India’s Elephant Navy and China’s Dragon Navy @ 2025: Contesting to Have a Say in the Indo-Pacific’s ‘Pas de Deux-Churn’

280 pages

Dr James Bosbotinis

The subject of this book immediately appealed to this reviewer, as the major navies of the Indo-Pacific are one of my principal areas of research. The principal authors, Ranjit Rai, a retired Commodore in the Indian Navy who held a variety of appointments including Director of Operations and Intelligence, and Neil Harvey, a keen warships enthusiast and publisher, set out to provide an analysis of the contemporary Indian and Chinese navies as well as the wider geopolitical developments influencing Indian and Chinese strategy. Commodore Rai is also a long-standing member of the NR, with three of his previous books (A Nation and its Navy at War, Warring Nuclear Nations – India and Pakistan, and The Indian Navy Yearbook 2020) reviewed. The book also features contributions from other Indian authors: Commodore (rtd.) Uday Bhaskar, Mahendra Ved, Rahul Vatsyayan, Balaji Chandramohan, Group Captain TP Srivastava and Captain Kamlesh Agnihotri. This adds to the range of perspectives that the book covers.

Across 13 chapters, the authors examine key issues around the development of the Indian Navy, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and, for example, the 2025 Shanghai Cooperation Summit, the impact of President Trump’s use of tariffs against India, and the May 2025 Operation SINDOOR. Rahul Vatsyayan’s chapter, ‘The Indian Navy’s Expansive Build Pipeline: A Maritime Transformation in Motion’, was particularly interesting, providing an analysis of Indian naval modernisation plans over the coming decade or so, and included the notable statement that “India’s naval modernisation is not limited to shipbuilding. It encompasses infrastructure, technology, and strategic partnerships aimed at asserting dominance in the Indian Ocean and projecting power into the Atlantic.” There is much in this book that will be of interest, in particular to those seeking to gain insights into Indian thinking on the evolving maritime strategic environment, the modernisation of the Indian Navy, and Chinese naval developments. However, there are typos, errors, unnecessary capitalisation of certain words, and areas of repetition (such as on pp 48-49), which should have been corrected through the editing and proof-reading process. While distracting, they do not detract from the value of the text.

Chapters 12 and 13 provide overviews of the Indian Navy and PLAN respectively. The latter has some significant issues, containing errors, dated information, an image of an online April Fools’ Day joke from 2021 concerning a fictional Chinese ‘Type 100 submarine” (page 213; similarly, on p 167, an image of a CATOBAR-configured Queen Elizabeth-class carrier is used for the Indian Navy’s proposed future carrier Vishal), and aspects which need development. For example, the Indian Navy overview includes replenishment ships and other auxiliaries while the PLAN chapter does not include such vessels; and the naval surface-to-air missile sub-section does not cover the HHQ-9, HHQ-10 and HHQ-16 – the principal long-range, short-range, and medium-range SAMs deployed on PLAN surface combatants. These, and other issues can be addressed: an expanded, amended second edition of the book is planned. Overall, India’s Elephant Navy and China’s Dragon Navy @ 2025 provides valuable reading, especially with regard to gaining understanding of Indian perspectives and naval modernisation; the comparisons with China are also useful, while noting the above-mentioned issues. For those with an interest in the Indo-Pacific or the Indian Navy, this book would be worth reading.