Navy in Good Hope port, China in hangar
Marine commandos on fast dinghies leave parallel white wakes as they skim across False Bay to the beach in the South African naval base at Simon's Town.
Through a window of the Two Oceans' Restaurant in the high flats at Cape Point, the profiles of the Indian Navy's destroyer, the INS Mysore, and the stealth frigate, the INS Tabar, are visible as the late-morning fog alternately lifts and descends.
"Those (the fast dinghies) were part of our exercise," Captain Biswajit Dasgupta, commanding officer of the frigate, confirmed later in Cape Town's Victoria and Albert Waterfront. "We were in the middle of practising a landing assault."
After docking in Cape Town, task force commander Rear Admiral Ramakant Pattanayak invited its residents to visit the Indian warships and take away Indian mementoes. They will also party, as they did in Port Elizabeth and Durban where, a gossip columnist for the Cape Argus reported, the women unabashedly ogled at the men in whites.
"We are here to build goodwill and share best practices," Admiral Pattanayak explains. "IBSAMAR — as the naval exercises are named — is the maritime component of the diplomatic initiative that the India-Brazil-South Africa forum represents," he said.
So, has the Indian Navy sent 1,500 officers and sailors from four ships of its "sword arm" — the western fleet — to look good and sing and dance? The impression is vastly reinforced when the first officer to greet you bears the name tag "Happy Mohan". The stripes identify his rank as commander.
Commander Happy Mohan is in charge of a briefing that Rear Admiral Pattanayak will give to the South African media. Few ambassadors of goodwill can claim to carry their nomenclatures with easier aplomb.
In the exercise in the waters of the two oceans, however, the commander was the man in charge of more serious business — called "VBSS". That is naval jargon for "visit, board, search and seize", one of the many drills that the three navies practised to intercept and neutralise "enemy" vessels in the high seas.
"We are three navies on the rise. This is the new 'New World'," says Rear Admiral "Rusty" Higgs, the South African task force commander.
Inside the hangar of the SAN Amatola, his voice booms: "Led by the Indian Navy, IBSAMAR II has increased its area of operations and intensified its combined operations."
At a time India is making bad news in South Africa (that is sending a large contingent to the Commonwealth Games in Delhi) fresh from a successful Fifa World Cup, at least the Indian Navy is not at sea for the wrong reasons.
Higgs says the three navies have practised anti-submarine warfare and aerial defence among other manoeuvres.
For two weeks now, a potent Indian naval flotilla is leading trilateral war games involving the navies of South Africa and Brazil in the second edition of IBSAMAR around the southern tip of Africa where the Atlantic and the Indian oceans meet. The 15-day war games officially end tomorrow.
It will take nearly three weeks for the four warships — the frigate INS Ganga and the replenishment vessel INS Aditya are accompanying the Mysore and the Tabar — from the western fleet to return to Mumbai with a stopover in Mauritius.
It is here, however, in the Cape of Good Hope — one of the most strategic geopolitical points on the global map — that the reason for the Indian Navy's presence in these waters is so telling.
In the drive through the "fynbos" — the South African grassland that climbs to Cape point — it is impossible to miss a giant US Air Force C-17 Globemaster III transport plane — circling over the Cape peninsula.
The plane has taken off from the South African Air Force base in Cape Town's Ysterplaat, possibly with delegates to the African Aerospace and Defence Exhibition to give its passengers an aerial survey of the continent's tip.
The Indian Air Force is about to contract 10 Globemaster III aircraft.
Inside the Ysterplaat Air Force base, the American soldiers are among the militaries of some 40 countries that have sent delegations to the exhibition.
The Defence Research and Development Organisation, the Ordnance Factory Board, Bharat Electronics and the India-Russia joint venture Brahmos (missile developer) mark the Indian military presence in two separate hangars.
But it is the Chinese pavilion, which occupies a full hangar that catches the eye. When the Mysore and the Tabar dock alongside the South African Navy's German-built frigate, the SAN Amatola, it not only coincides with Africa's defence show but also a coming-out of the Chinese in the continent.
China sources more than half of its oil supplies from Africa. Among the exhibits in the Chinese pavilion is a model of the JF-17 Thunder, the Chinese-built fighter aircraft that Beijing is gifting to Islamabad.
The aircraft is not on the flight line alongside the Gripen that the South African Air Force has inducted from Sweden. The Gripen is one of the six competitors for an Indian — and currently the world's largest order — that could top $12 billion.
Africa's chilly spring of 2010 at the foot of Table Mountain marks not only a change of seasons but also a global meet of military compulsions with strategic targets.
In his foreword to the document that goes with its official doctrine ("Freedom to use the seas: India's maritime military strategy"), the Indian Navy's former chief, Admiral Sureesh Mehta, writes: "The maritime military strategy recognises that the major task of the Indian Navy during the 21st century will be to use warships to support national foreign policy."
The same document lists the Cape of Good Hope as the one of the nine "choke points" in the Indian Ocean region that the Indian Navy considers its domain.
"The Cape of Good Hope is not a conventional choke point since adequate depth of water lies to its south and the passage of ships is not restricted by land," it says. "However, economic sense and unfavourable currents (of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans) demand that ships pass close to land which makes them susceptible to attack and grounding."
For the moment, the only signs of aggression here are from the Southern Right Whale, a protected species that dives and spouts in the seas around Cape of Good Hope where the resort named Boulders is the habitat of Jackass penguins.
Now there are Chinese military planes in the hangars and Indian warships in the ports. The Cape of Good Hope is still where it is: overlooking False Bay, home of shipwrecks for centuries.
Navy in Good Hope port, China in hangar
