With its geostrategic location, size, economic and military potential and established historical engagement in South Asia and Indian Ocean littoral states, India is indispensable for any coalition of like-minded countries which respects the rule of international law and is concerned about Chinese ambitions in the region. The United States recognises India’s heft and growing salience in the Indo-Pacific region. This has led to incessant calls for Five Eyes to venture beyond the Anglosphere in potential collaborations and partnerships. Some objectives of the last two decades include the war on terror and perceived challenges from China and Russia as regional powers with their own spheres of influence.
The strategic objectives of the Five Eyes have undergone a gradual shift in the post-Cold War era. India and Five Eyes, is a possibility alive? A few of these deficiencies include outdated curricula and training practices, poor technology staffing, woeful financial resources and understaffed intelligence agencies. Such chronic deficiencies don’t leave India with much capabilities to offer to the member countries of the Five Eyes alliance. Īnother factor which inhibits close cooperation between India and the Five Eyes is the engrained deficits of India’s own intelligence community. An additional apprehension that pops up is potential usage of surveillance technology by the provisioners themselves, as experiences of Indian institutions being monitored by the American agencies have shown in the past. The large-scale electronic surveillance conducted by the grouping has also compromised the privacy rights of even the citizens of Five Eyes partners. There have also been privacy concerns around the breadth and scope of operations conducted by the Five Eyes. This has caused hiccups for deepening cooperation. An example includes India’s consternation at the US for withholding crucial intelligence before 26/11 terror attacks. While India’s bilateral intelligence sharing with the United States has grown in the recent years due to the common China factor, some instances in the past act as barriers. However, this initiative was watered down due to mutual suspicions. In 2008, India was invited to join the “Fourteen Eyes,” an extension of the Five Eyes arrangement. However, the idea of close cooperation between India and Five Eyes is not new. Other frameworks for cooperation include new affiliate groupings under the Five Eyes, like the Nine Eyes and the Fourteen Eyes. India should seek cooperation with the Five Eyes on the lines of established partnerships with countries like South Korea, Singapore and Japan. Other potential areas of collaboration that would assist India could be surveillance, tracking and interception of terrorist activities along with joint intelligence collection operations against illicit arms transfers, piracy, drug/human trafficking and illegal fishing. Following the recent announcements by the QUAD leaders, such maritime intelligence cooperation also presents opportunities in the fields of Maritime Domain Awareness and security operations in the region.
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This is coupled with the prospect of deepening bilateral and plurilateral military engagement with United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, countries who have direct interests in the Indo-Pacific region.įive Eyes-India intelligence cooperation can immediately take form by supporting the annual MALABAR and Tiger Triumph maritime exercise series along with integrating navies of like-minded partners in the future. Other incentives include increased intelligence sharing along with access to state-of-the-art intelligence technology.
Second, Chinese incursions and development activities along the Himalayan frontier. Cooperation would significantly boost India’s capabilities in tackling its perennial challenges: Cross-border infiltration and terrorism emanating from Pakistan. Observers have noted that the fundamental selling point of joining or cooperating with the Five Eyes for India is twofold.
Contemporary dynamics in the Indo-Pacific region along with India’s new dynamism in the QUAD, perhaps, makes the time for cooperation ripe. These include demands for cooperation with the Five Eyes, but historical hesitations and mutual concerns stopped the idea from sprouting. This has frequently led to calls in India for a renewed approach. Be it the 1962 war against China or the 1999 conflict with Pakistan, intelligence paucities have come to bite New Delhi in the back. We have witnessed time and again that intelligence deficiencies have extracted exorbitant costs from New Delhi.
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