Taking off from an air base five miles from the Taj Mahal at Agra, a fleet of Soviet-built Il-76 jet transports streaked southward across the subcontinent and then out over the Indian Ocean. When the planes landed four hours later on one of the 1,200 coral atolls that make up the Republic of Maldives, hundreds of elite Indian troops charged out onto the tarmac, rifles at the ready. But the mere sight of the Indian planes had struck panic among a band of mercenaries trying to bring off a coup d'etat against the government of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, and they quickly fled in boats. Three days later, commandos from an Indian frigate forced the high-seas surrender of the mercenaries.
India's swift suppression of the pocket coup in the Maldives last November attracted only mild notice in much of the world. Not so with India's increasingly nervous neighbors: for them, the operation was but the latest indicator that the sleepy giant of the subcontinent is determinedly transforming itself into a regional superpower. India's new stature has profound implications for the strategic and diplomatic balance of the area and raises a host of foreign policy challenges for the U.S.
India is fast emerging as a global military power. New Delhi's defense budget has doubled in real terms during the '80s and has in fact outstripped the government's ability to fund it. The 1989-90 budget, unveiled earlier this month, froze defense spending at $8.5 billion, though some estimate the actual figure to be as high as $11 billion. Indian scientists and engineers are immersed in nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. The 1,362,000- strong armed forces, the fourth largest in the world (after the Soviet Union, with 5,096,000 troops; China, with 3.2 million; and the U.S., with 2,163,200), are raising four additional army divisions to boost combat strength by 80,000. In the southern state of Karnataka, a superport is developing to service submarines, surface vessels, including a planned 30,000- ton aircraft carrier, and long-range reconnaissance aircraft capable of patrolling as far away as Africa and Australia.
Since 1986 India has ranked as the world's largest arms importer: in 1987 it purchased weaponry from abroad valued at $5.2 billion, more than Iraq and Iran combined and twelve times more than Pakistan. Largely to gain the foreign exchange needed to pay its military imports bill, India is preparing to enter the world arms bazaar as an exporter.
As India's military muscle has grown, so has its willingness to employ force in disputes with other nations. In 1984 Indian troops occupied the no- man's-land of Kashmir's 20,000-ft.-high Siachen Glacier, where at least 100 Indian soldiers have since died every year. By the summer of 1985, for the first time since the 1960s, Indian jawans penetrated into unoccupied and disputed territory along the China-India border, provoking what Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi later called an "eyeball-to-eyeball" confrontation with China.
In July 1987 Sri Lanka bowed to pressure from New Delhi and allowed Indian forces to occupy the north and east of the island. Some 80,000 soldiers remain deployed there, trying with limited success to suppress Tamil separatist guerrillas who, ironically, were initially encouraged, armed and trained by India.