“From this kingdom of Melibar, and from another near it called Gozurat,” wrote the great Venetian explorer Marco Polo, “there go forth every year more than a hundred corsair vessels on cruize. These pirates take with them their wives and children, and stay out the whole summer.” Fleets of up to 30 pirate ships, he recorded, would form giant nets across the sea to catch their plump merchant prey. “For when any one corsair sights a vessel a signal is made by fire or smoke, and then the whole of them make for this, and seize the merchants and plunder them.”
Last week, when INS Kolkata and Indian Navy special forces soldiers rescued the hijacked bulk carrier MV Ruen from Somali pirates, the significance of the message was hard to miss. Facing threats to its energy and trade routes through the Indian Ocean, India was determined to discharge its role as the region’s primary maritime power.
The growing naval security mission marks a dramatic break from history—when the failure of Indian rulers to develop true ocean-going navies allowed colonial powers to seize control of the region. There is also a challenge, though: The battle to secure the oceans, history shows, also has to be fought on land.
The lawless ocean
From the dawn of history, great pirate fleets operated across India’s western seas. Early in the first millennium, Roman chronicler Gaius Plinius Secundus recorded that vessels headed to the Malabar Coast carried companies of archers because the coast was “greatly infested with pirates”. The Portuguese sailor Duarte Barbosa, 1600 years later, described pirate attacks thus: “A multitude of them gather together all armed with bows and arrows in plenty, and thus they surround any vessel they find becalmed with flights of arrows until they take and rob.”
The account of scholar Muhammad ibn Battutah, whose ship was pillaged by a fleet of 12 pirate boats, described the attackers as “infidels”. The 15th-century account of the great Russian explorer Afanasy Nikitin, similarly, said the pirates were “neither Christians nor Mussulmans; they pray to stone idols and know not Christ”.
Like many other marginal communities in medieval India, historian Sebastian Prange explains in a magnificent essay, Malabar’s Mukkuvar fishing caste turned to looting merchant traffic during times of hardship. Led by their headmen, the fishermen-pirates used manoeuvrability and speed to overcome larger ocean-going merchant vessels, which were often defended by mercenaries. The pirates, Prange notes, operated as part of an organised protection racket, with local rulers using the threat of violence to extract taxes.
The ports of the pirates, French navigator François Pyrard of Laval wrote, were “well fortified on the seaside only, for with the Nair kings who have given them these refuges they have a good understanding, being subject to their judicature and paying them tribute. This understanding is highly profitable to these petty Nair kings”.
Even the arrival of the great Portuguese caravel fleets, with their high speed and deck-mounted artillery, did not extinguish the pirate threat. Led by the first pirate king Kunnali Marakkar I, historian AP Ibrahim Kunju writes, Malabar Muslims turned pirates to protect their long-standing monopoly of the spice trade. The Portuguese retaliated by repeatedly sacking the pirate citadel at Ponnani.
The Kunnali Marakkar pirates played a key role in the defeat of the Portuguese at the famous maritime battle of Chaul, fought in alliance between the Zamorin of Kozhikode, Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur, and Murtaza Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar. The battle would lead to the fall of the Portuguese fort of Chaliyam.
Later, however, Kunnali Marrakar IV developed territorial ambitions and began describing himself as the lord of the Malabar Muslims. The 17th-century eyewitness account of Portuguese historian and poet Manuel de Faria e Sousa recorded that the Kunnali Marrakar king insulted the Zamorin and “caused the tail of one of his elephants to be cut-off, as also the privy parts of a Nayre [Nair] which were also fastened to his mouth”.
The Zamorin, alarmed, allied with the Portuguese, crushed the Kunnali Marakkar and executed their king and his sons in 1600.
Little acknowledged, Indian rulers did establish significant merchant fleets in the late medieval period. The merchant navy of Surat, Prange writes, contained at least 112 ships by 1701, twice the number it had 10 years earlier. For the most part, though, the Mughals were reliant on European protection on the high seas, using their control of land routes to exert influence by choking supplies.
