Opinion | India’s Andaman Islands Overlook Malacca. Its Carrier Group Does the Rest

India’s Great Nicobar Island sits approximately 90 nautical miles from the northern tip of Sumatra. The northern entrance to the Strait of Malacca opens roughly 150 nautical miles to the south-east. These are not numbers from a strategic concept paper. They are coordinates on a nautical chart, and they define one of the most consequential pieces of maritime geography in the Indo-Pacific. A carrier strike group operating in conjunction with the tri-service Andaman and Nicobar Command can conduct sustained air operations over both the Malacca approach and the Bay of Bengal simultaneously. No other regional navy can replicate that geometry.

China’s dependence on the Malacca Strait is not a recent discovery. Beijing has discussed what it calls the “Malacca Dilemma” in strategic documents since at least 2003, when then-President Hu Jintao acknowledged that Chinese energy security rested on a chokepoint outside Chinese control. The PLAN has spent two decades attempting to solve this through a combination of land-based infrastructure, port access agreements, and alternative energy import corridors.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, connecting Kashgar in Xinjiang to the port of Gwadar in Balochistan, is partly a response to Malacca dependency. So is the Kyaukpyu port project in Myanmar. None of these alternatives fully substitutes for Malacca. China imports approximately eleven to twelve million barrels of oil per day. Overland pipelines and alternative sea routes carry a fraction of that volume. The Strait remains the throughput that keeps Chinese refineries running, with roughly eighty percent of China’s seaborne oil imports transiting it.

India’s Andaman and Nicobar Command, established in 2001 as India’s first and only tri-service theatre command, has air, naval, and ground assets permanently stationed on the islands. The command’s area of responsibility covers the Andaman Sea, the northern Malacca approach, and the western reaches of the Bay of Bengal. An aircraft carrier operating from this region extends the command’s effective reach from fixed island-based assets to a mobile floating air base capable of sustained combat operations.

This creates an overlapping coverage geometry that the Andaman Command’s fixed assets alone cannot produce. The Andaman and Nicobar Command’s land-based strike aircraft — Su-30MKIs operating from Car Nicobar — have a combat radius of approximately 1,500 kilometres with refuelling, while maritime patrol aircraft operating from INS Baaz on Great Nicobar provide continuous surveillance over the Six Degree Channel and the northern Malacca approach.

A carrier operating in the Andaman Sea adds mobile, sustained air power to the south and east, putting the full width of the northern Malacca approach within a single carrier air wing’s operating range without dependence on fixed basing.

For China, the implications are doctrinal. A Chinese vessel transiting northbound through Malacca — whether warship or commercial tanker — passes through a maritime corridor that India can monitor, interdict, or threaten from both shore-based and carrier-based platforms simultaneously. This is not a wartime scenario. It is a peacetime strategic reality that shapes every calculation Beijing makes about Indian Ocean operations.

Pakistan’s geographic position gives it no comparable leverage over Chinese sea lines of communication. Gwadar sits at the mouth of the Arabian Sea and is relevant to Gulf trade flows. Pakistan has neither the carrier capability nor the geographic position to threaten Chinese maritime traffic through Malacca. India, by virtue of where the Andaman and Nicobar Islands sit on a chart, occupies a strategic position that Pakistani port investment and Chinese naval assistance cannot replicate.

Sri Lanka, positioned at the apex of the Indian Ocean triangle, sits within direct operating range of a carrier group using the Andaman base as its eastern anchor. Any actor attempting to use Sri Lankan port infrastructure to threaten Indian sea lines of communication finds itself within a geometry that India can contest from multiple directions simultaneously, including from above.

The Malacca leverage is geographic. The carrier is what converts geography into a military equation. Without the carrier, India watches the Strait from 150 nautical miles away. With it, India holds options that China’s naval planners are required to account for in every scenario they model.