With its operations to bust piraty in the Gulf of Aden meeting with success this week, India on Thursday said it was considering augmenting naval assets to fight the threat to peaceful commercial shipping in the region."Yes, we are considering a proposal to increase the number of warships in Gulf of Aden to fight the pirates and to protect merchant ships flying the Indian flag," a top Navy officer said.India currently has a stealth guided missile frigate in the Gulf of Aden and the warship, INS Tabar, has successfully defended two merchant vessels that came under pirate attack last week and went on the offensive for the first time on Wednesday to sink a mother ship of the sea brigands.Navy officials also met Defence Minister A K Antony to discuss the developments in the wake of INS Tabar destroying the pirates' mother ship.The proposal to increase the number of warships and augment its naval assets came from the Shipping Ministry, which suggested four warships to be deployed there. However, a decision was still pending on the proposal, as the Navy felt that it would be near impossible for a single nation to indefinitely deploy its warships and other assets, and also keep the supplies going to the on-board personnel, officers said.Following this realisation, India has sought an international arrangement, preferably under the United Nations, to have a collaborative effort to ward off the menace in the sea brigand-infested international waters of the Arabian Sea. "A Shipping Ministry representative has told an International Maritime Organisation meeting last Friday that India seeks an UN-mandated international operation against the piracy, which is turning out to be major concern for all nations with shipping interests in the Arabian Sea," the Navy officers said."No amount of naval assets of a single nation is adequate to fight the pirates. But there are already three groups of navies carrying out anti-piracy operations in the region, such as (the US-led) Task Force 150, NATO and the European Union. But their efforts are not coordinated well, hence the complexities. That's precisely why we are asking for a UN arrangement," they said.Another challenge was the paradigm shift in the way pirates operated in Gulf of Aden, compared to the Malacca Straits."In the Malacca Straits, the hub of piracy a few years earlier, the issue was pilferage of cargo and theft of property on-board merchant vessels. The situation now is mostly under control there. The Somalian pirates in Gulf of Aden have gone a step ahead and are hijacking cargo ships along with the crew to a port and demanding a ransom," the officers said.In fact, the Somalian pirates are so ingenious that they have started operating 500 nautical miles off the coast in the high seas and regularly improvising their attack tactics."Most of these Somalian pirates are originally trained militia men from the hinterland and they have developed tactics of decoy to distract and deceive merchant vessels," they said.
