The Indian Ocean Conference, held annually by India Foundation, is one of the region’s most consequential Track 1.5 forums, bringing together foreign ministers, strategists, and senior officials from littoral states and beyond to shape the terms of maritime governance. This year’s ninth edition, hosted in Port Louis, Mauritius, from April 10 to 12, carried unusual urgency. An active conflict in West Asia had disrupted the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which roughly 20% of global energy supply passes, and its effects were already visible across the Indian Ocean world: LNG tankers stranded, LPG supplies cut to industries, and fuel prices rising from Colombo to Kathmandu.
Into this moment, two speeches defined the conference. India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar argued that the ocean’s growing vulnerabilities demand collective stewardship, with no single state capable of managing them alone. Nepal’s Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal argued that such stewardship is meaningless unless it includes nations that depend on the ocean without bordering it. Read together, they form a single argument: the Indian Ocean is a shared system, and its governance must reflect that reality.
An Ocean Under Pressure
The Indian Ocean has always been central to global trade, energy, and connectivity. What has changed is the degree to which that centrality is being actively exploited. Jaishankar captured the defining tension of the moment plainly: “The interdependence is getting deeper, but the competition is getting stronger.” Chokepoints, once understood as geographic features, have become instruments of geopolitical leverage. As Jaishankar noted, this logic now extends beyond the physical: “We naturally tend to think of it physically, but let’s not forget that it has also been conceptually developed in domains like finance, technology, resources, and even knowledge.”
The disruption in the Strait of Hormuz is the most visible example of this dynamic. India depends on the Strait for over half its LNG imports, with Qatar alone supplying more than 40% of that total. When shipping through the Strait was halted, India was forced to cut natural gas allocations to certain industries to protect household supplies, and LPG to commercial customers was heavily rationed. The energy crisis was not background noise at the conference. It was the immediate condition in which every speech was delivered. India’s Petroleum Minister flew to Qatar the same week, and Jaishankar held emergency bilateral meetings with counterparts from Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt on the conference sidelines before flying on to the UAE.
What International Law Says About Landlocked States
Beneath the diplomatic proceedings, a more structural question was being raised: who gets to participate in governing an ocean they do not border?
The answer, under international law, is unambiguous. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, ratified by over 160 states, contains specific provisions for landlocked nations under Part X of UNCLOS. These include the right of access to and from the sea through the territory of transit states, equal treatment in ports, and the right to participate in international maritime trade on terms no less favourable than coastal states. Landlocked nations are also entitled to participate in the exploitation of coastal states’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs) under defined conditions.
These are legal rights, not diplomatic courtesies. In practice, however, they depend on bilateral arrangements with transit neighbours, and those arrangements are often uneven, contested, and subject to political pressure.
Nepal’s Case for Inclusion
Nepal, surrounded by India and China with no coastline, used the conference to make this argument precisely, and with unusual intellectual force.
Foreign Minister Khanal grounded the claim in ecology first. Nepal’s glaciers feed the great river systems that discharge into the Indian Ocean. Climate change is simultaneously retreating those glaciers and warming the ocean, driving sea level rise that threatens island states in the same body of water. The mountain and the ocean are not separate systems. They are one. Khanal put it directly, “What melts in the mountains eventually rises in the seas.”
From there, the argument moved to law, then to lived reality. Millions of Nepali citizens work in Gulf countries that sit on or near the Indian Ocean. The West Asia conflict had already claimed one Nepali life, injured others, and driven up fuel costs at home. Nepal absorbs the consequences of maritime disruption without holding any formal seat in the governance arrangements that shape the ocean’s stability.
The assertion that landlocked nations hold inherent rights to maritime access and participation, not privileges contingent on geography, is a deliberate signal. Invoking UNCLOS at a multilateral forum is a way of holding transit neighbours to a legal standard they have formally accepted.
Reframing the Indian Ocean as a Shared System
The alignment between India’s stewardship argument and Nepal’s inclusion argument reflects the pressures of a specific moment. A world fragmenting along great power lines is producing a new politics of access to energy, to trade routes, to maritime infrastructure. Smaller and landlocked states, watching chokepoints become bargaining chips, are turning to international law as their most reliable recourse.
Jaishankar articulated the stakes in terms that apply as much to Nepal as to any littoral state. “When energy is scarce and expensive, it has an overarching implication for the entire society. When trade is constricted, this goes beyond business to livelihoods.” His call for the Indian Ocean to be treated as “a global commons, where not only the benefits are shared but so too other responsibilities,” sets the standard against which Nepal’s demand should be measured.
India’s answer to the present crisis is institutional: build platforms, deepen partnerships, act as a first responder, and position the ocean as a shared responsibility. Nepal’s answer is legal: assert rights that already exist and insist they be treated as such. These are not competing positions. They are, in fact, the same argument made from different ends of the same system.
The conference did not resolve the underlying tension between coastal states that control access and landlocked states that assert participation. But it named that tension clearly, and in doing so, expanded the frame of who gets a voice in shaping the Indian Ocean’s future.
This article has been researched, edited, and fact-checked by India’s World staff and prepared with AI assistance.