With Hormuz Shut and Bab el-Mandeb Lost, Hindu Op-Ed Proposes a Malacca–Singapore Cooperative Mechanism

The news

Persian Gulf and Red Sea. The Economic Times editorial “Oil’s Sea Lanes Get Tougher to Navigate” says Yemen’s Houthis are tightening their control over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait — the narrow mouth of the Red Sea between Yemen and the Horn of Africa — while Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz continues, so that both points of access to West Asian oil, through the Persian Gulf and through the Red Sea, are choked. A strait is a narrow natural sea passage joining two larger bodies of water; it becomes a chokepoint when closing it forces ships onto much longer routes. The ET notes that India buys around four-fifths of its oil from Russia and West Asia. Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the UAE supply India through the Persian Gulf, while Russian cargoes use the Red Sea, which the Houthis are not blocking. Asia-bound tankers avoiding the Red Sea must sail around Africa, a four-week detour. In an ET op-ed, Ateesh Tankha writes that before February 28, when the war began, Hormuz carried about 20 million barrels per day (bpd), and that after its closure barely 2 million bpd trickled out; he says the little crude that got through recently paid a toll, and that the Houthis have bombed Saudi refineries and stalled Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, known as Petroline. The Indian Express, citing Reuters from Dubai, reports that Yemeni government forces remain on the defensive after the loss of Bab el-Mandeb. In The Hindu, M. Kalyanaraman offers the Straits of Malacca and Singapore as a model. In 1971 Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore jointly challenged the idea that those straits were “international”; once Indonesia and Malaysia claimed 12-nautical-mile territorial seas, the zones met in the middle. The U.K. then introduced “transit passage”, a right to cross “continuous and expeditious” that also covers warships, and in 2007 the three littoral states built a Cooperative Mechanism with an Aids to Navigation Fund paid by voluntary contributions, which “do not amount to tolls”. Iran, which has not ratified UNCLOS, passed a law in 1993 requiring foreign warships to seek its authorisation. Iran and Oman have apparently agreed on a framework for reopening Hormuz, but the Strait has not reopened and the U.S. has not accepted the arrangement. The syllabus link is GS2 on the effect of other countries’ policies on India’s interests and GS3 on energy security.

Static syllabus linkage

1. UNCLOS creates graded rights of passage, and the strait regime is the strongest. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, adopted in 1982 and in force since 1994, lets a coastal state claim a territorial sea of up to 12 nautical miles under Article 3. In the territorial sea, foreign ships enjoy only innocent passage, which must not be prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal state, and Article 25(3) allows the coastal state to suspend it temporarily in specified areas for security reasons. Submarines in innocent passage must travel on the surface and show their flag under Article 20. In straits used for international navigation, Part III (Articles 37 to 44) provides transit passage, which covers ships and aircraft including warships and submarines, and Article 44 says it cannot be suspended. India ratified UNCLOS in 1995.
2. Article 43 of UNCLOS is the legal hook for the Malacca model. Article 43 says that user states and states bordering a strait should cooperate by agreement to establish and maintain navigational and safety aids and to prevent pollution from ships. The 2007 Cooperative Mechanism in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore was the first arrangement to put this article into practice, with a Cooperation Forum, a Project Coordination Committee and an Aids to Navigation Fund. Its design principle is that littoral states keep sovereignty and do not charge for passage, while users share the cost of safety. Separately, Article 26 allows charges on foreign ships in the territorial sea only for specific services rendered, not for passage as such.
3. Two chokepoints guard the two exits of West Asian oil. The Strait of Hormuz lies between Iran and the Musandam peninsula of Oman and links the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. The Bab el-Mandeb lies between Yemen on the Arabian side and Djibouti and Eritrea on the African side, and links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden; with the Suez Canal it forms the shortest route between the Indian Ocean and Europe. The Strait of Malacca lies between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra and joins the Andaman Sea to the Strait of Singapore and the South China Sea. Archipelagic states such as Indonesia received a separate regime, archipelagic sea lanes passage, in Part IV of UNCLOS.
4. India’s buffers against a supply shock are limited by design. India’s strategic petroleum reserves are built by Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Ltd, a special purpose vehicle under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, in underground rock caverns at Visakhapatnam, Mangaluru and Padur with a combined capacity of 5.33 million tonnes. These cover only a matter of days of national consumption, so India’s real buffer is diversification of suppliers and routes. The Indian Navy has run Operation Sankalp since 2019 to escort Indian-flagged merchant ships in the Gulf region, and the Information Fusion Centre–Indian Ocean Region at Gurugram shares maritime traffic information with partner navies.

