India Summons Pakistan Envoy After Pak Corvette Collides With Indian Warship in Arabian Sea

A THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD RULE MEETS A MODERNISING NAVY

Article 10 of the 1991 Agreement on Advance Notice on Military Exercises sets one number: naval ships of India and Pakistan must stay at least three nautical miles apart in international waters. That number was set to prevent exactly what happened this week - a close-quarter manoeuvre ending in collision.

Reading this incident only as a diplomatic protest misses the more interesting question: what was each navy actually trying to accomplish by closing that distance in the first place?

What India Was Doing The

Indian warship was on a routine surveillance mission roughly 120 nautical miles from the Gulf of Oman - a stretch of ocean India has patrolled more heavily since 2025 in response to piracy and Houthi-linked threats to shipping. For the Indian Navy, sustained presence here is not optional; it protects a trade corridor and signals capability to a wider set of regional actors, not just Pakistan.

What Pakistan Was Doing For

Pakistan, intercepting or shadowing an Indian warship serves a different purpose: demonstrating that its recently modernised navy - PNS Hunain, the vessel involved, was commissioned barely two years ago - can actively track and approach Indian assets rather than simply patrol its own waters passively. Pakistan's own framing of the incident, calling the Indian presence "provocative" in its EEZ, suggests Islamabad is equally invested in being seen as assertive, not just aggrieved.

Why the CBM Still Matters and Where It Strains The 1991

agreement was built for a specific era of risk: preventing large-scale misreadings of intent, the kind that nearly triggered conflict after Operation Brass Tacks in 1987. A three-nautical-mile buffer works well against accidental encounters between passive patrols.

It works far less well when both navies are actively expanding presence in the same waters and using close manoeuvring itself as a form of signalling - where "how close did you get" becomes part of the message, not an accident to avoid.

This is the real tension the collision exposes: a CBM designed to prevent misreadings of large troop movements is now being tested by routine, low-intensity naval assertiveness that neither side wants to formally escalate, but neither side wants to fully avoid either.

The fact that only one incident of this kind occurred between 2011 and now shows the treaty has largely held - but a modernising Pakistani navy operating more assertively in shared waters means the margin for a genuinely accidental miscalculation is narrowing, not widening.

Why This Matters for the Exam

The exam-relevant point is not "India and Pakistan collided at sea"

• it is recognising how a decades-old CBM, built for one kind of risk, gets stress-tested by a newer kind of behaviour it was never designed to manage and what that says about the durability of bilateral risk-management frameworks generally.