Drawing a new India-Philippines arc of maritime convergence

WRITTEN BY EERISHIKA PANKAJ AND RAHUL KARAN REDDY

27 August 2025

Shipping lanes have long doubled as fault lines in the South China Sea (SCS), and the Philippines sits at the heart of the region’s unfolding struggle for power, stability, and sovereignty. The August 2025 collision between Chinese and Philippine vessels at the disputed Scarborough Shoal capped years of Chinese maritime coercion in waters central to Manila’s sovereignty. This latest incident, captured vividly on video, underscores a fraught pattern of coercive behaviour that has gradually eroded regional stability, while exposing both the vulnerabilities — and the resolve — of the Philippines. In response to Chinese assertiveness, Manila has increasingly signalled a decisive pivot toward resilience, seizing the opportunity to forge stronger, more substantive partnerships. This shift is most evident in Manila’s deepening engagement with New Delhi, as India’s stake in the SCS becomes increasingly explicit.

For years after the 2016 Arbitral Tribunal ruling in Manila’s favour, India upheld UNCLOS and freedom of navigation but avoided direct involvement in the dispute. That changed in June 2023, when a joint statement with the Philippines called on Beijing to respect the award’s binding nature — marking a clear policy reorientation towards supporting Southeast Asian sovereignty and a rules-based order. This approach reinforced India’s image as a sovereignty-conscious, norm-advancing power aligned with the principle of ASEAN Centrality, underscoring Delhi’s recognition of Southeast Asia’s central role in regional architecture. At the same time, it signalled to China that India’s maritime engagement now spans various sub-regions of the Indo-Pacific — part of a deliberate bid to establish itself as a credible, independent pole of influence within an increasingly contested maritime order.

Quietly redefining India–Philippines ties in 2025

Key factors underpinning India’s evolving SCS calculation derive from its value as a gateway linking the Eastern Indian Ocean to the wider Indo-Pacific — critical for India’s energy security, trade flows, and influence. Over half of India’s trade passes through the Strait of Malacca, making stability in these waters vital. Hence, even as the Act East Policy (AEP) has driven recent ASEAN outreach, economic stakes have shaped India’s approach to SCS for over a decade. India’s energy investments in Southeast Asia and role as a net security provider have projected Delhi’s long-held readiness to defend strategic interests in contested waters from China’s threats. For instance, repeated renewal of ONGC Videsh’s “Block 128” contract despite consistent Chinese warnings since 2011 and limited commercial returns has shown India’s growing willingness to incur political risk by aligning more closely with Southeast Asian states.

Such outreach has created the basis for India’s enhanced proactive engagement with partners such as the Philippines, with whom Delhi’s arc of engagement has gained unprecedented momentum in 2025. Symbolising India’s shift from peripheral observer to proximate stakeholder in the SCS, the two middle-powers conducted their first-ever naval exercise in the South China Sea on 3 August, followed two days later by the upgrade of ties to a Strategic Partnership during Philippine President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.’s state visit to India. Thirteen agreements were signed, including three defence pacts that institutionalised service-to-service talks across the army, navy, and air force. Beyond defence, negotiations on a Preferential Trade Agreement, cooperation on digital infrastructure, and Manila’s invitation for India to join the Information Fusion Centre–Indian Ocean Region illustrate how security and economic interests are increasingly fused within this arc.

The concern Beijing has with an India-Philippines strategic partnership lies in its signalling of the rise of layered, maritime-centric, military cooperation emerging in China’s periphery — designed to reinforce a rules-based order and deter unilateral changes to the status quo in the global commons.

Unlike India’s Vietnam engagement, economically driven via oil exploration, or its coordination with Indonesia focusing on the Malacca gateway, the Philippines partnership is now about immediacy and operates at the frontline against maritime coercion. Indian involvement will directly buttress Philippine resilience against coercive maritime actions, while strengthening ASEAN’s collective leverage, demonstrating a sovereignty-sensitive, norm-forward model for security partnerships in the region. Compared to US treaty commitments and Japan’s ODA-led capacity building — now deepened by the Reciprocal Access Agreement between Manila and Tokyo set to take effect in September 2025 — India’s role stands out. Its willingness to work on platforms such as submarine infrastructure development and engage in training and domain awareness provides smaller middle powers with credible military capacity — without the political baggage of alliances — precisely when Washington’s regional bandwidth is stretched.

