Rajnath Singh Calls for Maritime Resilience at IPRD 2026

Rajnath Singh, the Raksha Mantri, delivered the commemorative address at the Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue (IPRD) 2026 in New Delhi on 4 November 2026. IPRD is the Indian Navy annual apex-level international strategic conference, and this edition is being run together with the National Maritime Foundation (NMF). The three-day conference opened a day earlier, on 3 November 2026.

What the Defence Minister argued

His central point was that a strained maritime security environment is no reason to walk away from globalisation. The answer, he said, is to make the dependence of nations on one another safer and harder to break. Four remedies were named: diversifying supply chains, maritime infrastructure that can be relied upon, sharper awareness of what is happening at sea, and wider cooperation among partners in the region, together with the ability to foresee disruption, absorb it and recover from it. Oceans, he said, are bridges between nations and civilisations rather than barriers, yet some actors and countries try to turn the importance of the sea into narrow unilateral gain. Deliberate disruption of trade, open challenges to the freedom of navigation and the weaponisation of narrow sea passages were listed as the visible symptoms.

Technology must not widen the gap

Threats at sea are no longer only military, the Minister noted, and listed piracy, trafficking, illegal fishing, cyber-attacks and natural disasters among the non-traditional ones. Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and new sensors are changing what navies can watch and do, but he warned that technology must not turn into one more source of inequality, since the Indo-Pacific contains countries at very different levels of research and economic capability. The most useful technology, in his words, is not the costliest or the most sophisticated but the one that solves a real problem, which matters most to smaller maritime states and developing nations.

India maritime vision

The address tied the sea to the goal of Viksit Bharat by 2047, naming port-led development under Sagarmala and describing the Maritime Amrit Kaal Vision 2047 as the national blueprint. India commitment to an open, inclusive and rule-based maritime order was restated through MAHASAGAR, which stands for Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions, and through the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative that Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced in 2019 and which works across seven connected areas. He also insisted that growth and care of the environment must move together, because the ocean cannot be treated as a limitless store of resources.

Who else spoke

Chief of the Naval Staff Admiral Krishna Swaminathan said cooperation at sea must go past buying equipment to building capabilities that partner navies can operate, maintain and upgrade on their own. Chief of the Army Staff General Dhiraj Seth and Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Ashutosh Dixit were among the dignitaries present. A session called Perspectives from the Flag Bridge brought together former Navy chiefs Admiral R K Dhowan, Admiral Sunil Lanba, Admiral Karambir Singh and Admiral Dinesh K Tripathi with Admiral Jayantha Perera, who once commanded the Sri Lanka Navy.