Indian and Pakistani warships collide in the Arabian Sea

Two warships, two nuclear-armed neighbors, one collision.

On September 15, Pakistan's PNS Hunain and India's INS Kolkata came together in the North Arabian Sea — steel on steel, 2,600 tons against 7,400 — during Pakistan's SEASPARK-26 naval exercise. Nobody was reported killed. But in the world's most dangerous bilateral relationship, a collision at sea is never just a collision: both capitals summoned diplomats, both blamed the other, and a 1991 agreement on naval etiquette is suddenly the most consequential document in South Asia.

The competing accounts are irreconcilable, which is the point. Pakistan: the Hunain was operating inside Pakistan's exclusive economic zone during a scheduled national exercise, and the Indian destroyer closed dangerously. India: the collision happened in international waters, the Pakistani corvette manoeuvred unsafely in violation of the 1991 agreement's Article 10, and here are the photos of the gash in our hull. Somewhere between the two stories is what actually happened; neither navy has any incentive to find it.

The vessels themselves tell a story. INS Kolkata is a 7,400-ton guided-missile destroyer — a capital ship, the pride of the Indian fleet, built to project power across the Indian Ocean. PNS Hunain is a 2,600-ton Yarmook-class corvette, less than half the displacement, built for patrol and presence. The physics of the encounter favored India; the narrative of the encounter favors whoever tells it better. Pakistan gets to play the smaller navy harassed by the bigger; India gets to play the responsible power wronged by a reckless neighbor. The tonnage gap is not just engineering. It is the material basis of two different victimhoods.

"In the world's most dangerous bilateral relationship, a collision at sea is never just a collision."

The legal argument underneath is older than the ships. An exclusive economic zone extends 200 nautical miles from a country's coast: inside it, the coastal state controls the resources — the fish, the oil, the minerals — but foreign vessels, including warships, retain the right of navigation. That last clause is the entire dispute in miniature. Pakistan reads its EEZ as a zone of national sensitivity where a foreign destroyer loitering during a Pakistani exercise is a provocation. India reads the same water as international, where its navy may sail as it pleases and the 1991 agreement's safe-conduct rules are the only constraint. Both readings are defensible. That is why the dispute is permanent.

The 1991 agreement is the ghost at the feast. Signed after the Cold War to prevent exactly this kind of incident, its advance-notice and safe-conduct provisions were supposed to keep the two navies' exercises from turning into confrontations. The logic was borrowed from the superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union signed their Incidents at Sea agreement in 1972, after a decade of destroyers shadowing each other a little too closely, and it worked — not by resolving the rivalry but by ritualizing it. India and Pakistan tried to import the ritual. Both sides now cite it against the other — which means it is functioning, after a fashion: as a shared vocabulary for disagreement rather than a prevention mechanism.

Article 10, the safe-conduct clause India invokes, is the kind of provision that looks precise until it is tested. Safe conduct at sea means warships must avoid dangerous manoeuvres near each other — but "dangerous" is in the eye of the bridge. Every naval incident in history has featured two captains, each certain the other turned first. The 1991 agreement gave the two navies a common language for the argument. It did not give them a referee. There is no referee on the high seas, which is why the photographs of the gash in the Kolkata's hull matter so much: in the absence of an umpire, evidence is ammunition.

The diplomatic choreography — summoned chargés d'affaires, formal protests — is the standard South Asian escalation ladder, and its very standardness is reassuring. This is how New Delhi and Islamabad handle incidents they intend to contain: loudly, formally, and without moving the military dial. The ladder exists so that collisions stay collisions. Each rung — the summons, the démarche, the press statement — is a signal calibrated to show resolve without requiring retaliation. The ritual is the message: we are angry, we are formal, and we are not mobilizing.

The context nobody states aloud: SEASPARK-26 is Pakistan's major biennial naval exercise, staged in waters where India's navy increasingly operates as the region's dominant force. Pakistan's navy is a fraction of India's in tonnage, hulls and budget; exercises like SEASPARK are how a smaller navy asserts that its waters are still its own. The collision happened at the intersection of that assertion and India's routine presence — the smaller navy's exercise meeting the larger navy's patrol. Friction was not an accident of the encounter. It was the encounter's premise.

The North Arabian Sea is also the energy corridor — the tanker route from the Gulf — which makes every naval incident there a global economic event as well as a bilateral one. Roughly a fifth of the world's petroleum liquids transits the Strait of Hormuz, and the North Arabian Sea is the water it sails through next. The world's oil markets watched the diplomatic notes with more attention than the navies did, because a collision between two nuclear-armed states in the lane that carries the world's oil is the kind of headline that moves prices before it moves fleets. The energy dimension is the reason this story traveled beyond South Asia: the collision was local, but the water is global.

The nuclear shadow is the part of the story everyone knows and nobody dwells on. India and Pakistan are the only two nuclear-armed states to have fought repeated wars and to maintain an active, unresolved territorial dispute. Their naval encounters carry a weight that US-Soviet shadowing never did, because the escalation ladder between them is shorter and the political systems on both sides reward toughness. A collision at sea between non-nuclear rivals is an incident. Between India and Pakistan, it is an incident with a ceiling nobody wants to contemplate — which is precisely why the choreography of containment is so elaborate.

What happens next is procedural: naval inquiries on both sides, diplomatic notes exchanged, the 1991 agreement's consultative mechanisms invoked or ignored. The inquiries will conclude, in due course, that each navy's own vessel acted correctly — naval inquiries are not known for self-criticism. The diplomatic notes will be filed. The 1991 agreement will survive, because both sides need the vocabulary even when they reject each other's grammar. The collision will be absorbed into the long ledger of India-Pakistan incidents — unless it isn't, and the next exercise brings the two navies closer still.

