India will hold a trilateral naval exercise with the US and Japan in the Pacific Ocean this month end. The exercise in the Malabar series will take place off the Japanese coast in which Indian warships would carry out training manoeuvres in naval warfare alongside the US Navy and Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force warships.
The Malabar exercise, which began as a bilateral exercise in 1992 with the Americans, has in the recent years taken on a multi-national character with greater participation from US allies and has made China sit up and take a note.
The last Malabar trilateral exercise involving India, US and Japan was held in early 2007 off the Japanese coast. In the later part of that year, India joined the multilateral 25-warship Malabar exercise involving navies of Singapore and Australia too, apart from US and Japan in the Bay of Bengal.
The multilateral exercise had led to vociferous protests from the Left parties, which accused the UPA government of placing India alongside US "imperialistic designs" aimed at containing Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean regions.