Key Terms & Concepts — UPSC Mains
SHANTI Doctrine
"India's 2026 maritime security doctrine emphasising norm-based cooperation over deterrence-first framing, launched with the Bay of Bengal and BIMSTEC as its first operational test."
SHANTI is the latest in a sequence of named Indian maritime security doctrines, following SAGAR ('Security and Growth for All in the Region', 2015) and MAHASAGAR (2025). Where SAGAR established India's foundational post-2015 role as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean Region linked to inclusive regional growth, and MAHASAGAR broadened that ambition as India's blue-water naval capability and Indo-Pacific engagement grew, SHANTI (2026) explicitly foregrounds norms and cooperative frameworks over deterrence-first language. The Bay of Bengal, operationalised through BIMSTEC (the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, spanning India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand), was chosen as SHANTI's first practical test, a comparatively low-tension, high-trust regional grouping in which India can build and demonstrate cooperative maritime security commitments, joint maritime domain awareness, disaster-response coordination and anti-piracy cooperation, before extending the approach to more contested waters. Analysts caution that a doctrine's substance is established not by its launch language but by whether it converts into verifiable, institutionalised commitments, joint exercises, information-sharing architecture, capacity-building programmes, over the following years.
A fresh, testable addition to India's sequence of maritime doctrines for GS2 (India's neighbourhood, regional groupings) and useful for tracing policy evolution rather than treating each doctrine as an isolated fact.
- 1 Sequence: SAGAR (2015) -> MAHASAGAR (2025) -> SHANTI (2026).
- 2 SHANTI's distinguishing emphasis: norm-based cooperation over deterrence-first framing.
- 3 First operational test: the Bay of Bengal, through BIMSTEC.
- 4 BIMSTEC members: India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand.
- 5 Chosen as a low-tension, high-trust grouping to build credibility before wider Indo-Pacific application.
- 6 Credibility test: whether launch language converts into verifiable BIMSTEC-level commitments (joint exercises, domain-awareness sharing) over the following year.
SHANTI's first credibility test will be whether India converts its Bay of Bengal outreach into institutionalised BIMSTEC commitments, such as joint maritime domain awareness sharing, rather than remaining a vocabulary shift layered onto MAHASAGAR's ambition.
