India in the Mediterranean

Vijay Prashad

On 26 October 2026, Greece’s foreign minister George Gerapetritis stood at the United Nations headquarters and rejected the maritime agreement between Turkey and Libya. Gerapetritis spoke on behalf of Greece of course, but also Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, the European Union, and the United Arab Emirates. Five days later, the Indian frigate INS Trishul entered Souda Bay in Crete as part of activities with the US Navy installation (Naval Support Activity) and with the NATO Maritime Interdiction Operational Training Centre. The sequence illuminates a developing strategic geography: India’s naval reach, its confrontation with Pakistan’s new Turkish partner, and its ambition to connect Indian capital to European markets increasingly converge in the eastern Mediterranean.

Energy fields

On 20 October, the Libyan Government of National Accord in Benghazi approved a maritime memorandum signed with Türkiye in 2019. Greece, which has a hostile relationship with Türkiye, argues that the delimitation in the memorandum disregards the maritime entitlements of islands that Greece claims, such as Crete; the European Union (EU), agreeing with Greece, argues that this memorandum infringes the rights of third party states. Of course, Türkiye welcomed the decision from Benghazi and rejected the EU statement.

These arguments are weighed down by the oil that lies beneath the waves. In February, Chevron and Helleniq Energy signed an agreement to explore four offshore Greek oil blocks, including two south of Crete. Chevron holds a 70 percent operating interest in this endeavour, which envisaged seismic exploration of potential fields. The concessions show why maritime boundaries matter, since competing maps can have an enormous impact on future discoveries of oil.

Indian Odyssey

In August 2023, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi went to Athens and met with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. They signed an agreement that reinforced the India-EU Connectivity Partnership of May 2021, which on the surface covers a great deal of ground but which underneath it is mainly about deals for large corporations around ports, submarine cables, and satellite networks. In February 2024, Modi and Mitsotakis explicitly connected cooperation in the eastern Mediterranean with the US war aims Asia, writing of – in the Greek version – ‘a free, open, and rules-based Mediterranean Sea and Indo-Pacific’ (Modi said to Mitsotakis that ‘it is a matter of joy that Greece has decided to join the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative’, an Indian-driven platform for scientific cooperation but mainly for maritime security). The institutional relationship has since deepened with a February 2026 Joint Declaration of Intent on defence industrial cooperation and then with a Bilateral Military Cooperation Plan. India’s Defence secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh visited Cyprus and Greece in mid-October to follow-up on the India-EU Security and Defence Partnership. As India and Greece struck these diplomatic and military deals, Indian navy vessels came one-by-one to Greece. Before the INS Trishul, the INS Tamal called at Souda Bay in August 2025, while INS Trikand reached Salamis in September 2025 and participated in the first India-Greece naval exercise.

Why is Modi’s India so eager for this arrangement with Greece? Apart from the words on the text, two other contextual issues bear mention: first, the commercial arrangements led by Modi’s major corporate backer, Gautam Adani, and second, the emergent arrangements for West Asian security developed by Pakistan, Türkiye, and Saudi Arabia.

Adani’s Ports

In 2022, Gautam Adani’s Adani Ports built a joint venture with the Israeli firm Gadot to acquire Haifa port in Israel, with Adani holding 70 percent. This acquisition allowed Adani to build a substantial position at a Mediterranean gateway. Less than a year later, in September 2023, at the G20 summit in New Delhi, several countries such as India and the United States joined the European Union to announce the creation of an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). The IMEC process forms part of the US-backed effort to offer an alternative to the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative. The pathway is simple: it begins in Gujarat and Maharashtra, goes to the Gulf by ship, connects to railways through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel, then from Israel it moves to Greece and France. What is striking is that across the entire landscape of the IMEC are properties owned by Adani’s various corporations: from the ports at Kandla and Mundra (in Gujarat, India) to Haifa (Israel) and then to Marseille (with the continued attempt to acquire stakes in Greek ports). In a sense, the IMEC is less a network of nations and more a global chain of Adani-owned ports.

IMEC’s proposed itinerary deliberately bypasses Türkiye, privileging a Gulf-Israel-Europe connection that serves Washington’s regional integration agenda while limiting Ankara’s role as a transit power. US President Joe Biden explicitly presented it as a contribution to an economically integrated Middle East that made Israel the Mediterranean transit point rather than Türkiye. The logic of this route must be understood in light of the Abraham Accords, which was designed by the United States to push various Arab states to normalise relations with Israel formally. The IMEC, with Saudi Arabia urged to allow trade lines to run through Israel, would have de facto ended up being an exercise in normalisation. The necessity to avoid Türkiye and go through Israel was not about commerce but entirely, for the United States, about the politics of normalisation for Israel.

The Mecca Agreement

The US-Israeli attack on Iran changed the entire paradigm of security in West Asia.  Iran’s retaliation against US military bases in the Gulf Arab states sent a message that the US cannot be an adequate defence shield for these regions. The general view is now that the countries of West Asia need to come together to seek their security through negotiations. On 7 August 2026, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye signed a joint defence agreement that treated an armed attack on one as an attack against all three. Prior to that announcement, Pakistan’s Asim Munir went to Tehran to inform the Iranian leadership that the Mecca agreement was not designed against Iran but to create a platform that did not include the United States (and by October, defence ministers from all three countries went to Iran to defuse any tensions). On 11 August, India’s officials said that they were monitoring the situation, and later in the month when Bangladesh said it was considering membership, India repeated again that it had its eye on the agreement.

Little written about in all this is Pakistan’s growing relationship with Türkiye. In February 2025, Ankara and Islamabad signed agreements covering electronic warfare cooperation, military personnel exchanges, and training in military health. Three months later, in May, India and Pakistan conducted an air war in which Pakistan used Türkiye-origin YIHA-III and Asisguard Songar drones (with an additional controversy, denied by Ankara, that six Turkish military aircraft landed in Pakistan in late April). On 22 September 2026, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan raised the matter of Kashmir at the UN General Assembly, which India rejected a week later. India’s cultivation of Greece, which has its own conflicts with Türkiye over Cyprus, offers Delhi potential influence in Türkiye’s neighbourhood.

Saudi Arabia’s dance between its intimacy with the United States and its eagerness to be a player in its neighbourhood means that it was an original IMEC participant in 2023 and an original signatory of the Mecca Agreement in 2026. Officials close to the Saudi palace – reaffirmed by Reuters – say that Mohammed Bin Salman, the titular leader of the country, has been closely assessing the shifts in world power away from the United States and is eager to join or build platforms (such as the BRICS+) that bring Saudi Arabia closer in line with the multilateral system.

India’s Mediterranean engagement combines commercial expansion with strategic calculation. But does the entry of India into a conflict between Greece and Türkiye, and into the Israeli occupation and genocide of the Palestinians benefit India’s people or does it do the work of US and NATO foreign policy? Extending the India-Pakistan conflict into the Mediterranean brings one more set of tensions into waters that already have sufficient problems. The profits of a port operator offer an inadequate measure of the national interest.

SOURCE : southasiajournal