Securing the Energy Transition at Sea: India’s Maritime Power as Supply-Chain Statecraft in the Indian Ocean

The global energy transition has transformed clean energy supply chains into strategic assets, exposing new vulnerabilities along maritime routes that connect sources of transition minerals, energy equipment, and digital–energy infrastructure. While existing scholarship on economic statecraft has focused primarily on trade policy, industrial subsidies, and sanctions, far less attention has been paid to the role of hard security instruments in stabilising clean energy supply chains. This paper argues that India is developing a distinct form of supply-chain-oriented maritime statecraft, in which naval presence, maritime partnerships, and infrastructure protection are increasingly deployed to secure critical nodes of clean energy supply chains across the Indian Ocean. Rather than treating maritime security as a generic public good, New Delhi is selectively aligning its maritime strategy with the protection of transition-related flows—particularly critical minerals, energy equipment, and subsea connectivity infrastructure—linking hard security directly to economic resilience. Empirically, the paper traces how India’s maritime strategy has evolved from a traditional focus on sea lines of communication toward a more targeted approach that prioritises supply-chain security. Through qualitative process tracing, it examines the alignment between India’s naval deployments, maritime domain awareness initiatives, and regional security partnerships with specific vulnerabilities in clean energy supply chains, including mineral transport routes from Africa and Australia, energy-related port infrastructure, and dual-use subsea systems. The analysis demonstrates that India’s maritime posture increasingly functions as a geoeconomic tool designed to mitigate strategic dependence and exposure to disruption, particularly in a context of intensifying competition with China. Theoretically, the paper contributes to the literature on geoeconomics by expanding the concept of economic statecraft beyond market-based instruments, showing how military and security capabilities can operate as mechanisms of supply-chain governance in the clean energy transition. By bridging maritime security studies and clean energy political economy, the paper highlights how emerging powers such as India are redefining the boundaries between security and economics in an era of strategic competition and decarbonisation.