From the mid-18th century, as Mughal power began to wane, that option closed. India would pay a high price for its lack of credible naval power.
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The Gulf of Aden pirates
Late in 1994, a group of armed men calling themselves the “Somali Coast Guard” boarded the merchant vessel Bonsella, three miles off Caluula, the northernmost point of Somalia. The hijackers told the crew they needed a vessel faster than their Dhow to chase down illegal fishing boats. Six days of unsuccessful raiding later, the hijackers emptied the Bonsella’s cargo, relieved the crew of their money, and left the ship. Future attempts, though, would grow in sophistication, organisation, and competence.
In 2023, the Indian Ocean was lifted from a list of regions at high risk of piracy: A more than decade-long multinational naval commitment seemed to have paid off. The pirate threat, though, resurfaced as soon as Western navies pulled out their ships to deal with Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.
Though separated by centuries, the world of the Somali pirates and the Malabar Mukkuvar are near-identical. Ever since the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist regime of Mohamed Siad Barre, Somalia has suffered endless civil war and the complete absence of central authority, scholar Ken Menkhaus has recorded. The country is among the poorest in the world.
From the mid-1990s, low-grade pirate attacks began off the Somali coast, organised by fishing communities that had lost their livelihood to foreign commercial fishing. Though Somalia passed laws to prevent illegal fishing by China, researcher Mariama Sow notes, it had no capacity to enforce them.
The destruction caused by the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to fishing villages along the Somali coast ensured there was no workforce available to raise pirate armies, scholars Peter Lehr and Hendrick Lehmann suggest.
Local communities made the most of another resource: The 20,000 merchant vessels, which transit the Gulf of Aden each year. From 2005, historian Edward Lucas has recorded, there was a sharp uptick in Somali pirate attacks. Factional competition fueled this growth, with rival warlords using ransoms from hijacked ships to pay for weapons.
Even as international navies moved in to secure the Indian Ocean, violence continued to surge. The Ukrainian-flagged Faina, loaded with tanks and antiaircraft guns, brought in a $3.2 million ransom. The super-tanker Sirius Star, netted the pirate cartels $3 million. The Thai-owned Thor Nexus and its 27 crew, hijacked 560 km off the coast of Oman, were ransomed for $5 million. In 2010, pirates attacked 219 ships, successfully hijacking 49 of them and kidnapping 1,016 sailors.
Garowe, in the region of Puntland, came to host a kind of informal stock exchange, where cartels could invest money to fund future attacks. Banks based in Hong Kong and Singapore help route ransom payments from owners to the pirates, while British-owned firms based in Kenya conduct negotiations and air-drop cash to the cartels.
Finally, an African Union-led peacekeeping mission that had begun in 2007 brought stability to some parts of the country. The coastal Puntland region also began clamping down on pirate cartels in an effort to secure international funding.
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Finding solutions
Efforts to legally prosecute pirates have met with little success. All nations, in theory, have jurisdiction to prosecute crimes on the high seas. European countries, though, have fought shy of trials on their soil, fearing alleged perpetrators from war-torn Somalia would make claims for asylum. For its part, India has prosecuted just one group. Kenya has made the most sustained effort but lacks the means to act against pirate bases inside Somalia itself.
A policy of catch-and-release, legal expert James Thuo Gathii bluntly notes, is no deterrent at all. Things seem set to get worse. Puntland, home to key ports like Garowe, has become mired in intra-tribal warfare, empowering the pirate cartels. African Union peacekeepers are now in the process of drawing down troops, which will leave the cartels free to operate again.
Even though enhanced naval patrolling can suppress piracy, the resurgence of piracy shows it is an expensive band-aid, not a solution. The famous historian of piracy, Philip Gosse, suggested its practitioners evolve from small-time criminals to larger professional cartels and on to proto-states. In Somalia, locked in a struggle between rival warlords as well as jihadist groups like Al-Qaeda, that is a terrifying prospect.
Like it has done on the high seas, India needs to show leadership on dry land, too, and push the world into committing to the military and economic reconstruction of Somalia.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)