The ledger is worth a glance. The two countries have managed their rivalry at sea with surprising discipline for three decades — no sinking, no shots fired in anger between the navies, a record that land borders cannot claim. That discipline is not an accident. It is the product of exactly these mechanisms: the 1991 agreement, the hotlines, the summoned diplomats, the shared interest in keeping the water calm while the land burns. The collision tests the discipline without yet breaking it. The question the next SEASPARK will answer is whether the test made the mechanisms stronger or merely showed their limits.

The rank of the summoned diplomats is itself a message. Both capitals summoned the other's chargé d'affaires — not the ambassador — because neither country currently posts an ambassador to the other; the two have operated at chargé level for years, a standing downgrade of the relationship. Summoning the chargé is thus the loudest diplomatic instrument available short of expulsion. It is also a contained one: a chargé can be summoned on a Tuesday and be back at receptions by Friday. The ladder is designed to be climbed down as easily as up.

The domestic politics on both sides reward the performance. In New Delhi, standing firm against Pakistan is the cheapest applause in politics; in Islamabad, standing up to the larger neighbor is the core of the national story. The summoned diplomats serve both audiences simultaneously — each capital's protest is the other capital's provocation, and both play well at home. This is the structural reason the choreography persists: it converts a dangerous incident into a manageable domestic win for everyone. The collision becomes content. The content becomes calm.

The 1972 parallel deserves one more look, because it contains a warning. The US-Soviet Incidents at Sea agreement worked — but it worked between two navies that had direct, constant communication and a shared interest in avoiding a war neither wanted. India and Pakistan have thinner hotlines, hotter politics, and a land border that bleeds into every maritime encounter. A ritual transplanted from the Cold War's deep freeze to South Asia's permanent fever may function differently. The 1991 agreement has held for thirty-five years. The question the Hunain and the Kolkata pose is whether it held because it was strong, or because it was never truly tested — until now.

The water will stay crowded. Neither navy is going home, the energy corridor will not move, and the next exercise is already on someone's calendar. The mechanisms held this time — the diplomats were summoned, the notes were exchanged, the collision stayed a collision. But mechanisms are only as strong as their last test, and the Hunain and the Kolkata have just set the curve for the next one.

Western coverage treats the incident as a near-miss in need of guardrails. The emphasis is on the 1991 agreement's inadequacy: a Cold War-era document governing 21st-century naval competition between nuclear powers is due for an upgrade, and the collision is the argument. The summoned diplomats are read as a healthy sign — the machinery of crisis management working as designed.

The energy-corridor angle gets play: the North Arabian Sea carries Gulf oil, and Western energy security has a stake in the two navies' etiquette. In the Western telling, the collision is a reminder that the world's energy architecture depends on the good behavior of rival navies in a handful of chokepoints — and that good behavior is a depreciating asset. The policy prescription follows the diagnosis: update the 1991 agreement, add modern incident-management protocols, and give the two navies better tools than a thirty-five-year-old text and a pair of summoned diplomats.

The Western lens also notes, with the frankness of distance, the asymmetry of the encounter. A 7,400-ton destroyer and a 2,600-ton corvette do not meet as equals, and the Western coverage is alert to how that asymmetry shapes the narratives: the smaller navy claims harassment, the larger navy claims irresponsibility, and the truth — as in every asymmetric encounter — is hostage to the telling. The West's prescription is procedural because its analysis is structural: you cannot fix the asymmetry, so you manage the friction.

Eastern coverage is careful and balanced, giving both accounts full weight — the Pakistani EEZ claim and the Indian international-waters claim — without adjudicating. The editorial interest is in the exercise context: SEASPARK-26 as Pakistan's assertion of its maritime space, and the collision as the friction that assertion generates with a larger Indian navy.

The 1991 agreement is presented as a functioning, if strained, instrument: both sides reached for the same document, which is more than most rival navies manage. In the Eastern telling, the fact of the shared vocabulary matters more than the disagreement over its meaning. Rival navies that argue from the same text are rival navies still committed to the argument — and the argument is the alternative to the collision becoming a pattern.

The Eastern lens also places the incident in the wider pattern of the region's militarization: growing fleets, busier waters, more exercises, tighter margins. The collision is read not as a failure of any single mechanism but as the statistical product of density — more ships, in more contested water, with more at stake. In this telling, the answer is not a better agreement but fewer occasions for the agreement to be tested: the diplomacy of deconfliction, practiced quietly, before the next exercise.

The Global South lens recognizes the genre: the post-colonial navies of two partitioned states, performing sovereignty at sea. The EEZ-versus-international-waters dispute is the maritime version of the land-border disputes the South knows intimately — lines on water, drawn by history, defended by warships.

The summoned chargés get a knowing reading: this is how the subcontinent does crisis — formal, loud, contained. The South's quiet observation is that the real audience for the protests isn't the other capital but the domestic one. Every summoned diplomat is a headline at home, proof that the government stands firm; every formal protest is a pressure valve, releasing the demand for action without requiring any. The South knows this choreography because it invented variants of it everywhere: the performance of resolve as a substitute for its exercise.

The Southern lens adds the observation the other two circle: that the partition's unfinished business is now maritime. The land border has the Line of Control, the working boundary, the whole vocabulary of division. The sea was supposed to be simpler — water does not take sides. But the EEZ dispute shows the partition followed the navies offshore: the same logic of contested lines, the same performance of sovereignty, the same inability to agree on where one country ends and the other begins. The collision happened on water. The argument is about history.