India elevates ties with Mauritius: Is there a China angle?

Amid growing geopolitical competition, on 11-12 March this year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Mauritius, a strategically key nation in the Western Indian Ocean. With 70% of Mauritians tracing their roots to India, cultural and historical ties have long underpinned Delhi’s close partnership with Port Louis.

However, beyond people-to-people connections, the India-Mauritius relationship has evolved into a critical pillar of New Delhi’s Indo-Pacific strategy, particularly in the maritime domain, where global powers, including China, seek to expand their influence.

While platforms like the Quad offer a minilateral counter, India’s security interests demand deeper bilateral collaborations, making its ties with Mauritius more crucial than ever. This is where Mauritius becomes India’s most dependable partner in the region. 

However, since the general elections in Mauritius in November of last year, India has had the challenge of engaging with the new leadership, which remains crucial to Delhi’s overall engagement with Port Louis. While maintaining strong ties is central to India’s strategic and economic interests in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), it must navigate perceptions of political favouritism in Mauritius and counter China’s growing influence. But do the latest developments signal a decisive shift in India-Mauritius ties and the regional power balance?

While the maritime arrangements between the two countries have been the cardinal force driving the relationship forward and making it more forward-looking, a significant task before Prime Minister Modi during the Mauritius general elections in November 2024 was to dispel the notion that India had any political favourites in Mauritius.

India was seen as close to the ruling regime of Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth, who suffered a massive defeat, from winning 42 seats in 2019 to just two seats in the recent elections — the victory of Navinchandra Ramgoolam was a clear mandate against the previous regime accused of failing to provide social security amid growing concerns about corruption and good governance. 

But despite the best bilateral ties during Ramgoolam’s previous tenures (1995-2000 and 2005-2014) the impression is that India has Jugnauth as a favourite, which was also seen as a factor for Ramgoolam delaying his visit to India.

There was speculation that Delhi invited Ramgoolam to visit twice in the past five months, but he could not, partly due to his busy calendar, causing unease for India. Therefore, the chatter in Delhi is that Modi took the initiative to visit Mauritius, reaffirming India’s strong support for the nation’s new leadership. Once again, by backing Mauritius in the Chagos Archipelago dispute — a decades-old sovereignty battle with the UK — India cemented its strategic ties with Port Louis.

Beyond dispelling the notion of political favourites, India has a bigger worry in the region — China. In Delhi’s view, Beijing is aggressively expanding its footprint in the Indian Ocean through port acquisitions — Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Pakistan and Djibouti — military partnerships, and dual-use infrastructure projects.

Meanwhile, closer to the Western Indian Ocean, China’s presence in Djibouti, growing engagements with East African and island nations, and efforts to establish dominance over critical sea lanes raise strategic warnings for India. This strategic calculation led India to launch its SAGAR vision (Security and Growth for All in the Region) during Prime Minister Modi’s first term state visit to Mauritius in March 2015.

While SAGAR emphasises Mauritius as a crucial partner for realising security in the IOR, it has been upgraded to MAHASAGAR (Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions) which, in addition to security, emphasises capacity building and development partnership, including digital public infrastructure frameworks like Aadhaar (digital identity), UPI (unified payments interface), and other e-governance solutions.

The exceptionally strong outcome during the trip was the elevation of the India-Mauritius partnership to an “enhanced strategic partnership”, India’s first in the Indian Ocean Region and the entire region at large. Although India signed its first strategic partnership in the region with China in 2005 — the Strategic and Cooperative Partnership for Peace and Prosperity — it remains hostage to border tensions and awaits the realisation of its full potential. 

There remains little doubt that China is a key threat to India in the Indo-Pacific region. While a platform like the Quad partnership brings together powerful countries — the US, India, Australia and Japan — to ensure a “free and open” Indo-Pacific, India’s strategic gains from its deepening partnership with Mauritius place it in a stronger position to counter China’s growing influence in the IOR.

The agreement on logistics infrastructure on the Agalega Island — a remote Mauritian territory in the Indian Ocean that holds strategic significance for India’s naval presence and regional security — is a crucial milestone, ensuring a sustained naval presence in the region. Unlike the much-talked-about Chinese model of debt-driven infrastructure expansion, India projects its cooperation model rooted in “genuine and lasting trust”, reinforced through transparent developmental aid and security partnerships. 

Moreover, India’s role in shaping Mauritius’s “Blue Economy” aligns regional interests with its own Indo-Pacific vision of a “free, open, inclusive, peaceful, and prosperous Indo-Pacific region, one which is built on a rules-based international order.” To make it an effective vision, it is necessary to create an economic and security architecture that limits China’s ability to dominate key maritime routes.

The Comprehensive Economic Cooperation and Partnership Agreement (CECPA) — India’s first ever trade agreement with a country in the African region — has further strengthened economic ties, offering a counterweight to China’s trade leverage, especially the Free Trade Agreement that Beijing signed with Port Louis in 2019 and which came into effect in 2021. This agreement was also China’s first with an African country, which has simplified trade procedures and contributed to trade growth in past years.

To conclude, by securing Mauritius as a reliable strategic partner, Delhi is safeguarding its regional interests while limiting China’s ability to gain a foothold in this critical maritime corridor. Moreover, India has the advantage of earning the goodwill of the People of Indian Origin (PIO) community, which has remained a consistent and influential factor in strengthening bilateral ties.

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