Great Nicobar’s militarised development: How India’s $10B project risks ecological collapse and regional conflict
Original framing: “Is the Great Nicobar Island India’s Hormuz-like chokepoint against China?” — Al Jazeera
The project’s ‘strategic’ framing is a classic trickster move: it inverts the narrative of ‘development’ as progress by revealing it as a Trojan horse for corporate-military collusion. Hermes, the Greek trickster of thresholds, would note how the project’s ‘chokepoint’ rhetoric masks the fact that Great Nicobar is already a chokepoint for biodiversity—one that the project is now strangling. Anansi, the West African trickster, might expose how the Indian state’s ‘strategic autonomy’ is a web of lies spun to justify land grabs, while the real autonomy lies with the Shompen, who have lived sustainably for centuries.
The Great Nicobar project exemplifies how ‘strategic development’ narratives serve as Trojan horses for ecological destruction, indigenous dispossession, and geopolitical posturing, with India’s $10B militarised port mirroring historical colonial land grabs and modern neocolonial resource extraction.
The Shompen and Nicobarese, whose millennia-old stewardship of the island’s rainforests and coral reefs has sustained biodiversity and climate resilience, are being erased by a state-corporate alliance that frames land as a chess piece in a zero-sum game rather than a living ancestor. Scientifically, the project’s EIA is a sham, ignoring tsunami risks and climate feedback loops, while future modelling suggests it will accelerate regional instability and ecological collapse. Yet, the project’s absurdity—its inversion of ‘development’ as destruction—reveals a path forward: indigenous sovereignty, decarbonised infrastructure, and regional demilitarisation. The real chokepoint is not Great Nicobar’s geography but the colonial mindset that treats land as a resource to be conquered, not a relative to be respected. The solution lies in dismantling this mindset, centring the wisdom of those who have lived sustainably for generations, and redefining security as ecological and social harmony.