China’s responses and anxieties

The nuances of China’s reaction to the India-Philippines joint maritime patrol reveal insights into Beijing’s view of maritime cooperation among its disputant neighbours. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs' assertion that “no third party should intervene” reflects more than a routine diplomatic posture, underscoring China’s strategic preference for keeping SCS disputes strictly bilateral. Such a stance not only isolates claimant states from strengthening their position through external partnerships but also permits Beijing to operate from a position of strength, which stems from the asymmetry of military power in China’s favour. With India and the Philippines developing an arc of engagement across domains, China becomes increasingly sensitive to unfavourable corrections of power imbalance in the Indo-Pacific. With one eye on an accreting Indo-Pacific security architecture, China has turned its attention to normalising the bilateral relationship with India, which stems partially from a desire to limit the tempo of India’s outreach to China’s adversaries.

Beijing’s remarks also betray the anxiety of containment by its Indo-Pacific adversaries. The PLA’s Southern Theater Command’s response that the Philippines must not “gang up with others to stir up troubles” is an effort to delegitimise multilateral approaches that constrain its coercive leverage — revealing the statement to be less about principle than about maintaining strategic dominance. Furthermore, China's fears could also stem from the fear that Indo-Pacific maritime powers like India pursue cooperation with Southeast Asian states to keep China confined to SCS — and out of the Indian Ocean Region. With Japan pursuing the Defense Buildup Program and expanding OSA, Australia committed to the Pacific Maritime Security Program and AUKUS, the US deepening its Indo-Pacific rebalancing and now India expanding strategic partnerships, the Indo-Pacific maritime space becomes more congested but also robust to China’s conventional and grey zone coercion.

China’s recently released white paper on national security for a new era reflects its growing concern over the perceived threat of counter-militarisation in the SCS by extra-regional powers. Notably, it makes a rare, explicit reference to the positioning of an intermediate-range missile system in the Philippines. Though widely interpreted as a veiled reference to the US Typhoon missile systems in the Philippines, it could equally allude to India’s sale of the BrahMos missile system to Manila. Beijing’s anxieties are hence manifesting in the form of aggressive military responses to vessels operating legitimately in the South China Sea. The latest collision only reiterates the necessity of greater maritime cooperation between navies in the Indo-Pacific and the relevance of layered partnerships between like-minded countries to uphold a rules-based maritime order.

The concern Beijing has with an India-Philippines strategic partnership lies in its signalling of the rise of layered, maritime-centric, military cooperation emerging in China’s periphery — designed to reinforce a rules-based order and deter unilateral changes to the status quo in the global commons. Furthermore, with the US administration seen to be retreating from its commitments in Southeast Asia, like the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), states in the region are keen to see countries like India fill the strategic space with durable partnerships. Such partnerships, anchored in shared maritime security interests and a normative commitment, have a stabilising effect on the balance of power in contested maritime spaces. By aligning their ambitions, India and the Philippines have made a decisive and forward-thinking choice to bridge two key actors in the Indo-Pacific. The ball now is in China’s court, forcing it to consider how aggressive maritime postures invite collective action by less-powerful adversaries who bridge and compound their military capacities.

India’s interest in widening the arc of its maritime security outlook beyond the Indian Ocean Region converges neatly in the form of cross-regional partnerships with the Philippines, which seeks to build coalitions that enhance its maritime security in the region. Their like-minded, values-based engagement shows how mutual security interests gain legitimacy and durability when paired with shared commitments on international maritime law and territorial integrity, which acts as a force multiplier for regional stability. As this partnership deepens, it may well set a precedent for cross-regional coalitions that shape the future architecture of maritime security in the Indo-Pacific.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writers and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Authors’ biographies

Eerishika Pankaj is the Director of the Organisation for Research on China and Asia (ORCA) and is the Convenor of ORCA's Global Conference on New Sinology (GCNS). She is also an Editorial and Research Assistant to the Series Editor for Routledge Series on Think Asia; a 2020 Young Leader of Pacific Forum’s Young Leaders Program; a Quad Think Tank Leader of the U.S. State Department’s Leaders Lead on Demand program; a Member of the Indo-Pacific Circle and a Council Member of the WICCI’s India-EU Business Council.

Rahul Karan Reddy is Senior Research Associate at Organisation for Research on China and Asia (ORCA). He works on domestic Chinese politics and trade, producing data-driven research in the form of reports, dashboards and digital media. He is the author of ‘Islands on the Rocks’, a monograph about the Senkaku/Diaoyu island dispute between China and Japan. He is the creator of the India-China Trade dashboard and the Chinese Provincial Development Indicators dashboard. His work has been published in The Diplomat, East Asia Forum, ISDP & Tokyo Review, among others. Image credit: Wikimedia/Government of India.