Why UPSC loves this

1. Chokepoints and the law of the sea are recurring Prelims material. UPSC has repeatedly asked map-based questions on straits and the water bodies they connect, and questions on maritime zones — territorial sea, contiguous zone, exclusive economic zone. The distinction between innocent passage and transit passage, and the question of which regime covers warships, is exactly the type of conceptual statement the examiner likes to test.
2. Mains asks about energy security and the Indian Ocean as India’s strategic space. The GS2 syllabus names the “effect of policies and politics of developed and developing countries on India’s interests” and the Indian diaspora, and GS3 covers infrastructure including energy and security challenges in border areas and the seas. Questions on West Asian instability, the safety of sea lanes of communication and India’s maritime diplomacy have appeared across years, and the present crisis supplies a live case for all of them.
3. Earlier coverage treated oil as a price story; this is a routes story. The U.S. tariff law against buyers of Russian oil was covered on 21 September and is not repeated here. The new development is the simultaneous closure of both West Asian exits and a concrete legal proposal for Hormuz. An answer that moves from price to route to law shows depth.

Analysis

1. The Malacca parallel is technically exact and politically inverted. Kalyanaraman is right that the geography matches: in both cases two territorial seas meet in the middle and leave no high-seas corridor. But the Malacca bargain was struck while UNCLOS itself was being negotiated, when Indonesia could trade acceptance of transit passage for recognition of its archipelagic waters. No such trade is on the table for Iran today, because the treaty is already written. More basically, the littoral states of Malacca were worried about groundings and oil spills; Iran is worried about being attacked. A fund for lighthouses and hydrographic surveys answers the first worry, not the second. The model can supply the machinery of a settlement, but not its political core.
2. The toll is the real dispute, and the Malacca model is designed precisely to avoid one. Tankha reports that the little crude that left Hormuz recently did so after paying a toll. A toll turns a right of passage into a permission, which is exactly what transit passage was invented to prevent; Article 26 of UNCLOS allows charges only for services rendered, not for passage. The Malacca fund solves this by separating the two ideas: users pay voluntarily for safety services, and nobody pays for the right to pass. Offering Iran a seat on a similar committee would give it a formal role and some legitimacy without the humiliation, for the user states, of paying a toll. The counter-view is serious: rewarding a state that closed a strait by force with a role in managing it could invite the same tactic elsewhere.
3. Iran and the U.S. are both outside UNCLOS, which weakens the law at the one strait where it matters most. Iran has signed but not ratified UNCLOS and argues that transit passage is a treaty right available only to parties, which is why its 1993 law demands authorisation from warships. The United States has not joined UNCLOS either, but treats transit passage as customary international law binding on everyone. The two principal antagonists at Hormuz therefore each invoke the law selectively. For India, a party since 1995, the principled position is the one it takes in the South China Sea: freedom of navigation under UNCLOS for all. Consistency on that point is a diplomatic asset India should not spend on short-term cargo deals.
4. India is exposed on both routes and on both sides of the ledger. The ET editorial’s sharpest point is that disruption hits India harder than most because nearly all its crude imports and its exports of refined products move by sea. Gulf crude comes through Hormuz; refined products to Europe, which revived after the EU banned products made from Russian crude, go out through the Red Sea. Russian crude, the obvious substitute, faces the U.S. tariff threat. India’s diversification has therefore been by supplier, not by route, and the present crisis shows the second matters as much as the first. A reserve of 5.33 million tonnes buys days, not months, of cover.
5. India can be a convener of user states, but not their guarantor. India is one of the largest users of both straits, has working relations with Iran through Chabahar and with Oman, and has escorted its merchant ships since 2019. That gives it standing to argue for a user-state cooperative mechanism for Hormuz on the Article 43 model, alongside Qatar, which the Hindu op-ed says has already mooted the idea. What India cannot do is make the United States accept an arrangement it has rejected, or make Iran give up its security demands. The realistic role is to keep the idea alive and ready for the day a ceasefire makes it usable.

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