity building, technology, MDA (maritime domain awareness: tracking what moves in a country's waters) and underwater surveillance [1].
• Institutional: it is linked to the Act East Policy and ASEAN-led mechanisms [1].

Implications for Southeast Asia: opportunities

• Strategic: it supports ASEAN centrality and an Indo-Pacific where nations of every size make independent choices [1].
• Operational: the first ASEAN-India Maritime Exercise (AIME) in 2023 had about 1,400 personnel on nine ships and ended in the South China Sea [3].
• Institutional depth: ties were raised to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2022 [4]. India co-chairs the ADMM-Plus Experts' Working Group on Counter-Terrorism with Malaysia for 2024–27 [5]. The maiden ASEAN-India Defence Think Tank Forum added a Track-1.5 channel (experts and officials together) [2].
• Defence-industrial: BrahMos's shore-based anti-ship missile deal with the Philippines was India's first BrahMos export [6]. Rajnath Singh now calls for joint research and co-production [1]. Bilateral tracks, such as the India-Indonesia Defence Ministers' Dialogue, add depth [7].

Constraints

• Uneven buy-in: Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar were absent from AIME [3]. ASEAN decides by consensus, so its slowest member sets the pace.
• Export ≠ co-production: BrahMos is a DRDO–Russia joint venture, which limits how freely India can transfer its technology [6].
• Perception risk: arms sales to South China Sea claimants may look like taking sides. India's case must rest on UNCLOS (the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) [1].
• Non-binding forums: think-tank dialogues have no budgets or deadlines, and AIME has had only one edition so far [2][3].

MAHASAGAR moves India's engagement with ASEAN from goodwill to shared capability. To make it work, India should hold AIME regularly and build co-production frameworks and shared MDA networks through ASEAN-led platforms. That would make India a partner in a rules-based, inclusive Indo-Pacific, in line with SDG 14, not a rival bloc.